Death has always scared me.
At least once a week, I ask myself how any of us ever get anything done, knowing what we do about our own mortality.
I’ll be typing something at my laptop and look down at my fingers tip-taping across the letters and think, my god, we are nothing but skin and bone! Look at me, moving parts of my animated skeleton across a keyboard for a living. What is life! What is death!
Then I get a snack, look at my dog, and move on with my day.
I’ve been thinking about death more and more.
Could be that I’m getting older. Probably has something to do with having a life-altering chronic illness. Might be that since my precious nieces were born, I’ve become preoccupied with wanting them to be safe forever.
My parents keep having birthdays, lurching us closer to a dreaded time when they are no longer here. I haven’t fully metabolised the panic of a global pandemic. My early experiences of death - a young friend taken way, way too soon, beloved grandparents with whom I would never have had enough time - follow me around.
And then, yeah, there are these moments where I’m doing something mundane and I am hit by the full force of wondering what we are doing here at all, what a freak of nature that we are living, what a strange inevitability that one day we will stop.
Makes me think (as I often do) of this one magical line from the book This Time Tomorrow by
.Once you had proof of the sudden cruelty of life, how could you ever relax?
Speaking of books, I’ve been reading an excellent one by the Australian journalist
called All The Living and the Dead. In it, she visits the people who make a living out of death - grave diggers, morticians, etc - and lays out those interviews alongside her own thoughts. I’ve had to read it slowly.In one of the earlier chapters, Hayley speaks to Poppy Mardall, founder of Poppy’s Funeral Home. I’ve heard of this Poppy before; she’s sort-of a death industry legend. She said something that really, really stayed with me.
You need to be able to separate the shock of death from the shock of grief.
I though about that for days and then I called Poppy to ask how we might do that… how can we separate out the shock of death from an individual loss?
A big question, but I expect she gets questions like this all the time.
Again, she says something that really, really stays with me. “Bring death into life in whatever small ways you can. Let it into your life like shards of light.”
So far, I’ve been doing the opposite. If either of my parents mentions the fact that they will not live forever, I cry immediately, forget how to breathe, put my hand up and basically ask them, could they please not. I don’t watch violent movies. I am so cranky if my boyfriend tells me “that’s nature” when I sob about an imperilled baby penguin on an Attenborough documentary.
Death, or the threat of it, has barged into my life unannounced a few times and it’s really knocked me. I’m not going to seek it out in my free time!!! Except that maybe now I should, and I might, after my chat with Poppy.
“I’m a bit like a midwife, in a sense, only at the other end of life,” she tells me, “and I really get to see family dynamics up close and see which conversations haven’t been had.” (Conversations that might have happened if one family member, ahem, hadn’t started weeping at the dinner table).
“We are really just ricocheting about in the dark when it comes to this subject. Because we don’t bring death into our lives enough. Most people wait until someone they love has died, to talk about it. And then, by the time they come to see someone like me, they’re in a passive, vulnerable state and they just do what they’re told, and I think that’s true of how we face death more generally.”
I think I groaned at this point, down the phone, out of guilt and recognition and fear. It’s so true. We do all do that. Poppy continues: “We mostly live with a perceived sense of immortality, until, for example, we get very sick or someone we love dies. And then, we think, hang on, this is going to happen to everyone, to me.”
So, WHAT DO WE DO, Poppy, HOW DO WE GO ON LIKE THIS, I ask, keeping the panic outta my voice. I think.
She’s encouraging people to plan their funerals, to talk to each other while everyone’s still around. She’s campaigning to get death and bereavement on the school syllabus in the UK, which is a fantastic idea (more useful than knowing any theories Pythagorus had about triangles, in my opinion). She suggests attending something like Death Cafe, an event where people chat about death over tea and cake.
Let it in. Like shards of light.
She also says that when you see a dead person for the first time, it shouldn’t be someone you love. Not sure how to facilitate that one, but something to keep in mind.
