By Regis Martin, Crisis Magazine, March 24, 2026
Regis Martin is Professor of Theology and Faculty Associate with the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. He earned a licentiate and a doctorate in sacred theology from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome. Martin is the author of a number of books, including Still Point: Loss, Longing, and Our Search for God (2012) and The Beggar’s Banquet (Emmaus Road). His most recent book, published by Sophia Institute Press, is March to Martyrdom: Seven Letters on Sanctity from St. Ignatius of Antioch.
The loss of everything we love to the ultimate arbiter of life – death – is ultimately what makes the Good News good.
“In my beginning is my end.”—T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
What is the leading cause of death? Does anyone out there know? What do all the experts say? Suppose we ask them; perhaps they’ll tell us. Heart disease, they say, is the reason most people die.
But is that strictly true? Yes, but only in an immediate and proximate sense. But remotely? I mean, what ultimately accounts for death? The answer is quite simple: birth. That’s because from the moment we first begin to be, to exist—“mewling and puking,” as Shakespeare so elegantly puts it, “in our nurse’s arms”—we are old enough to die. What other qualification do we require?
What then is death but an event that follows upon birth, the dread certainty of which awaits us all. Indeed, says Pascal, “it makes all the difference in the world, if it is certain that we shall not be here for long, and uncertain whether we shall be here even for an hour.” There can be no exceptions, each of us having been predetermined to die at a given time and place none of us knows in advance—toward which we find ourselves inexorably moving from the first moment we begin to exist in our mother’s womb. Not even the tiniest of zygotes may escape the net of death. …
