Death’s Summer Coat: What the History of Death and Dying Can Tell Us About Life and Living
by Brandy Schillace
A new conversation is starting on this most universal of topics. But to know where we are heading, we need to know where we have come from… Death is the one subject we will all confront; it touches our families, our homes, our hearts. And yet we have grown used to denying its existence, treating it as an enemy to be beaten back with medical advances. What led us to this point – what drove us to sanitize death and make it foreign and unfamiliar? In Death’s Summer Coat Brandy Schillace explores our past to examine what it might mean for our future. From Victorian Britain to contemporary Cambodia, forgotten customs and modern-day rituals, we learn about the incredibly diverse – and sometimes just incredible – ways in which humans have dealt with mortality in different times and places. Today, as we begin to talk about mortality, there are difficult questions to face. What does it mean to have a ‘good death’? What should a funeral do? As Schillace shows, talking about death and the rituals associated with it can help to provide answers. It also brings us closer together. And conversation and community are just as important for living as for dying. Some of the stories are strikingly unfamiliar; others are far more familiar than you might suppose. But all reveal a lot about the present – and about ourselves. It’s time to meet the new (old) death . It’s time to meet the new (old) death.
Death’s Summer Coat: A Review of The Natural Death Handbook, Fifth Edition
is a volume that speaks with simple clarity and grace about the best practices for sitting with the dying, washing and cooling a loved one after passing, and preparing the body for a natural funeral.
When I was four years old, I lived with my mother and grandparents in a white house with two porches. A great, leaning barn sheltered the farm cats, Snow-foot, Fluffy and Yellow-Tom, and if you left the hose on, toads gathered in plague proportion by the basement window. I remember this place as though static and unchanging, an event horizon around which time and space bend. Undisturbed by years of memory, it remains a touch-stone for me — for it was here that I first considered death.
No tragic event inspired this encounter. It was springtime, and blue-bell flowers had come up next to the front steps. They bloomed, and they died; their lives were ephemeral, and this bothered me. Everything dies, my grandmother explained: the flowers, the toads, the cats… And you and me. In our present culture, obsessed with youth and sheltered from death by the sterile screen of the hospital ward, such a story may sound horrific. But I was not horrified. To be honest, my first inkling of life-making was much more fraught. I was not afraid of death, for I had not been taught to fear it. Free from the cultural underpinnings I’ve since come to know, I thought of death as a universal truth. Everything, my grandmother said. Everything dies. I would brush against death many times on my way to adulthood; I would be taken to every wake and every funeral. I don’t remember weeping. But I remember green grass, the smell of wet earth, and blue bells: Death, wearing his summer coat.
Cultural death practices-from Dia de los Muertos to sky burial to the veneration of remains and reliquary-evince a long-standing fascination with (and attempts to understand) the end of life. In our modern age, however, wherein death and disease are hidden away or sanitized by palliative care, discussions of mortality and mourning have become strangely taboo. In many ways, the natural death movement attempts to recapture this sense of death’s place in our lives and culture. The Natural Death Centre, the charity behind The Natural Death Handbook, exists to help re-open the dialogue about life’s end, offering a combination of practical advice, how-tos, go-tos, and reflections that inspire, comfort and challenge. At the heart of the movement is a commitment to death as a natural part of life. No longer conceived of as a terror, death is refigured as the winding down of life’s frantic clock — and dying as a means of coming to terms with our identities, our loved ones, ourselves. The second major contribution of this movement is the reconsideration of our death practices, particularly the harmful effects of certain preservation techniques on the earth itself, that patient womb to which we are returned.
