Doctrine on children who die fulfills a primal desire for Latter-day Saint parents

The second-hardest thing I have ever done is hold my infant son in my arms and watch Ray die. The hardest task for my wife and me were allowing Ray to die without a fight. He was born in 2000 with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, which meant that his heart wouldn’t function on its own. After reviewing the doctors’ options, which involved a high expectation of pain for Ray and a survival chance that a dispassionate observer would rate as virtually nil, we allowed our son to die.


A key advantage of grief is that it allows sorrow to be put into perspective. The months before Ray’s birth, when he was diagnosed, and several months to years after his short life, were very difficult. Moments intended for matrimonial passion become a time for tears when you look into your spouse’s eyes and know what both of you are thinking of. You look at children born at the same time as Ray and resist an impulse of bitter envy. You mentally plug your ears to condolences that your child “was too pure for the world” or vain exclamations from the pulpit of how prayer saved so and so’s child.

But grief is a positive. With time, it allows comprehension to sink in that what happened to your child happens to many, many others every year. You realize that 24 hours with a healthy baby makes you very lucky compared to the countless others left to die too early in terrifying circumstances, with no one to comfort them. If you don’t understand that life’s not fair, that our Creator doesn’t play favorites, then grief can turn you into a selfish, self-pitying person — and that’s a bigger shame than the loss of an innocent.

My wife and I do cling to a faith-based belief that others may call fantasy. We’re LDS, and we regard Joseph Smith as a prophet. When Smith was alive, he taught this, according to a 1918 edition of The Improvement Era: 

President Joseph F. Smith, the sixth President of the Church, reported: ‘Joseph Smith taught the doctrine that the infant child that was laid away in death would come up in the resurrection as a child; and, pointing to the mother of a lifeless child, he said to her: ‘You will have the joy, the pleasure and satisfaction of nurturing this child, after its resurrection, until it reaches the full stature of its spirit.’ …

"In 1854, I met with my aunt [Agnes Smith], the wife of my uncle, Don Carlos Smith, who was the mother of that little girl [Sophronia] that Joseph Smith, the Prophet, was speaking about, when he told the mother that she should have the joy, the pleasure, and the satisfaction of rearing that child, after the resurrection, until it reached the full stature of its spirit; and that it would be a far greater joy than she could possibly have in mortality, because she would be free from the sorrow and fear and disabilities of mortal life, and she would know more than she could know in this life. I met that widow, the mother of that child, and she told me this circumstance and bore testimony to me that this was what the Prophet Joseph Smith said when he was speaking at the funeral of her little daughter."

I choose to believe that I, with many other happy parents, will raise children who died too soon. I’m not convinced of that because a group of retired businessmen say it. I base it on my faith in a loving God and a primal desire to have that privilege. 

But if I’m wrong, I refuse to be disappointed. The 24 hours my wife and I had with Ray was another blessing we will always thank God for.


-- Doug Gibson

Originally published at StandardNET in 2010

Despite what you might hear cremation is acceptable to LDS doctrine

(This article was first published in 2010 at StandardBlogs.)

I serve as a home teacher to an elderly woman. She has very little money and tries to stay independent. Eager not to have her death be a burden to her children, she long ago started putting money away so that when she dies, she can be cremated.

However, as she expressed to me, the decision has caused her anguish, as some members of the church have told her that cremation is not permitted in the LDS Church. “I simply have no other way of paying for my funeral,” she told me with a mixture of frustration and determination.

In the past weeks, the issue of cremation versus burial has become more personal to my family. My wife’s father, a member of the church who lived alone in Hungary, died. A somewhat reclusive man, he was dead at least a week before we were notified. Wanting to arrange for a funeral celebration in early April, we had no alternative but to have him cremated and his remains stored until the service.

The idea that cremation would be contradictory to God’s law has always struck me as ridiculous. Common sense dictates that someone killed in a plane crash, for example, is pretty well cremated. But, like the woman I home teach, I frequently was told growing up in the church that cremation was wrong. One rationale I heard often was that a cremated body could not be resurrected. That seemed like a flip answer to a serious question.

