I'm Not Dead Yet!

It's been a while since I posted to this blog. I knew that, but I didn't realize it had been ten months. 

Oops.

It appears that I made my last post a day or so before we moved from our temporary apartment to our house, built in 1930 in a historic neighborhood in the Tidewater region of Eastern Virginia. At the same time, I was experiencing some tension as a chaplain at the hospice where I worked, tension that ultimately led to me switching to a job I love at another hospice nearby. 

Between buying the house, relocating locally, and changing jobs, I did not know how long the blog had been dark. 

House lights down, stage lights up full. 

The recent animated movie Encanto, with songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda, an award-winning composer, is full of catchy songs, as one would expect. Evidently the big earworm, particularly among the uner-10 set, is “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” focusing on what turns out to be just one of several family dysfunctions.

 

In the American culture at large, it’s not Bruno we refuse to talk about, but death. After seven years in nursing-home chaplaincy and roughly a year and a half in hospice chaplaincy, I’ve found that just about everyone I’ve encountered in those settings fits into one of a few categories.

 

Category A: The person nearest to actually dying – the resident or patient – is more than ready to talk about it. This person has ideas, if not an actual service, has definite opinions about the celebrant, the location, the music, and the mood. This person has family members – spouse, children, nearest living relatives – who are anything but ready to talk about it. No way, no how, no time.

 

Category B: The family members would like to discuss making plans with the resident or patient, if only to know if the person has a preference regarding cremation, cremation avoidance, organ donation, and disposition of the body in general. Ideally, the family members would like to encourage the resident or patient to participate in shaping the funeral or memorial service. (A funeral features a body in a casket. A memorial service features either a cremated body or no body at all.)

 

Category C: Neither the patient nor the family members want to talk about it. Period.

 

Category D: Both the patient and at least some of the family members are ready to talk about it.

 

Guess which category allows for the most healing and paves the way for the most restorative time of mourning and moving forward toward living with loss? That would be Category D.

 

In some cases, people in Category A and Category B might be subconsciously influenced by a superstition they can’t even name, much less acknowledge: that talking about death will hasten the end of life. The word “superstition” comes from the Latin stare (-stition), to stand, plus super, meaning “over.” The idea is that of standing over something, frozen in awe, but it also strikes me that some of the super means thinking that hovers above our conscious, linear, rational thinking. Something we pay homage to even as we are a little sheepish about doing so.

 

People sometimes have the same thinking about hospice care, not wanting to begin services, although that might be less superstition than misinformation, or uninformation. Hospice care is for when the patient has a terminal disease, with a prognosis of six months at most to live, and wants his or her life to end at home (or in a nursing home), with as much dignity, comfort, and autonomy as can be achieved.

 

Back to the discussion about death, and whether or not we talk about it, one of the (possibly unintended) results of not talking about it is the decline of funerals altogether. Whether it’s a funeral, a memorial service, or a celebration of life, choosing to do nothing at all is becoming increasingly popular.

 

Part of it, no doubt, is the increase in what the Pew Research Center calls “nones,” people who do not claim an affiliation with a house of faith. If ritual is not something that you normally engage in, it can feel artificial and even ghoulish to put on a service with your dead parent as the centerpiece. At the same time, the practice is a keystone of healthy grieving, of being able to live with the loss in a way that is healthy and whole. 

 

Part of it is most likely the statistical reality that many of the people dying now are part of the Silent Generation, and their reflexive inclination is: “I don’t want to be a bother.” Maybe they think that saying, “I don’t want a funeral” will lift a burden from their loved ones. They mean well. They’ve been trying to avoid being a bother most of their lives. But in doing so, they’re also depriving their loved ones of the opportunity to engage in one final act of love.

 

At the hospice service where I work, in the week before Easter (coincidence? Who knows), eleven people died. That’s a lot for one week. Four, just under half, chose to have no funeral or memorial service. And yet burial rituals are seemingly as old as humankind. People who study the very earliest human communities have found evidence of burials. St. Jean de Brebeuf, a Catholic missionary from France found people in the Huron-Wendat communities of North America uniting for a communal burial of the dead every ten years. This was in the early 1600s. 

 

Newly dead people were wrapped in beaver skins and placed on high wooden scaffolds. In preparation for the burial, women in the families were tasked with scraping clean the bones. Father Brebeuf saw one family do this with a corpse “oozing with decomposition.” Deeply moved, he called it “heartening” to see such “works of mercy.” (From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World in Search of the Good Death, by Caitlin Doughty.)

 

Not that I’m suggesting that we return to do-it-yourself defleshment. But the emotional reality is that doing nothing at all leaves a hole that never quite fills. If you are part of a family in categories A, B, or C, instead of choosing not to “talk about Bruno,” ponder this: At some point, you will be dead, and the people you love most will have to make decisions about what kind of ritual, if any, they will find to mark the passing of one person – one unique, wildly precious person – from their lives. You can participate in the discussion and let your loved ones know what you do, and do not, want. Otherwise, your loved ones are left to make guesses, or to honor your desire not to be a bother.