Prima Verba – Part 6

Death is a hard thing.

Even if we face it with a sense of acceptance—after a long, hard-fought battle with a terminal illness, for example—still, it’s often extraordinarily difficult for all parties involved when the time comes to say goodbye.

And then there’s the ‘getting on with life’ that survivors must accept. That’s not always easy to do. Some people struggle with it for many years. Some choose not to struggle with it and never truly get on with life.

Death is a hard thing.

As a pastor, I discovered another layer of difficulty that gets added into the mix. I think of it as pressing pause on your own grief. You need to be there for the family and friends of the deceased. So, instead of giving yourself over to your own grieving process, you press pause. It’s not until after the funeral and committal that you’re able to press play and finally process the loss for yourself.

That’s how it was for me, anyway. And I say none of this begrudgingly. It’s part of what’s required of a pastor. And by God’s grace, I was able to extend his comfort to many families in their time of loss and receive his comfort in the process.

But still… Death is a hard thing. Even for pastors.

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According to my memory and my records, thirty-three church members died during my fifteen years and two months as their pastor. It seems crass to put it this way, but that averages out to about two deaths per year.

But over a period of sixteen months, which started in the heart of Covid and lasted until late in 2021, there were 13 deaths in our church. That would average out to almost ten deaths per year. Put another way, of all the deaths of church members I experienced as a pastor, forty percent of them occurred when I was struggling with the first wave of burnout.

I should clarify that most of these deaths weren’t related to Covid, whether directly or indirectly. A few were, but most weren’t. No, most of them were due to other preexisting illnesses, sudden medical emergencies, or the natural physical decline that occurs with age.

But man was there were a lot of them. And each one took a toll on me, beyond what I had experienced up to that point in my ministry.

But why was that?

I think it’s fairly simple, though I didn’t see it clearly until a couple of years later. When you pour yourself into someone (such as a person who’s dying or a grieving family), you are necessarily pouring yourself out. And you need emotional reserves on tap to sustain that outward flow. In the case of these frequent deaths, I was already being depleted by the Covid wave, and I wasn’t experiencing much in the way of refueling. So, as each death occurred, I became more and more emotionally depleted, to the point of emotional exhaustion.

I’m sure it didn’t help that, for some of the funerals, there were still restrictions in place on how many people could be gathered in one location. At one memorial service, only the deceased’s husband and her two sons were able to be present, besides the funeral home staff and me. There was no network of support at the funeral. No other family, friends, or church members. Just an empty funeral home.

As if the loss of a wife and mother wasn’t hard enough. I felt in my soul, along with the family, how wrong this was.

It was a crazy and tragic time. And for me, it was an increasingly difficult time in which to be a pastor. In my previous post, I mentioned a prayer I said sometime around the spring of 2021. It went something like this:

God, if you don’t want me to be a pastor anymore, I’m fine with that. In fact, I think I’m ready to be done. And if you show me the off-ramp, I’ll take it.

That was about halfway through these sixteen months.

At the time, I wasn’t really thinking about these things in terms of waves of burnout. In retrospect, that’s probably a good thing. You see, there were still two waves to go.

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As always, I want to thank you for your ongoing interest in my story. Your support—whether in prayer, encouraging words, or finances—is greatly appreciated and is never taken for granted.

Over the past couple of weeks [here in early November of 2025], I’ve had some things I needed to tend to, and this has left me with less time for writing. But I think I’m back on a more regular schedule now, which should allow me to publish the next parts of my story at a steadier pace.

Please keep me in your prayers, and please know that you are in mine.

May the Lord bless and keep you all.

Gloria in excelsis Deo

Aaron