Up in Alaska, there’s a report from the local diocesan paper about a man who has launched a remarkable and inspiring ministry to those who are facing their final hours:

Ed Iwata thoughtfully sipped a latte while talking about his foray into the land of the dying.

Iwata, a convert to Catholicism and a member of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Anchorage, just passed a landmark 60th birthday with multiple celebrations and is very much alive. But when the AIDS crisis began in the 1980s, Iwata began to think about death and why people, including him, were so afraid of it. AIDS sufferers “were treated like the lepers of Christ’s time,” he recalled. “I thought, ‘how could I comfort them?’ Yet it was something I feared.”

At the time, he lived in the Washington, D.C. area, and faced his fears by getting involved in AIDS education. Today, retired to Alaska with his wife, he’s become involved in another ministry to the dying — NODA.

NODA – No One Dies Alone – has gotten a spate of publicity in Anchorage recently, including a splashy report on local television and a front page spread in the Anchorage Daily News.

NODA is a national program, with a local chapter sponsored in Anchorage by Providence Alaska Medical Center. In Anchorage, the program ensures that no one dying at one of Providence’s four facilities – the hospital, Mary Conrad Center, Providence Extended Care or Horizon House – will die without someone at their bedside.

A volunteer with the organization since it began in Anchorage last summer, Iwata said being present to death is being present to the sacred.

“Even before NODA, when I visited a person who was seriously ill, I felt I’d seen a suffering Christ. I ask myself, what would it have been like to be brave enough to be at the foot of the cross?”

When Iwata worked in AIDS education, he made almost 100 presentations for the Red Cross on the facts of HIV/AIDS at a time when most people knew little about the disease and its causes.

“This was when people were still saying, ‘can I touch them?’”

Volunteering led him to Damien Ministries, which offered retreats to persons with AIDS. Iwata began by educating the cleaning and cooking staff at the retreat center, but soon found himself drawn to the center’s Friday Masses.

“Too many died while I was there, including the ministry’s founder. It got me in touch with death and dying,” he said.

At NODA, Iwata volunteers for the hard-to-fill hours – the midnight shift. While he’s been called to several “activations,” which is how NODA describes the call to a deathbed, he has been present for only two deaths.

At both instances, Iwata was struck by how human touch calmed the dying person. One man kept raising his hand as Iwata softly recited the Rosary. He gently took the man’s hand. A few moments later, Iwata realized that the man, whose hand he still held, had quietly died.

As a young man, Iwata, a third generation American of Japanese descent, won a scholarship to Gonzaga University in Spokane. There, the combination of “a roommate and Vatican II” drew him to the Catholic Church.

His call to serve the dying has led him deeper into the mystery of Christ.

Death, Iwata reflected over his coffee, must be like falling into the greatest unconditional love you can imagine.

“Think about a time when you felt love, or in love. The feeling consumes you and you’re floating on a cloud. Then double that and you’re bursting. Multiply it by 10 times and you can’t contain it. Multiply it infinitely – that’s God,” he said.

That, explained Iwata, is what the person who dies must experience. It also means Iwata doesn’t leave a deathbed with sadness, but with peace.

“Sometimes when I leave someone, I’ll tell them, ‘if you feel this great warmth, see this great light, embrace it,’” he said.

Check out the rest of the story for more.

The Church needs more people like Ed Iwata. So, for that matter, does the world.