What a Priest and a Mortician Teach About Dying Well

Father Stefan Starzynski spent eight years as a hospital chaplain at Inova in the Diocese of Arlington. He has anointed the dying, sat with the grieving, and watched people encounter death with either terror or something closer to readiness. At 56, marking 30 years as a priest, he says plainly: 'Every day I'm one step closer to heaven. I am looking forward to being with God in his timing. That is not resignation but recognizing that each day is drawing closer to heaven while, at the same time, living my life to the fullest.'

Patti Maguire Armstrong, writing in the National Catholic Register, paired Father Starzynski's reflections with observations from Victor Sweeney, a small-town mortician whose daily work carries a similar clarity. Sweeney and the priest do not share a morbid fascination with death. They share a posture toward it: look at it honestly, and it will tell you something about how to live.

Their conversation produced one sentence worth returning to. Father Starzynski, quoting a homily he gave on the one-year anniversary of his father's death, said: 'Life is not just holding on. In order to get to heaven, we must die — so we are preparing ourselves, not resigning ourselves.'

That distinction — between preparing and resigning — is the hinge on which this whole question turns.

What the research actually shows

Terror Management Theory documents that most people organize significant portions of their behavior around avoiding awareness of mortality.[^2] That avoidance is not neutral. It generates a low-grade, chronic anxiety that shapes decisions about relationships, risk, vocation, and meaning in ways the person rarely examines.

Research in meaning-making has found the opposite also true: people who integrate finitude into their self-concept report stronger relational bonds, clearer personal values, and higher levels of meaning. A 2006 study in Psychological Science found that mortality salience, when framed constructively rather than as a threat, increased prosocial behavior and authentic engagement with personal goals.[^3] George Bonanno's work at Columbia on resilient bereaved individuals documented that what distinguishes them is not an absence of grief but a capacity to hold distress and positive engagement simultaneously, without requiring resolution before re-entering life.[^4]

The priest and the mortician, between them, have accumulated something like a lifetime of that specific data.

How a clinician or friend can help

Father Starzynski identified one of the most common obstacles to dying well: people locate their worth in busyness and accomplishment. When illness or aging strips those away, they can be left without an answer to the question of what they are worth now. He pointed to 2 Corinthians 4:16 — 'Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day' — as a reorientation. Worth does not diminish with diminishment.

For a clinician or a close friend accompanying someone approaching death, several things follow from this.

The first is permission to name what is happening. Many people approaching death are waiting for someone else to say the word. Clinical instinct sometimes runs toward deflection or toward filling silence with reassurance. What the dying often need is a companion willing to be present to what is actually true. Father Starzynski's counsel is direct: tell the people you love that you love them, forgive where there is unforgiveness, and prepare while there is still time to prepare. A friend or clinician can help make space for exactly those conversations.

The second is attention to unfinished relational business. Armstrong's reporting captures Father Starzynski's emphasis here, and it is echoed in Victor Sweeney's observations from the mortuary. Unforgiveness, unexpressed gratitude, unspoken love — these are the things that make dying harder than it needs to be. A clinician does not need to be a spiritual director to ask: 'Is there anyone you'd like to be in contact with before things change further?' That question opens a door most people are glad to walk through.

The third is resisting the impulse to manage the dying person's emotions toward a more comfortable state. Bonanno's research suggests that what matters is the capacity to tolerate oscillation — grief and gratitude, fear and peace, in alternation.[^4] Trying to move someone toward acceptance prematurely, or away from sadness too quickly, can interrupt a process that is working. The clinician's role is closer to witness than to resolution.

The fourth is helping the person identify what they believe about what comes next. This is not proselytizing. It is attending to the dimension of meaning that dying reliably activates. Father Starzynski's clarity about heaven is not denial of death's weight. It is a frame within which the weight becomes bearable. A clinician who ignores this dimension is working with less than the whole person.

The Ignatian logic of it

Ignatius of Loyola built a meditation into the Spiritual Exercises in which the retreatant imagines standing at the end of life and looking back at the decision currently before them. The purpose is not to induce despair but to clarify what actually matters. Decisions that look urgent from inside a busy week look different from the vantage point of a deathbed.

Father Starzynski's thirty years of priesthood have taught him something close to this by practice rather than meditation. Victor Sweeney's work has done the same. Both of them have arrived at a conviction the Stoics held, that the memento mori encodes, and that the data now supports: the person who can hold death honestly in view lives with more, not less, of what makes life worth living.

For the person approaching death, and for whoever is accompanying them, that is not a small thing to know.

References

[^1]: Nordling, W. J., in Vitz, P. C., Nordling, W. J., & Titus, C. S. (2020). A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person. Divine Mercy University Press, pp. 210–248.

[^2]: Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., & Solomon, S. (1986). The causes and consequences of a need for self-esteem: A terror management theory. In R. F. Baumeister (Ed.), Public Self and Private Self (pp. 189–212). Springer. See also: Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (2015). The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life. Random House.

[^3]: Jonas, E., Schimel, J., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (2002). The Scrooge effect: Evidence that mortality salience increases prosocial attitudes and behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28(10), 1342–1353. https://doi.org/10.1177/014616702236834. See also: Niemiec, C. P., Brown, K. W., Kashdan, T. B., Cozzolino, P. J., Breen, W. E., Levesque-Bristol, C., & Ryan, R. M. (2010). Being present in the face of existential threat: The role of trait mindfulness in reducing defensive responses to mortality salience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99(2), 344–365.

[^4]: Bonanno, G. A. (2004). Loss, trauma, and human resilience: Have we underestimated the human capacity to thrive after extremely aversive events? American Psychologist, 59(1), 20–28. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.59.1.20. See also: Bonanno, G. A. (2009). The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss. Basic Books.