This, the fifth edition of The Natural Death Handbook, is presented as a collection of three smaller volumes. The handbook itself remains the greatest part, a singular volume that speaks with simple clarity and grace about the best practices for sitting with the dying, washing and cooling a loved one after passing, and preparing the body for a natural funeral. During the time of bereavement, we feel over-whelmed, numb, distracted. If we are very lucky and very blessed, we are met in this place by a patient friend — the one upon whom we may cast our burdens and questions, the one who kindly walks us through the preparations and reminds us of what must be done next. I have been this friend in my lifetime, and I have leaned on these friends. In its quiet, considerate and measured tone, the handbook captures the spirit of this paraclete, offering gentle advice from chapter to chapter and ending — appropriately — with the grieving process itself once the earth has been turned. Appearing throughout are personal stories and testimonies, the practical experience of those who chose the natural death method and the quiet serenity of home wakes and preparations (and their practical considerations). I smiled at some, and I wept at others. It is a powerful thing to share our deaths, even as we share our lives.
Attending the handbook is the directory, which is more than a practical compendium of natural death sites and accommodating funeral directors (though it is that, too). The directory contains brief snap-shot descriptions of many sites by location, types of burial shrouds, urns and etc., and the code of conduct for the Association of Natural Burial Grounds. Though this is now also offered online to make updates quicker and easier, the bound volume is useful for planning purposes. I lived next to an old county cemetery for much of my adolescence, and I can speak to the peace and serenity of a natural setting. These are concerns we may not always consider (particularly, I think, here in the United States). Though the handbook contains only locales in the U.K., it may serve as inspiration for our own explorations of place and space. There are sites and centers that can help the Usonian or Candadian to begin, among them one from The Centre for Natural Burial.
Lastly, and a new addition to this printing, is a collection — Writings on Death. Aptly described by the editor, Ru Callender, as “smoked glass, through which together we might glimpse death’s outline,” these essays demonstrate a collective wisdom, courage and clarity in the face of our endings. Whether it be the inspired self-reflection of a mourner or the studied vision of the historian — or the creative spiritualism of celebrants, practitioners and questioners of faith — the perspectives offered here might better be described as prism glass, refracting in full color. It is a great relief and respite from our often somber-hued considerations of death and dying, the best accompaniment I can think of for Death’s summer coat.
From this last piece, I would take one thing more. The editors are careful to explain that, in many ways, the natural death movement is a secular one. However, it is not an exclusively secular one, even as ours is not an exclusively secular world. In fact, death is where our distinctions between science, self and sanctity most often break down — thus, while a funeral may not be held under the auspices of a particular church (or even a particular god), spiritual healing and comfort are not to be eschewed. The handbook is careful to point out that considerations of death often need to be flexible (and suggests funeral directors and other groups that allow the mourners to craft the ceremony in ways they feel are best). A person of faith — whether they be Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Janist, Animist, or Paganist — need not fear to explore natural death practices. Speaking as a person of faith from the U.S. context, where funerals are held in “funeral homes,” I find that the quiet home wake, the green hillock, and the mourner-designed funeral rites lauded in the handbook water the soul in ways more traditional practices no longer can. It is, therefore, with great appreciation and deep respect that I recommend this, the fifth edition of The Natural Death Handbook. May we all unlearn our fear of death — may death, indeed, lose its sting.
It is no secret that I write about death. In my fiction, my research and my non-fiction essays, I have tried to engage the subject as it really is: a natural process of life rather than a horrifying and unnatural conclusion to our human story.
It is no secret that I write about death. Given that I grew up underground near a cemetery in abandoned mining land, it is probably also no surprise. In my fiction, my research and my non-fiction essays, I have tried to engage the subject as it really is: a natural process of life rather than a horrifying and unnatural conclusion to our human story.
This is also my aim as a member of and organizer for Death Salon (deathsalon.org). The Salon — a gathering of intellectuals, scholars and independent thinkers — explores our shared mortality through open dialogue about death and its anthropological, historical, artistic and spiritual contributions to culture. (The conference meeting this year will be in LA.) But, you might fairly ask, what about death that occurs unexpectedly — “unnaturally” — violently? What about those killed in the Boston bombings, or by handguns, or by the war and oppression affecting myriad countries, cultures and individuals at any given moment?
