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I've heard that death is as taboo a subject today as sex was in Victorian England. Because I don't know anyone who was alive during Queen Victoria's reign, I can't verify the statement, but it seems we don't deal with death well.

A friend of mine, who works in the intensive care unit of a hospital, agreed. Too many people, she told me, have not prepared for their death. As someone who loses half her patients, she knows. Not everyone acts as if they're simply entering a tunnel of light, as is the common image of death today. Many, even those who have been unresponsive for days, are clearly horrified by whatever it is they see in the moments before death.

But death, except for executions, isn't so public to us as it was to earlier generations. In a day when 80 percent of deaths take place in a hospital, it can be easy for our culture to forget the ubiquity of death. When Doris Betts sat with her neighbor after the neighbor's husband died, she said, "This was my first experience of sitting with the widow and the newly dead—a vigil that for a generation earlier had been commonplace."

Modern medicine has given us the luxury of thinking that a "normal" illness can be cured, says Margaret Kim Peterson. Writing about her husband's death due to AIDS, Peterson writes, "We are profoundly unsettled by illnesses which cannot be fixed, and we do not associate willingly with people who have such illnesses, preferring that they keep decently to themselves in hospitals and nursing homes."

Surely, Peterson says, we don't marry people who have deadly illnesses. But she did, and that marriage, with all its difficulty, was truly "in sickness and in health." (Peterson later wrote a book, excerpted here, about her short marriage.)

When it came time to make preparations for her husband's death—not mental preparations, but physical ones—Peterson had the odd opportunity to take a picture of her husband sitting on the grass next to his gravestone. The words I know that my redeemer liveth had been etched on the gravestone. "It is a photograph at once macabre, and darkly funny, and soberly realistic," Peterson writes. "He is dying, and he knows it, and he also knows that his redeemer lives, and that he is soon to see him face to face. Isn't that how a Christian ought to live, and ought to die?"

Ars Moriendi is the art of dying, and during the Middle Ages, when death from plague, war, or accident was ever-present, many studied the art of dying. Christians like Martin Luther and Jeremy Taylor gave some of the best advice, Peterson says. "They remind us that death is the destiny of every human being, and that we do well to keep that reality always before us. You are going to die, and probably sooner than you think, so be ready."

Luther, who remained in his town as pastor while many fled when the plague struck, advised that Christians first take care of earthly matters. Make a will, be on good terms with your neighbors, and provide for your survivors, he said. (Although, according to Lauren Winner, such preparations can be extremely expensive these days as the funeral industry abuses the bereaved for profit.) Luther also said to live like a Christian, Peterson says, go to church, commit yourself to God, and you will have provided for your soul.

When sickness does come, Taylor said, treat it as if it would end in death. "Too often, because they are afraid to die, people cope with illness, however severe, by imagining that of course they will get better," Peterson says. As a result, they die unprepared.

John Donne was another pastor who lived through the plague. Not only that, but 5 of his 12 children died at birth or in infancy, and he preached his own wife's funeral. "It's not surprising that Donne often had death on is mind," Elesha Coffman writes. "What's remarkable is how he used the subject as a springboard for meditations on all aspects of the Christian life."

Donne would have understood what Cinda Gorman had to deal with when a child in her congregation died. The issues are complex and Gorman's navigation of both children's and adults' spiritual needs can be helpful to modern-day pastors.

Death, as difficult as it is, makes sense, says Sarah E. Hinlicky. After her grandmother's death, Hinlicky says, her grandfather's health declined. At first she recoiled from the idea that her grandfather would soon pass away as well. "Death is nothing but the heartless divider, separating me from my departed loved ones."

Yet, in the time she had with her grandfather, they drew close in ways they wouldn't have if death hadn't taken her grandmother, or if it wasn't imminently going to take her grandfather. "As death crept closer," she says, "it was starting to make some sense to me."

"There is no resurrection without death, real death," Hinlicky writes.

"We have to be honest about the world, and honest about the difficulties of faith within it. And then we still have to hope in God," James van Tholen told his congregation in one of his final sermons as he battled cancer.

Betts says that despite the Christian's hope, we are not required to rejoice. "We Christians still meditating on the last things draw comfort when we remember that Jesus himself was no stoic on the Cross. He felt despair and dread before and during the crucifixion; he cried out his challenging question to God as have King David, Job, Ivan Ilych, and millions upon millions. Stoicism is not required of believers, but hope is offered."

That hope can be even harder to understand than death. "Grace is hard to believe," van Tholen says. "Grace goes against the grain. The gospel of grace says that there is nothing I can do to get right with God, but that God has made himself right with me through Jesus' bloody death. And that is a scandalous thing to believe."

Rob Moll is online assistant editor of Christianity Today.