What is “mystagogy,” and what does it have to do with death—yours, mine, or the author’s? This is the question that the distinguished Catholic theologian Richard René Gaillardetz, who died on November 7, 2023, at the age of sixty-five, tries to answer at the very beginning of this, his final and most personal book.

“Mystagogy,” Gaillardetz writes, is the term that was used in early Christianity to describe the “process of instruction” that led neophytes “into a deeper exploration of the fundamental mysteries of the Christian faith.” Sensing that both believers and nonbelievers need to wrestle with how to live when death approaches—for, as Philip Larkin noted, “most things may never happen: this one will”—Gaillardetz offers a series of “random reflections” on dying. He first shared these on his CaringBridge website, following his February 2022 diagnosis with terminal pancreatic cancer. A lucid and engaging writer whose articles occasionally appeared in Commonweal, Gaillardetz hoped that his reflections might help himself and others “plumb the mystery of death and resurrected life.”

For Gaillardetz, there was no glossing over his impending demise or its implications for his family, students, and colleagues. He describes his own bodily decomposition in stark, graphic detail: the significant weight loss (sixty pounds), growing neuropathy, nights spent in the bathroom, falls, hospitalizations, living from CT scan to CT scan and treatment to treatment, and what he calls the necessity of “relinquishing control of the days.” On the other hand, he also offers encomiums to the love and support of his family (wife, four sons, mother, and sisters—“a beautiful conduit of God’s own love”), fellow teachers, graduate students (one, Grace Mariette Agolia, writes an affective and theologically rich epilogue), and he testifies that the Eucharist had never felt so vital: “In each Eucharist, time explodes with graced possibility and expectation.”

In keeping with the CaringBridge format, the chapters in Gaillardetz’s book are deeply personal and succinct. They often put the year and a half of his illness in the context of the Church’s liturgical cycle—Lent, Holy Week, Ordinary Time, Advent—thus reflecting and elucidating his familiarity with the Christian mysteries and his attempt to live and understand them.

Gaillardetz’s learning and his appreciation for a wide spectrum of life, including sports figures, novelists, mystics, social reformers, theologians, and contemporary songwriters/performers, create a cumulative “theological aesthetic,” one that both informs and challenges. How does one deal with death and the inexpressible mysteries that a theologian must wrestle with? One is reminded of Teresa of Ávila’s saying that, loving us as no one else does, God “fits us to His measure” only gradually, lest “the soul should be dismayed.” God “dilates” the soul as far as is necessary “for it to contain all He intends to fuse into it.”

In Gaillardetz’s suffering, with and for others, one senses both his physical and spiritual dilation. His consequent growth in understanding, acceptance, hope, and gratitude for life—heightened by his questioning of his own beliefs and character—are both instructive and reassuring. Perhaps most challenging is his effort to maintain hope in the face of what we all fear most—the non-being of life as we have personally and consciously known it. His use of the Latin phrase “dum spiro, spero” (“while I breathe, I hope”) as an antiphonal coda to each chapter is a reminder of just how close all of us are to dying: our next breath could be our last.

That sobering reminder is a gift. We must take—and receive—each new breath as a form of grace, a hope realized, giving us time to reflect on and be grateful for the opportunity to not only love life, others, and God, but to comprehend more deeply that both death and suffering have been overcome in the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus. As Gaillardetz writes with well-earned authority: “In Jesus’s crucifixion God actively makes my suffering God’s own.” Dum spiro, spero, indeed. 

While I Breathe, I Hope
A Mystagogy of Dying
Richard R. Gaillardetz
Liturgical Press
$19.95 | 256 pp.