I am grappling with this on a personal level as well as a philosophical one. A number of years ago, I lost my cousin to the blade of a paroled felon. More recently, I lost a family friend who took his own life. They were young, these two men. They had futures ahead of them. Then, they were gone. How do we engage with death when it comes unexpected? And as family members, as friends, as educators, how do we help others to engage with it in a way that is healthy?
I have been thinking increasingly about mourning rituals as a means of progressing through grief and death. In so many ways, our culture-in part due to the advent of modern medicine and the screen of hospital care-has lost the ritual practices we once had. Death, especially when unexpected, used to be a kind of public grief. The Victorians had incredibly complex mourning rituals, mourning jewelry, momento-mori photography, and the public wearing of mourning clothing. Like birth, it was a social event and included the community. It drew together. People hovered over the dying as well as over the dead-they witnessed it, understood it, knew it better than we do today (and not just because mortality was higher in previous centuries among even the young and the healthy). There is a very useful book on the subject, The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder by Allan V. Horwitz, Jerome C. Wakefield, and Robert L. Spitzer. It is an academic look at this phenomenon, but I think we can engage the topic more broadly as well. We can, and we should, and I hope to.
In my recent Huffington Post review of The Natural Death Handbook, I talk about “Death’s summer coat.” That was not to put a rosy hue on what is hard and unfathomable. It was not an attempt to make palatable a bitter pill. This phrase, to me, is a recognition that all things ephemeral are made lovely in their brevity. We long for summer or spring because it is fleeting, a glimpse of life’s bud followed by fall and by the long, dark winter. The image of summer remains with us, and we ritualize it by cleaning house, by planning reading lists and summer vacations, by celebrating Easter or any of the other holidays that rejoice in the thaw. We shed our layers and put on new clothes like a new skin. Death’s summer coat is life’s unexpected beauty, and when we pass ultimately into that last winter, I believe it, too, will be followed by a new spring. What that spring will be like, I don’t know. Many religions describe it. Many who are not religious nonetheless see continuity in our return to the earth and our part in the life cycle and the seasons. Death, like winter, is the sleep of a weary season-a sleep that my cousin joined early, a sleep and a quiet that my friend longed for.
But it is also a separation, and one that we feel as keen as amputation. It is not fair. I know it isn’t. And we who remain ache and pine and weep, but let us not think of death as a disease. Let us think of it as winter, as the deepening of roots and the hibernation of seedlings. I plan to remember my lost loved ones as I remember summer; warm sun on smooth stones, green trees and wet earth. Ritual helps us to do this, but I do not mean fixed or inflexible ritual. I mean facing death with loved ones in our own way, with our own mechanisms for grief and a recognition that grief-like death-is natural and need not be medicalized. Death is with us always, the dark heart of becoming, the shedding of so much skin. I hope we remember to celebrate life even when death is unexpected.
I first saw the story on Twitter. Dr. Ben Janaway, NHS psychiatrist, educator and mental health advocate, posted a photo of himself at the gym — but this was not the usual workout selfie. His jaw set, his face grim, Ben explained that turning pain into physical activity helped him to grieve.
I have followed Ben for a while, though we aren’t personally acquainted outside the digital stratosphere. We both have interests in health access and social justice, and Ben — himself a doctor — is open about his own struggles with mental health. Burly and bearded, a self-proclaimed “viking with neurosis,” Ben spends a lot of time helping others; I naturally wanted to know what had happened to bring him sorrow.
Ben had just lost Martha. Martha was a cat. When I asked him if I might speak about his experience in losing her, he was at first apologetic: “It’s just a cat, it doesn’t compare.” My heart broke to hear that, because I know for Ben, she was not “just.” And yet, our first impulse is often to say such things, as if that loss is less important than other kinds.
Loss is loss. Every time we lose something we have loved, a part of us goes with it. And you are allowed to grieve. You have a right to it, and no one should belittle, deny, or try to take it from you. In this last addition to the Coping with Death series, let’s look at how we got to this cultural place of grief denial, and how to get past it.
