One of my grandfather’s best summers was the year he died. Richard Mommsen, my dad’s eighty-one-year-old father, learned in May 2002 that he had aggressive terminal cancer. Palliative care was the only realistic option. Shortly after getting the diagnosis, he and Grandma moved into an apartment in my parents’ house. Most of us eight siblings were still living at home, and one of my brothers, a nurse, became his companion. Thanks to the steroids he was taking to control symptoms, he felt more energetic than he had for years. Alongside Grampa, all of us embarked on three months of intensive living.

He would rise at four a.m. to go outside to listen to the birds, read, pray, and wait for dawn. When Grandma got up, they would spend time together, usually in silence. After that, his daily social schedule took off. He sat on the patio visiting with passersby, doling out his homemade potato wine (tasting notes: crisp, clean, and floral, like a botanical soju). He wrote dozens of letters and postcards to a lifetime’s worth of friends, many going back to the rural cooperative in northeastern Georgia, USA, where he and Grandma had raised my dad in a self-built log cabin. Through the open windows, he broadcast a soundtrack of Brahms, Woodie Guthrie, and Louis Armstrong. In the evenings, he invited his grandchildren and their friends to come over for a campfire and folk singing – the Great American Songbook had been a hallmark of the 1940s communitarian counterculture he and Grandma had been part of.

The summer also became a multi-week literary festival featuring his favorite authors. He recruited us twenty-somethings to read through Hamlet, one or two acts per evening. Grandma was Gertrude, and Grampa laughed through the gravediggers’ scene as if hearing it for the first time. Other evenings he’d gather the extended family around his bed to read aloud: Tolkien, Damon Runyon, William Saroyan, Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries. One of his last requests was to read C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series together one more time. “Let’s have another chapter,” he’d keep saying, until we’d read most of a book in a single evening. He’d sleep a few hours, then do it all over again.

He didn’t have much pain that we could tell, or any fear of death. A pastor asked if he wanted our church to hold a prayer service for him. “Why would I want that?” he responded. “I’ve had a wonderful life. I’m only grateful.” Another time he told us, “You know, I always prayed to experience just one more summer. And this year that prayer has already been granted.” His serenity was in some ways surprising; in earlier years, he’d gone through periods of self-doubt and depression. But now he was simply happy. Dying, he gained a new kind of health.

His “health” obviously wasn’t that of a well-functioning body; the cancer’s progress was grimly real. Instead, it was the kind of health described as “wholeness” by another of his favorite authors, Wendell Berry. In a 1994 essay “Health Is Membership,” Berry points out that the word health “comes from the same Indo-European root as ‘heal,’ ‘whole,’ and ‘holy.’ To be healthy is literally to be whole; to heal is to make whole.”

That wholeness, for Berry, requires the kind of thick network of relationships that surrounded Grampa. As Berry puts it, “I believe that the community – in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures – is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms.” Here Berry anticipates the findings of happiness researchers such as Robert Waldinger, who leads a Harvard longitudinal study on life outcomes that launched in 1938. Waldinger’s 2015 TED Talk summarizing his team’s results concluded: “The clearest message that we get from this seventy-five-year study is this: good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.”

Berry’s definition of health as membership in community has clear Christian roots. The Gospels offer numerous stories of Jesus as a miraculous healer: of lepers, blind people, epileptics, paralytics, the woman with a discharge of blood. As the theologian John Swinton points out, Jesus’ miracles accomplish more than relieving an individual’s suffering. They are acts of social salvation. Those who suffer from diseases rendering them ritually impure and socially outcast gain restoration to the community. Some, such as the paralyzed man in chapter 5 of Luke’s Gospel, have their sins publicly forgiven. For Jesus, healing is both personal and communal, physical and spiritual.

This background may explain why Berry criticizes modern medicine, even while acknowledging its achievements. Medicine as usually practiced, in his view, attends primarily to the “isolated individual,” and so too easily loses sight of health as a communal concern. This isolating tendency springs from its bias for technological solutions. It then treats the body as “a defective or potentially defective machine, singular, solitary, and displaced, without love, solace, or pleasure.” Berry protests this approach as untrue to reality: “The machine metaphor works to enforce a division that falsifies the process of healing because it falsifies the nature of the creature needing to be healed. If the body is a machine, then its diseases can be healed by a sort of mechanical tinkering, without reference to anything outside the body itself.” But that approach misses an essential truth about what a human body is:

The body in most ways is not at all like a machine. Like all living creatures and unlike a machine, the body is not formally self-contained; its boundaries and outlines are not so exactly fixed. The body alone is not, properly speaking, a body. Divided from its sources of air, food, drink, clothing, shelter, and companionship, a body is, properly speaking, a cadaver, whereas a machine by itself, shut down or out of fuel, is still a machine. Merely as an organism (leaving aside issues of mind and spirit) the body lives, and moves and has its being, minute by minute, by an inter-involvement with other bodies and other creatures, living and unliving, that is too complex to diagram or describe.

The recent rise of anti-aging medicine offers an extreme example of the “mechanical tinkering” Berry would reject. Well-heeled longevity enthusiasts seek to halt or reverse aging with elaborate regimes of hormone treatment, exotic supplements, and plasma replacement. Whatever the effectiveness of such therapies, they highlight the force of Berry’s argument. Can a lifestyle so extravagantly devoted to a personal project of self-engineering be what health looks like? And what about those unable to afford it?

Thinking of health as membership in community promises one great advantage over defining health as individualistic self-optimization: it transcends the physical infirmity that must inevitably find us all. Through building relationships of love with others and with God, health becomes available to those who need it most: for example, those with chronic conditions, those with disabilities, and those who are already old. Or, as in my grandfather’s case, those who are dying.

Grampa could still speak and walk until the last day, when, seemingly confused, he asked for help packing for a trip to a nearby mountain. The time had come for the work of dying. It was tough, but he undertook it with apparent calm, in the spirit of a line from George MacDonald he’d often quoted: “I do care to live – tremendously – but I don’t mind where. He who made this room so well worth living in, may surely be trusted with the next!”

Lifelong communitarian that he was, he spent his final hours surrounded by his community: his wife of five decades, his children and grandchildren, fellow Bruderhof members, friends he’d known since they were young, and young friends newly made. To stretch Berry’s point, you could say he died healthy, the manner of his parting his final gift to the community he’d lived for.

This issue of Plough aims to show why that’s a kind of health worth aspiring to.