The reason for the “cremation is wrong” is probably due to its reference in “Mormon Doctrine,” which was written by the late LDS Apostle Bruce R. McConkie. Now, “Mormon Doctrine” is an amazing work, but its title is not accurate. It’s Bruce R. McConkie’s “Mormon Doctrine.” In fact, some of the book was changed after its first edition. In the second edition, here is what McConkie says about cremation: “…Cremation of the dead is not part of the gospel; it is a practice which has been avoided by the saints in all ages. The Church today counsels its members not to cremate their dead. Such a procedure would find gospel acceptance only under the most extraordinary and unusual circumstances …”

After reading that, I can understand why I, and my fellow ward member, have been told that cremation is wrong. Based on McConkie’s interpretation, poverty, it seems, would not be an “extraordinary” or “unusual” circumstance. McConkie’s opinion on cremation was shared by very early Christians, who regarded cremation as showing disrespect for God.

Except, McConkie’s wrong on this issue. Cremation is acceptable to LDS doctrine. In the July 1972 LDS Church publication, The New Era, Spencer J. Palmer, a former mission president in Korea, offered the LDS Church position on cremation: “Funerals and burials are prohibitive in cost to some of the most faithful members of the Church in that part of the world. Hence, although I personally prefer embalming and burial and although it has been the pattern followed by Israel, there appears to be no prohibition against cremation in the scriptures or in the theology of the Church.”

In the August 1991 LDS Church publication, The Ensign, Roger R. Keller, associate professor of Church history and doctrine at Brigham Young University, gave a lukewarm but definitive OK for cremation as an option. He wrote, “Ultimately, whether a person’s body was buried at sea, destroyed in combat or an accident, intentionally cremated, or buried in a grave, the person will be resurrected.”

I think the “cremation is wrong” doctrine is a lot like the “caffeinated soda is wrong” or “white sugar is wrong” rhetoric you hear often from well-meaning but over-exuberant members of the church. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is designed to provide comfort to our lives, not worry a poor old woman to her death quicker than she deserves.

-- Doug Gibson

LDS doctrine on children who die fulfills a primal desire

The second-hardest thing I have ever done is hold my infant son in my arms and watch Ray die. The hardest task for my wife and me were allowing Ray to die without a fight. He was born in 2000 with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, which meant that his heart wouldn’t function on its own. After reviewing the doctors’ options, which involved a high expectation of pain for Ray and a survival chance that a dispassionate observer would rate as virtually nil, we allowed our son to die.


A key advantage of grief is that it allows sorrow to be put into perspective. The months before Ray’s birth, when he was diagnosed, and several months to years after his short life, were very difficult. Moments intended for matrimonial passion become a time for tears when you look into your spouse’s eyes and know what both of you are thinking of. You look at children born at the same time as Ray and resist an impulse of bitter envy. You mentally plug your ears to condolences that your child “was too pure for the world” or vain exclamations from the pulpit of how prayer saved so and so’s child.

But grief is a positive. With time, it allows comprehension to sink in that what happened to your child happens to many, many others every year. You realize that 24 hours with a healthy baby makes you very lucky compared to the countless others left to die too early in terrifying circumstances, with no one to comfort them. If you don’t understand that life’s not fair, that our Creator doesn’t play favorites, then grief can turn you into a selfish, self-pitying person — and that’s a bigger shame than the loss of an innocent.

My wife and I do cling to a faith-based belief that others may call fantasy. We’re LDS, and we regard Joseph Smith as a prophet. When Smith was alive, he taught this, according to a 1918 edition of The Improvement Era: 

President Joseph F. Smith, the sixth President of the Church, reported: ‘Joseph Smith taught the doctrine that the infant child that was laid away in death would come up in the resurrection as a child; and, pointing to the mother of a lifeless child, he said to her: ‘You will have the joy, the pleasure and satisfaction of nurturing this child, after its resurrection, until it reaches the full stature of its spirit.’ …

"In 1854, I met with my aunt [Agnes Smith], the wife of my uncle, Don Carlos Smith, who was the mother of that little girl [Sophronia] that Joseph Smith, the Prophet, was speaking about, when he told the mother that she should have the joy, the pleasure, and the satisfaction of rearing that child, after the resurrection, until it reached the full stature of its spirit; and that it would be a far greater joy than she could possibly have in mortality, because she would be free from the sorrow and fear and disabilities of mortal life, and she would know more than she could know in this life. I met that widow, the mother of that child, and she told me this circumstance and bore testimony to me that this was what the Prophet Joseph Smith said when he was speaking at the funeral of her little daughter."

I choose to believe that I, with many other happy parents, will raise children who died too soon. I’m not convinced of that because a group of retired businessmen say it. I base it on my faith in a loving God and a primal desire to have that privilege. 

But if I’m wrong, I refuse to be disappointed. The 24 hours my wife and I had with Ray was another blessing we will always thank God for.


-- Doug Gibson

Originally published at StandardNET in 2010