Most of what I wrote in Death’s Summer Coat (my book exploring death and dying cross-culturally) centers on the idea that our approach to dying has changed. And not often for the better.
Our medical establishment is primarily concerned with prolonging life, not with preparing us for death. Death has become the enemy of medicine, to be fought at all costs, regardless of the situation. This is evident from the various debates about assisted suicide and enforced life support, and legal cases such as that of Terri Schiavo, a woman in a vegetative state whose feeding tube was removed only after seven years, fourteen appeals, five suits in federal district court, and a Supreme Court decision.
Meanwhile, advances in gene therapy offer the possibility that viruses can be used to fix ‘genetically defective cells […] enhance our genome, [and give] us powers we didn’t have before’, according to science writer Carl Zimmer. Ray Kurzweil, an engineer, philosopher, and inventor (described by Forbes as ‘the ultimate thinking machine’), suggests that nano-technology will allow humans to live forever. While this sounds far-fetched, it is essentially the ultimate mission of Western medical and scientific research: replacement parts, better genes, and the end of all diseases. We have not moved toward acceptance of death, but rather to the erasure of it.
Our disavowal of death’s naturalness makes it harder to grieve properly, but it also makes it hard to accept other people’s grief. It’s as if we don’t want death intruding into our lives from within or without — and this contrasts with the Victorians I spoke about in a recent essay in this series. They had incredibly complex mourning rituals, including mourning jewelry, photographs of the recently dead (memento mori), and the public wearing of mourning clothing. Like birth, death was a social event that drew communities together.
Compare this with our modern standards, where illness and death are either hidden away in hospitals or sensationalized through popular culture, and where prolonged grief is likely to be medicated as abnormal, rather than openly acknowledged as an inevitable part of life.
The DSM, or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders diagnostic criteria, suggests that grief becomes pathological if the symptoms are felt for too long. But how long is too long? How much grief is too much? For bereavement, the DSM defines a ‘normal’ period of sadness to be about two months. For other kinds of sadness, the DSM gives only two weeks, barely a vacation’s worth of response time to things as difficult as divorce or job loss. I don’t mean to pick apart psychiatric categories — we need them. But I also see how they encourage us to measure, compare, and judge our griefs, validating some, but not others.
Think about some of the conversations you had during the worst months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Some people lost whole families. Others lost a single loved one. Still others were impacted with just the sheer overwhelming loss of life in general. And because death waits for no one, some of us lost people and pets in the usual way, not due to a virus but through some other calamity or old age. The sheer number of people who felt they could not speak of, for instance, the loss of a beloved pet for fear of it being incomparable to the larger griefs must be considerable. But the truth is, grief is not a case of like vs. like. No two losses, no two people, and no two griefs, are the same.
Our world is changed after loss. And so it should be. The challenge is how to respond properly to that change.
I asked Ben about Martha. “The quality of sadness is not akin to depression,” he told me. “It feels valid, a hard but human experience built differently.” Martha was plucky, funny, kind, and knowing. As a kitten, she followed a ten-year-old Ben everywhere on little mitten feet. When he had severe depression at 28, she stayed with him — at his side as he battled insomnia. When Ben moved away from home, she occupied his room, awaiting their reunions as a serene matron.
But Martha was aging, slowing down, suffering the onset of dementia. In the second week of July, she began to deteriorate, and Ben rushed home to be with her.
“I could only think about how she would feel in the last minutes, and how I wanted to hold her tight and whisper to her good things as she moved on. No matter how I considered it, the last link in the chain was always a step into the black.”
The end of Martha’s life would be eased by injection. “I told her I loved her,” Ben said, stroking her nose as he used to do when she fell into sleep. “I would like to imagine there was a moment of recognition, or forgiveness. I think she knew what was coming and was thankful for it.[…] I believe she died feeling warm, comforted, smelling my skin and remembering those first months[together].”
