News has come, suddenly and without my expecting it, that Frank has died. I knew that he had an illness serious in its long-range possibilities, but I never thought it would lead to death so soon. When I talked with him two weeks ago, he seemed on his way to recovery.

Frank and I had been friends for 57 years, ever since we first met as classmates in our small high school. We shared much in values and outlook on the world. We had also shared in many of the weddings, baptisms and other events that marked the life of our families through the years.

Frank’s death marks only the second time in my lifetime that I have lost a close friend. It still comes as a new experience, upsetting because I feel unpre-pared for a world without him. In recent weeks we had talked about the activities we would share together as he moved more fully into retirement. Now that will not happen and I feel deprived.

He was a fine person who spent his life in public education because he believed it the most important work he could do. In his early years, he had given up a career that could have been much more lucrative in favor of teaching and school administration. After retirement five years ago, he devoted himself in large part to caring for his wife who had been afflicted with a crippling disease.

Spirituality always took a central role in Frank’s life. The religious values imparted to him growing up in a large family remained vital for him. When I talked with him during his recent hospital stay, I sensed that he was prepared for whatever might happen to him. With communication born of long friendship, I could tell that he had been thinking about death and the issues it posed.

Though I feel shaken by his departure, Frank’s death does not upset my own convictions about what dying means. Rather, it has strengthened them.

Ever since my own boyhood I have held a deep faith that dying leads to new life. Even aside from the teachings of religion, I have always judged it in-credible to think that death brings an end to everything. Given all the complexity and built-in value of each human life, I could never believe that this life does not continue.

Frederick Buechner, one of my favorite spiritual writers, expresses this faith in a way that accords with my viewpoint. In his most recent book” The Eyes of the Heart,” he explains his conviction that dying brings new life. I identify strongly with the reasons he gives to support his faith.

“If I were God,” Buechner writes, “and loved the people I created and wanted them to become at last the best they had it in them to be, I couldn’t imagine consigning them to oblivion when their time came with the job under the best of circumstances only a fraction done.”

Secondly, “life doesn’t feel like a black comedy. It feels like a mystery. It feels as though, at the innermost heart of it, there is Holiness, and that we expe-rience all the horrors that go on both around us and within us as horrors rather than just as the way the cookie crumbles because, in our own innermost hearts, we belong to Holiness, which they are a tragic departure from.”

Amen to this faith that human life does continue in splendor transformed by our loving God. At least, this has been my conviction since childhood, a con-viction that I regard as a divine gift. In that confidence I join Frank’s family and friends in committing him to God.

Only a few weeks ago, I wrote another column in which Frank played a part. My article dealt with long-lasting friendships and I included him among those closest to me. In the light of his death, a quotation he gave me for that piece has taken on new meaning.

When I asked him what our friendship meant to him, he told me this: “One of the things that we have been able to do is know one another well enough to wish it would go on forever.”

I remain convinced that Frank’s wish for it to go on forever has a solid basis in reality.

Richard Griffin