Every living thing on Earth experiences the end of life, just as we all experience its beginning. But in our modern culture, death has become almost a forbidden topic of conversation. We live in a society that celebrates youth and beauty, perfection and immortality. Death seems to have been cut out of the overall social fabric.
This week, I was preparing to write something witty about the psychological tricks I use to ease my pain at paying $5-plus for a gallon of gas. I road-tested some of the jokes and people thought I was pretty funny. Then, two things happened. I interviewed some folks at Hospice of Lenawee about the upcoming 40th anniversary celebration and I was the soloist at a funeral in my parish for a woman about 10 years younger than me.
When I was a kid, my parents took us to funerals pretty regularly. My mom thought it was important for us to understand death is a part of life. My grandparents were from large families with many of my great aunts and uncles born before 1900. That meant when I was a kid, that generation was dying off. And we were going to a lot of funerals.
I was thinking about those funerals I attended as a kid, about how Great-Aunt Edna looked in her casket or how I thought Grandpa was still breathing at his viewing. I remember the cloying smell of lilies and roses and the pressing in of a crowd of heavy wool coats and trouser-clad legs as we squeezed through the throng. The hard chairs my siblings and I sat on, our feet dangling over the edge of the seats, the murmuring and muttering of adults hanging over us like surround-sound.
For me, funerals were both comforting and scary. I never got completely accustomed to seeing people in caskets. Over the years, I’ve seen my share of the dead laid out in style, waxen faces against white satin framed in the highest quality walnut or stainless steel. While there is a closure there, there also is trepidation. My mind returns to the tombstone of one Clara Pencil I discovered in Brookside Cemetery decades ago: “Stop stranger as you pass by. As you are now, so once was I. As I am now, so you will be. Prepare for death and follow me.”
If we’re thinking of our own demise, we might be coping with the unknown by putting our affairs in order before we need them to be. If the death of a loved one has us down, it’s knowing that there are resources in our community to help us through the grieving process, such as the grief and bereavement programs offered by Hospice of Lenawee.
I like having a place like HOL in our community. My mom and my sister both benefitted from hospice care–my mother was in the Hospice of Lenawee Home the last two days of her life–and it made it somehow smoother for those of us who survived and dealt with the day-to-day emotions of loss. It was a place of comfort for our family, too. I certainly would want to spend my final days in a place like the Hospice Home if that happens to be the hand I am dealt.
My final semester at Adrian College in the spring of 2021, I taught “Literary Approaches to Death.” This class was based on one I’d had as an undergrad at Siena Heights and explored death through the lens of poetry, fiction, documentary, and essay. Students were asked to write their own obituaries, plan their own funerals, visit a cemetery, and to think about how they wanted to be remembered.
Their comments at the end of the semester were surprising. Most left the class feeling more comfortable talking about death and dying than when they started. Others found solace in being able to deal with real-life crises in their own families, including the young student who was dealing with a mother dying from breast cancer.
While death is a scary, morbid and sometimes taboo topic, it’s also unavoidable. We all will succumb to the Grim Reaper, Pale Rider, or Joe Black. It’s only a matter of time.
But talking about death and facing death not only can help us to grieve, but it also can help us to live. There is an old saying, “Memento mori.” Roughly translated, it means “Remember you will die.” The idea of it is not to freak you out or depress you, but to encourage you to live your best life.
One of my students put it this way:
“In this class, I think the most important thing I have learned was to become more comfortable with the idea of death,” wrote the student. “I also loved that we did not just learn about death, but we also learned how to live.”
Or as a famous movie character put it:
“It comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy living or get busy dying.”
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