Ben’s pain is real pain. My pain on hearing his story is real, too; it stings in the eyes and weighs on the chest; it flutters in the pulse of every loss I have experienced, myself. Because this is one place where all of us meet. Every single one of you reading has been here. And we can all grieve together.
“I have been told that pets should not be treated like humans,” Ben told me. “But Martha was my human. She cared for me, she spoke to me, knew me. To grieve for her as anything other than an equal would be false.”
I agree with him. I know that there are other losses; lost children and lost parents, lost spouses, lost friends. There are even losses without death — the end of a relationship, the loss of a nation upon seeking asylum, the loss of illusions about people we thought we knew. And here is the more important thing I want you to understand:
They all matter. Every one of your losses hurts, and that hurt is real.
The grief still comes in waves, and it will for some time. That’s true for all of us, never more so than now. It’s been important for me to revisit death and grief on the other side of a global tragedy that — in truth — has not finished unfolding yet.
I have been in my own deep grief for a friend who has not died, but who is dying, their last year of life also the year of Covid-19. Sometimes our grief is something carried with us in before death, when we hear its footsteps and know its approach. I hope I can be there for my friend’s last moments. And in a way, I think everyone who has grieved will be there, too, a community of mourners that stretches backward in time and outward to those we love and even to people we have yet to meet.
I want to thank Ben for sharing with me. And I want to thank all of you for reading this series on coping with death. Be gentle with yourselves. Be gentle with each other. In our approach to death, as in our approach to living, let us lift up and support one another.
May all things ephemeral be made lovely in their brevity.
May all things ephemeral be made lovely in their brevity.
儚いもののすべてが、その短さの中で愛らしくなりますように。
Death’s Summer Coat: What the History of Death and Dying Can Tell Us About Life and Living
by Brandy Schillace
Death’s Summer Coat: A Review of The Natural Death Handbook, Fifth Edition
by Brandy Schillace
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/natural-death-handbook_b_3034230
When I was four years old, I lived with my mother and grandparents in a white house with two porches. A great, leaning barn sheltered the farm cats, Snow-foot, Fluffy and Yellow-Tom, and if you left the hose on, toads gathered in plague proportion by the basement window. I remember this place as though static and unchanging, an event horizon around which time and space bend. Undisturbed by years of memory, it remains a touch-stone for me — for it was here that I first considered death.
No tragic event inspired this encounter. It was springtime, and blue-bell flowers had come up next to the front steps. They bloomed, and they died; their lives were ephemeral, and this bothered me. Everything dies, my grandmother explained: the flowers, the toads, the cats… And you and me. In our present culture, obsessed with youth and sheltered from death by the sterile screen of the hospital ward, such a story may sound horrific. But I was not horrified. To be honest, my first inkling of life-making was much more fraught. I was not afraid of death, for I had not been taught to fear it. Free from the cultural underpinnings I’ve since come to know, I thought of death as a universal truth. Everything, my grandmother said. Everything dies. I would brush against death many times on my way to adulthood; I would be taken to every wake and every funeral. I don’t remember weeping. But I remember green grass, the smell of wet earth, and blue bells: Death, wearing his summer coat.
Cultural death practices-from Dia de los Muertos to sky burial to the veneration of remains and reliquary-evince a long-standing fascination with (and attempts to understand) the end of life. In our modern age, however, wherein death and disease are hidden away or sanitized by palliative care, discussions of mortality and mourning have become strangely taboo. In many ways, the natural death movement attempts to recapture this sense of death’s place in our lives and culture. The Natural Death Centre, the charity behind The Natural Death Handbook, exists to help re-open the dialogue about life’s end, offering a combination of practical advice, how-tos, go-tos, and reflections that inspire, comfort and challenge. At the heart of the movement is a commitment to death as a natural part of life. No longer conceived of as a terror, death is refigured as the winding down of life’s frantic clock — and dying as a means of coming to terms with our identities, our loved ones, ourselves. The second major contribution of this movement is the reconsideration of our death practices, particularly the harmful effects of certain preservation techniques on the earth itself, that patient womb to which we are returned.