“It’s very weird that we do not see death,” she says. “Imagine if we lived in a society where newborn babies were taboo and we hid them away, and then one day you saw a newborn baby - you’d freak out.” We would.
I thank Poppy for her time and her wisdom. I make a joke about how this newsletter is called ENTHUSIASM and yet, here I am, writing about death, lol, lol, lol. And she says she’s not surprised at all, because “joy and death are so tightly bound.”
And that’s just it, isn’t it? Every time I feel joy, I am, on some level, aware of death. Joy is fleeting, and it has to be fleeting, and our knowledge of its brevity is what makes it precious, so how, really, can I be so scared of something that is always there, in the background, every time I feel joy?
(I mean, I can, I’m definitely still scared of death, that was a rhetorical question for dramatic effect, like I say, I am trying to be OK about death, this is me trying).
Later, Poppy emails me with an extra thought: “This work you're doing for yourself, acclimatising to the reality of mortality, not only is for you but is hugely beneficial for your community. You become someone who does get it so that when other people have the shock of death, you are on the side of supporting and understanding, rather than crossing to the other side of the street. Does that make sense?”
It does, I say. Makes total sense. My parents raised me to walk towards other people’s pain, rather than away from it, and I’ve always tried to do that.
And now, for my next trick, I will try to be OK about death.
Wanna… join me???
Ashes to ashes, my friends, funk to funky, share with me, if you’d like, the ways in which you might let death into your lives.
I’ll go first.
Chat with a funeral director (tick).
Write this post (tick).
Rewatch The Good Place on Netflix so I can think about ethics, love, and Ted Danson (tick).
Watch this Australian series hosted by giant of Aussie journalism, Ray Martin, called The Last Goodbye.
Listen to the podcast by Nadine Cohen and Anthony Levin called Grave Matters.
Let my parents, family members, friends and boyfriend talk to me about their mortality if they wish.
Narrow down which One Direction song/s I want played at my funeral.
Listen to the Tung album Dead Club.
ENTHUSIASM is a newsletter for people who feel strongly about things. Like, for example, autumn leaves, human rights, and Sabrina Carpenter kissing an alien on stage at the VMAs. Here, we contain multitudes.
Kate Leaver is an editor, author, and former professional fairy. She writes about things like love, pop culture, sadness, and Britney Spears. She’s currently writing her first novel, a cautionary tale about fame. She’s represented by Jemima Forrester at David Higham Associates and she really really loves her dog.
1. I worked as a CNA in nursing home, was taught to close eyes and clean bodies before family or funeral home came.
2. Decided those people shouldn’t have had to die alone. No families came to visit until after they died. I became a HOSPICE volunteer to sit with those in thier last days, months, etc.
3. I buried my mom (sudden, unexpected death), then buried my son 1 year (less 7 days) later. He was 21, had just moved out and had a serious asthma attack, fell down and that was it.
Now I’m no longer afraid to die, I’ll join my loved ones in heaven. But I’d rather not outlive another child or watch my children face the pain I did.
I may have been familiar with death before, but when it’s loved ones, it hits differently.
Have you read, or seen the play, the Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion?
Or read the book On Grief And Grieving by Elisabeth Kubler Ross? She wrote it with her husband, about her own death, as she journeyed through hospice. He completed the book after she passed and published. It’s become a handbook for Hospice and grieving.
I agree, death should be visited, talked about, a place we all travel to eventually, we should not be scared to go to.
I did a study unit titled 'Cultural Anatomy of the Dead Body' during my undergrad degree and I found it transformative to really look in depth at how different cultures (even within a limited Europe-centric lens) deal so differently with this universal human experience, and how much has changed relatively recently. There was an excellent episode of the Allusionist podcast over the winter in which Cariad Lloyd from Griefcast came on as a guest and talked about how so many of the things we think of as long term traditions around death in the UK are just Victorian inventions, and why they came about.