Putting death where it belongs
Time was, when life was hard, death wasn’t so bad, especially if you believed, as so many did, that your recompense for a life of unrelieved misery and privation here below was the reward of unlimited bliss up there. The prospect of paradise makes a lot of sense when you inhabit a vale of tears. And it makes it easier to die, too, both for the dying person and for those around the deathbed. “He’s gone to a better place,” people used to say to each other knowingly, comfortingly. And they felt the justice of it, truly believed it, even looking forward, somewhat, as they said it. But what was once an attractive offer has lost its allure. We lead lovely, comfy lives, now. We’d rather stay where we are, thank you.
It’s the lack of any inclination to contemplate anything better that accounts for attitudes to death today. Call it denial if you want, but I think you’d be missing the point. It’s more the case that we’re having such a lovely time playing out with our friends that we simply don’t hear Mum calling us in for our tea.
You feel the aftermath of this as a celebrant, sometimes, when you go to visit the freshly bereaved. You walk into shock. Paralysed disbelief. It makes no sense to be planning a funeral. Why, he could just be upstairs. The absolute absence of the dead person has yet to begin to make itself felt. And what I often think, as I sit on the sofa while everybody tries to get their head around the presence of this extraordinary stranger, is ‘I wish he was upstairs’. Nothing would better translate unreality into altered reality and enable everyone to get their heads around it.
Dying is bad and it’s getting worse. Now that the priests can tempt no more than a few of us with a next instalment that’s going to be even better, the government dangles before us, instead, the allure of the good death and the new Personal Care at Home Bill. I have my reservations about this good death myth and about the desirability of dying at home. It’ll suit a few of us, for sure. But drawn out decrepitude and protracted expiration call for very expert attention. Nursing homes and hospitals are exactly the right places to be.
In summary, therefore, dying at home can be overrated; being dead at home cannot.
Labels: Good death
posted by Charles Cowling at
13:11
5 Comments:
Yes, it would be nice if he was upstairs. Better still if he'd died upstairs. Your suggestion, Charles, seems to involve a need to bring the dead body home to pretend he died there. Not the same thing.
Better than him vanishing and magically reappearing in a box a few days later. But I'm not sure I agree that we're so unattuned to death because we're having such a ball. 'Lack of inclination to contemplate anything better'? The girl I always notice at the party is the one crying in the garden.
It's not about pretending the person had died at home, it's about stages, the next step away from deep shock towards acceptance. It is about reclaiming the person from hospital, seeing them for the first time in the coffin, noticing the changes, realising they really are dead, accepting that they cannot be kept there forever, going in to see them as a family, ducking back in on your own to say the thing that can't be said except in private, the busy practicalities of keeping them cool, dealing with it in every sense of the word. It is not always possible, a body in extremis brings a level of reality which is too much for most, but when it is, it works.
And you are so right Charles. The good death is, like the good life, a rarity. Good grief however, is open to us all, if we have the courage to face it. I hope that when it comes around for me again, I can do just that.
What Rupert said.
I agree with everything you say, Rupert. If my former partner, for instance, was obliged to die in a hospital, I'd want to get her out of there as soon as I could, take her home in my car and wash her and wrap her in a fleece that one of our sons had sheared at work, take her out into the garden and brave the wind and rain and sunshine with her among her flowers and shrubs, cry and laugh and console and be consoled over her, carry her up onto the cliffs over the wild sea she longed for, with songs and flasks of tea and a bonfire and memories and music and a picnic, and take her to the woods and dig her a grave with our five boys using her garden spade and, as she always puts it, 'plant' her, and wait there until the sun set over her and it was too cold to stay any longer.
It's the idea that the hospital was the best starting point for all this, if it could possibly be avoided by caring for her at home, that I'm disagreeing with.
A hospital isn't the best place, but perhaps a hospice is.
One of the most stressful things about dying at home is the enormous strain it puts on the spouse. They move from lover to carer, a fundamental change in dynamic that inevitably can bring about some resentment in all but the most saintly of us.
The way hospices work these days is changing.
It used to be a one way ticket, but now people come and go many times using them for specialist pain relief but also to allow the carer to have a rest and become a husband or wife again. This keeping the relationship alive and in it's loving erotic context allows us to truly die with our personalities and relationships intact.
Perhaps this is getting close to our ideas of a "good death".
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