This, the fifth edition of The Natural Death Handbook, is presented as a collection of three smaller volumes. The handbook itself remains the greatest part, a singular volume that speaks with simple clarity and grace about the best practices for sitting with the dying, washing and cooling a loved one after passing, and preparing the body for a natural funeral. During the time of bereavement, we feel over-whelmed, numb, distracted. If we are very lucky and very blessed, we are met in this place by a patient friend — the one upon whom we may cast our burdens and questions, the one who kindly walks us through the preparations and reminds us of what must be done next. I have been this friend in my lifetime, and I have leaned on these friends. In its quiet, considerate and measured tone, the handbook captures the spirit of this paraclete, offering gentle advice from chapter to chapter and ending — appropriately — with the grieving process itself once the earth has been turned. Appearing throughout are personal stories and testimonies, the practical experience of those who chose the natural death method and the quiet serenity of home wakes and preparations (and their practical considerations). I smiled at some, and I wept at others. It is a powerful thing to share our deaths, even as we share our lives.
Attending the handbook is the directory, which is more than a practical compendium of natural death sites and accommodating funeral directors (though it is that, too). The directory contains brief snap-shot descriptions of many sites by location, types of burial shrouds, urns and etc., and the code of conduct for the Association of Natural Burial Grounds. Though this is now also offered online to make updates quicker and easier, the bound volume is useful for planning purposes. I lived next to an old county cemetery for much of my adolescence, and I can speak to the peace and serenity of a natural setting. These are concerns we may not always consider (particularly, I think, here in the United States). Though the handbook contains only locales in the U.K., it may serve as inspiration for our own explorations of place and space. There are sites and centers that can help the Usonian or Candadian to begin, among them one from The Centre for Natural Burial.
Lastly, and a new addition to this printing, is a collection — Writings on Death. Aptly described by the editor, Ru Callender, as “smoked glass, through which together we might glimpse death’s outline,” these essays demonstrate a collective wisdom, courage and clarity in the face of our endings. Whether it be the inspired self-reflection of a mourner or the studied vision of the historian — or the creative spiritualism of celebrants, practitioners and questioners of faith — the perspectives offered here might better be described as prism glass, refracting in full color. It is a great relief and respite from our often somber-hued considerations of death and dying, the best accompaniment I can think of for Death’s summer coat.
From this last piece, I would take one thing more. The editors are careful to explain that, in many ways, the natural death movement is a secular one. However, it is not an exclusively secular one, even as ours is not an exclusively secular world. In fact, death is where our distinctions between science, self and sanctity most often break down — thus, while a funeral may not be held under the auspices of a particular church (or even a particular god), spiritual healing and comfort are not to be eschewed. The handbook is careful to point out that considerations of death often need to be flexible (and suggests funeral directors and other groups that allow the mourners to craft the ceremony in ways they feel are best). A person of faith — whether they be Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Janist, Animist, or Paganist — need not fear to explore natural death practices. Speaking as a person of faith from the U.S. context, where funerals are held in “funeral homes,” I find that the quiet home wake, the green hillock, and the mourner-designed funeral rites lauded in the handbook water the soul in ways more traditional practices no longer can. It is, therefore, with great appreciation and deep respect that I recommend this, the fifth edition of The Natural Death Handbook. May we all unlearn our fear of death — may death, indeed, lose its sting.
Coming to Terms With Death and the Unexpected
by Brandy Schillace
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/coming-to-terms-with-deat_b_3332996
It is no secret that I write about death. Given that I grew up underground near a cemetery in abandoned mining land, it is probably also no surprise. In my fiction, my research and my non-fiction essays, I have tried to engage the subject as it really is: a natural process of life rather than a horrifying and unnatural conclusion to our human story.
