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It was a Wednesday when Dad died.

The image. Big den in my parents’ home. The sofa is moved to clear space for a hospital bed. Porta potty, towels, medicines to the side. Mom, my sister, and me holding his hands. Den full of relatives and neighbors. Dad, body weakened by months of chemotherapy and cancer, limp on the bed, dreading the next whatever — swallowing a bunch of pills, eliminating waste — none of which he had energy for. Dad had been sent home to die.

We’re in the midst of the Christian season of Lent, a time when this faith tradition says, “Let go.” Honoring the ultimate letting go is not limited to religion. The existentialist, Albert Camus, writes, “From the dark horizon of my future a sort of slow, persistent breeze had been blowing toward me, all my life long.” It was death he saw. The possibility of non-existence, non-being, just as an idea, whether you believe it or not, can be disturbing. We are attached to our identities.

But we don’t have to fear. In my faith tradition, Paul says death has no victory, no sting. (1 Corinthians 15:54a-55) Death and life go together. Even now, new life springs up all through the plant world. But to get new growth, the leaf falls dead from the tree. We may think we’ve made peace with death, but this Lenten letting go is the ultimate one.

Woody Allen comes to mind: “I don’t fear death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” You like Woody Allen? Here’s another one: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying. I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.”

The crucial moment in Dad’s letting go — he shook his hands free from family and lifted them. Maybe reaching for something? I don’t think so. He was letting go, I think, and opening himself to it all.

In this potent moment for me, I knew that Dad knew. He knew there’s nothing to resist or fear. Gracefully, he dropped the body, as I heard them say in India. An earthy and pragmatic man, Dad wasn’t high church and never paid attention to the Lenten season, but he got Lent at the end.

There’s something to all this talk about love. Ultimately, it’s a safe universe. Not always safe in the here and now — check the morning news. But, ultimately, it is safe. Lent transitions to Easter. Dad taught me that.

I’ll admit, I didn’t get it in that moment Dad died. It took decades. At age 50, I joined the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), for the benefits. But for years — Susan, my wife, attests to this — I refused to touch the AARP magazine. Susan retrieved it from the mailbox, told me anything worth knowing, and trashed it herself. I resisted my mortality, mightily. But, eventually, that moment with Dad, when he let go, got through to me. And, making peace with death enables life more fully now.

So, on the other side of death is life, and it’s grounded in love. I don’t know the particulars of how it works. As a religion professor, I know all the theories, all the doctrines, about death and afterlife. I cannot give you a roadmap with specificity, but Dad taught me it’s OK to let go.

For months, I’ve been drifting off to sleep with these words, from poet Kahlil Gibran: “For what is it to die, but to stand naked in the wind and melt into the sun? And what is to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?”

The poet said the words. My Dad taught me the truth of the words. Thanks Dad.

Calvin Mercer teaches religion at East Carolina University. A few elements of this column come from a sermon he recently preached at a local church. Calvin’s favorite Lenten meditation is Psalm 23.

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