When I was growing up, as part of our family prayer we used to pray for a happy death. In my young mind, I had a certain conception of what that might look like. A happy death would be to die inside of grace, warmly cradled in the loving arms of family and church, fully at peace with God and others, having had time to speak some final words of love and gratitude.

Unfortunately, not everyone gets to die that way.

Accidents, unfortunate circumstances, and the complexity of human relationships sometimes conspire in nefarious ways so that people die in less-than-ideal situations: angry, compromised, unforgiving, bitter, immature, unreconciled.

Sometimes too the very cause of death speaks of a less-than-happy parting: drunkenness, an overdose of drugs, depression, recklessness, suicide. Death often catches people before they have had the chance to say and do things that make for a peaceful farewell. Invariably there’s unfinished business.

We all know examples of this: A man dead in an accident whose last words to his family were ones of anger; a woman dead of an overdose who hasn’t talked to her family in years; a colleague dead by his own hand; a friend who dies bitter, unable to forgive; or even simply the loved one who’s taken away by a sudden heart attack before he or she has had the chance to speak some last words of love and farewell. Rarely do people die without any unfinished business.

The pain of this can linger for a long time. I remember once counselling a man in his fifties who still carried pain and guilt from his mother’s death more than forty years previous. He had been taken to his mother’s bedside in the hospital; but was unaware that she was dying. She had asked him to give her a hug and he, a child, frightened and reticent in this tense situation, had backed away. The next day she died so his last memory of his mother was his refusal to hug her. Forty years later and he still hadn’t made peace with that.

Many of us have had people close to us die with whom we had unfinished business, a hurt never reconciled, an injustice never rectified, a bitterness that never softened. Death has now separated us, and the unfinished business remains precisely unfinished and we are left saying: “If only there was another chance!”

Well, there is another chance. One of our most consoling (albeit neglected) Christian doctrines is our belief in the Communion of the Saints. It’s a doctrine enshrined in the Apostle’s Creed itself and it asks us to believe that we are still in vital communication with those who have died. Moreover, it tells us that the communication we now have with them is free from many of the tensions that colored our relationship with them while they were alive.

Hence, to believe in the Communion of Saints is to believe that we can still tend to unfinished business in our relationships, even after death. Simply put, we can still talk to those who have died, and we can, even now, say the words of love, forgiveness, gratitude, and regret that ideally should have been spoken earlier. Indeed, inside the Communion of Saints the reconciliation that eluded us while that person was alive can now more easily take place. Why?

Because inside the Communion of Saints our communication with the one deceased is privileged. Death washes clean. It clarifies perspective and takes away a lot of relational tensions. Why do I say this? Because both faith and experience teach us this.

For example, all of us have experienced situations where, inside of a family, a friendship circle, a community, or a group of colleagues, a bitter tension with an individual can arise and fester so that eventually there’s an unresolvable rift. Things have happened that can no longer be undone. Then the one who has been at the source of the tenson dies and his or her death changes everything. In a strange way the death brings with it a peace, a clarity, and an understanding which, prior to it, were not possible.

Why is this? It’s not simply because the death has changed the chemistry of the group or because, as we may simplistically conclude, the source of the tension or bitterness has died. It happens because, as Luke teaches in his Passion narrative, death can wash things clean and release forgiveness in the same way as Jesus forgave the good thief upon the cross as he died.

This should be an immense consolation. If we are attentive to the Communion of Saints, what we can’t bring to wholeness and peace in this life can be completed afterwards. We still have communication, privileged communication, with our loved ones after death.

Among the marvels of that is the fact that we still have a chance to fix the things, after death, that we were powerless to mend before death took a loved one away.