This is also my aim as a member of and organizer for Death Salon (deathsalon.org). The Salon — a gathering of intellectuals, scholars and independent thinkers — explores our shared mortality through open dialogue about death and its anthropological, historical, artistic and spiritual contributions to culture. (The conference meeting this year will be in LA.) But, you might fairly ask, what about death that occurs unexpectedly — “unnaturally” — violently? What about those killed in the Boston bombings, or by handguns, or by the war and oppression affecting myriad countries, cultures and individuals at any given moment?
I am grappling with this on a personal level as well as a philosophical one. A number of years ago, I lost my cousin to the blade of a paroled felon. More recently, I lost a family friend who took his own life. They were young, these two men. They had futures ahead of them. Then, they were gone. How do we engage with death when it comes unexpected? And as family members, as friends, as educators, how do we help others to engage with it in a way that is healthy?
I have been thinking increasingly about mourning rituals as a means of progressing through grief and death. In so many ways, our culture-in part due to the advent of modern medicine and the screen of hospital care-has lost the ritual practices we once had. Death, especially when unexpected, used to be a kind of public grief. The Victorians had incredibly complex mourning rituals, mourning jewelry, momento-mori photography, and the public wearing of mourning clothing. Like birth, it was a social event and included the community. It drew together. People hovered over the dying as well as over the dead-they witnessed it, understood it, knew it better than we do today (and not just because mortality was higher in previous centuries among even the young and the healthy). There is a very useful book on the subject, The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder by Allan V. Horwitz, Jerome C. Wakefield, and Robert L. Spitzer. It is an academic look at this phenomenon, but I think we can engage the topic more broadly as well. We can, and we should, and I hope to.
In my recent Huffington Post review of The Natural Death Handbook, I talk about “Death’s summer coat.” That was not to put a rosy hue on what is hard and unfathomable. It was not an attempt to make palatable a bitter pill. This phrase, to me, is a recognition that all things ephemeral are made lovely in their brevity. We long for summer or spring because it is fleeting, a glimpse of life’s bud followed by fall and by the long, dark winter. The image of summer remains with us, and we ritualize it by cleaning house, by planning reading lists and summer vacations, by celebrating Easter or any of the other holidays that rejoice in the thaw. We shed our layers and put on new clothes like a new skin. Death’s summer coat is life’s unexpected beauty, and when we pass ultimately into that last winter, I believe it, too, will be followed by a new spring. What that spring will be like, I don’t know. Many religions describe it. Many who are not religious nonetheless see continuity in our return to the earth and our part in the life cycle and the seasons. Death, like winter, is the sleep of a weary season-a sleep that my cousin joined early, a sleep and a quiet that my friend longed for.
But it is also a separation, and one that we feel as keen as amputation. It is not fair. I know it isn’t. And we who remain ache and pine and weep, but let us not think of death as a disease. Let us think of it as winter, as the deepening of roots and the hibernation of seedlings. I plan to remember my lost loved ones as I remember summer; warm sun on smooth stones, green trees and wet earth. Ritual helps us to do this, but I do not mean fixed or inflexible ritual. I mean facing death with loved ones in our own way, with our own mechanisms for grief and a recognition that grief-like death-is natural and need not be medicalized. Death is with us always, the dark heart of becoming, the shedding of so much skin. I hope we remember to celebrate life even when death is unexpected.
You Have the Right to Grieve
by Brandy L Schillace
https://elemental.medium.com/you-have-the-right-to-grieve-fd47d0e7d553
I first saw the story on Twitter. Dr. Ben Janaway, NHS psychiatrist, educator and mental health advocate, posted a photo of himself at the gym — but this was not the usual workout selfie. His jaw set, his face grim, Ben explained that turning pain into physical activity helped him to grieve.
