Over the past nearly two years I have dealt with a lot of personal tragedy, with the deaths of a number of relatives and close friends. Relatives ranged from two nieces who were in their forties who succumbed to COVID-19 to my elder brother in his early nineties who had been ill for some time. I’ve also mourned the passing of a number of close friends and professional colleagues, again from a variety of causes and across a range of ages.
But this column is not about me or my losses. It’s about something I have noticed for a long time, but really struck me this time because of the large number of incidents. I have noticed that people have a hard time saying that someone has died.
This aversion crops up all over the place. People seem to try to avoid using the words die, died, dead, or death to children. So, when a relative, even a really elderly relative, dies, some of them either don’t mention it or they come up with some really strange verbiage to inform the kids. This, I think, is doing a disservice to children and a waste of time in most cases anyway. Death is a fact of life and trying to conceal it from children is not preparing them to face reality. Most of them intellectually understand it anyway. They see it when they see road kill on the highways, or if they live in the country, when they see the food chain in operation. My grandchildren, for example, were fascinated by the sight of a dead dear in the forest near their rural home and watched it as it decomposed. Because it was such a natural part of the environment, I don’t think they were traumatized by it at all.
I noticed one youngster of my acquaintance one day putting some twigs in an empty birdhouse. When I asked him why, he said it was in memory of some older relatives who had died. This kid understood and was dealing with it in a very reasonable and mature way.
Think about that the next time you have this situation in your family.
But don’t think you’ll get much help from your local media. I’ve noticed that a lot of even mainstream media seem to avoid using the term died in obituaries, preferring to use terms like ‘went home to rest’ instead. Now, I recognize this as being sensitive to the grief of the survivors, but does it really help not to just face the reality?
We’re born, we live, and eventually we die. An old saying, ‘the only sure things in life are death and taxes,’ might not be totally accurate—after all, many of the extremely wealthy seem to be able to avoid paying taxes—but it’s not far off the mark.
When I was a kid, the old people I knew took the view that one should not worry about dying but should strive to die with dignity. Maybe we should harken back to such times. – NWI
