The last funeral I attended took all of 45 minutes from start to interment, less than 30 seconds for each year of a wonderful life lived by the deceased. When it comes to death, my culture (white, working class British) doesn’t like to waste its time.

“Why do I feel lost, so sad? It’s been three months. People tell me I should have got over it by now.” The woman concerned was expressing frustration at the persistent feelings of grief at the death of her husband of nearly 50 years. She noticed that soon after the funeral, people stopped checking in with her. There were no more ‘how are you doing?’ enquiries. The funeral was meant to mark the beginning of her returning to ‘normality’.  Her grief failed to keep to the expected timetable so that her profound loss was tainted by the shame that she was ‘not coping’ and somehow letting down her late husband.

Regrets 

A woman in her late eighties with leukaemia knew her days are numbered. She desperately wanted to talk about her feelings, there are things she wanted to say. She’d been reflecting on her life, what she has achieved, her regrets. But her attempts to talk were brushed off by kindly family members who told her ‘Not to think like that’! They were convinced that she was ‘upsetting herself’ and that talking would only make matters worse.

The stiff-upper-lip stoicism of my culture might have a place in helping us through the tough times, but the courage of this stance is rarely softened with self-compassion.  And for me, this lack of compassion gets in the way of the deeply vulnerable but vital conversations we need to have about death and dying, especially in intimate, everyday spaces. I mourn the absence of those untold stories, those loving life-changing exchanges.

When my oncologist delivered the diagnosis of incurable cancer last June, he managed to do so without once using the ‘d’ word though of course his meaning was clear. It made me realise how largely absent death had been in my life.

Though I’m in my seventh decade, I can count only a vague remembrance of the deaths of three of my grandparents. The death of my grandmother coincided with the onset of adolescence and the concomitant morbidity and fascination with death. I have buried several small mammals in hallowed spaces of a back garden, observing rituals to broach the subject with a child. The traumatic death of my brother by suicide marked a profound change in the life of my family and led eventually to my training as a counsellor in middle age. I was present too during the months leading up to my father’s death aged 83 and will treasure forever the thoughts and feelings about his end, invariably expressed with the help of a good single malt.

Living in Victorian times, I would have experienced the brutal frequency of death. Life expectancy for someone born in Victoria’s reign would have been 39 years while infant mortality stood at 150 per 1,000.

Rituals 

My lack of familiarity with death and dying has meant I’ve had little use for time-honoured rituals to support me and to help me make sense of my experience. I suppose I’ve inherited some rituals around death from the Victorian age, notably, a sentimentality around the deathbed (where all the meaningful exchanges are meant to happen, if only), the wearing of black at the funeral (it is my best colour). But I have noticed, my culture really doesn’t supply even the most basic of roadmaps to the one experience I will be guaranteed to have along with the rest of humanity.  Life might be more straightforward pershaps if I had a faith and a belief in an afterlife (as my Victorian forbears would have had).

So, I am grateful for initiatives like Dying Matters which will help me to start conversations about a subject that remains taboo, especially in those more intimate spaces: between couples, families and friends; with our doctors and those who care for us.  I hope to use this week to learn more of the different approaches to death and dying of other cultures.

Ultimately, my intention is to curate and create ways of being at this time that will help me face this last big adventure with courage and compassion – and maybe to help those I leave behind to do the same.