I have followed Ben for a while, though we aren’t personally acquainted outside the digital stratosphere. We both have interests in health access and social justice, and Ben — himself a doctor — is open about his own struggles with mental health. Burly and bearded, a self-proclaimed “viking with neurosis,” Ben spends a lot of time helping others; I naturally wanted to know what had happened to bring him sorrow.
Ben had just lost Martha. Martha was a cat. When I asked him if I might speak about his experience in losing her, he was at first apologetic: “It’s just a cat, it doesn’t compare.” My heart broke to hear that, because I know for Ben, she was not “just.” And yet, our first impulse is often to say such things, as if that loss is less important than other kinds.
Loss is loss. Every time we lose something we have loved, a part of us goes with it. And you are allowed to grieve. You have a right to it, and no one should belittle, deny, or try to take it from you. In this last addition to the Coping with Death series, let’s look at how we got to this cultural place of grief denial, and how to get past it.
Most of what I wrote in Death’s Summer Coat (my book exploring death and dying cross-culturally) centers on the idea that our approach to dying has changed. And not often for the better.
Our medical establishment is primarily concerned with prolonging life, not with preparing us for death. Death has become the enemy of medicine, to be fought at all costs, regardless of the situation. This is evident from the various debates about assisted suicide and enforced life support, and legal cases such as that of Terri Schiavo, a woman in a vegetative state whose feeding tube was removed only after seven years, fourteen appeals, five suits in federal district court, and a Supreme Court decision.
Meanwhile, advances in gene therapy offer the possibility that viruses can be used to fix ‘genetically defective cells […] enhance our genome, [and give] us powers we didn’t have before’, according to science writer Carl Zimmer. Ray Kurzweil, an engineer, philosopher, and inventor (described by Forbes as ‘the ultimate thinking machine’), suggests that nano-technology will allow humans to live forever. While this sounds far-fetched, it is essentially the ultimate mission of Western medical and scientific research: replacement parts, better genes, and the end of all diseases. We have not moved toward acceptance of death, but rather to the erasure of it.
Our disavowal of death’s naturalness makes it harder to grieve properly, but it also makes it hard to accept other people’s grief. It’s as if we don’t want death intruding into our lives from within or without — and this contrasts with the Victorians I spoke about in a recent essay in this series. They had incredibly complex mourning rituals, including mourning jewelry, photographs of the recently dead (memento mori), and the public wearing of mourning clothing. Like birth, death was a social event that drew communities together.
Compare this with our modern standards, where illness and death are either hidden away in hospitals or sensationalized through popular culture, and where prolonged grief is likely to be medicated as abnormal, rather than openly acknowledged as an inevitable part of life.
The DSM, or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders diagnostic criteria, suggests that grief becomes pathological if the symptoms are felt for too long. But how long is too long? How much grief is too much? For bereavement, the DSM defines a ‘normal’ period of sadness to be about two months. For other kinds of sadness, the DSM gives only two weeks, barely a vacation’s worth of response time to things as difficult as divorce or job loss. I don’t mean to pick apart psychiatric categories — we need them. But I also see how they encourage us to measure, compare, and judge our griefs, validating some, but not others.
Think about some of the conversations you had during the worst months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Some people lost whole families. Others lost a single loved one. Still others were impacted with just the sheer overwhelming loss of life in general. And because death waits for no one, some of us lost people and pets in the usual way, not due to a virus but through some other calamity or old age. The sheer number of people who felt they could not speak of, for instance, the loss of a beloved pet for fear of it being incomparable to the larger griefs must be considerable. But the truth is, grief is not a case of like vs. like. No two losses, no two people, and no two griefs, are the same.
Our world is changed after loss. And so it should be. The challenge is how to respond properly to that change.
I asked Ben about Martha. “The quality of sadness is not akin to depression,” he told me. “It feels valid, a hard but human experience built differently.” Martha was plucky, funny, kind, and knowing. As a kitten, she followed a ten-year-old Ben everywhere on little mitten feet. When he had severe depression at 28, she stayed with him — at his side as he battled insomnia. When Ben moved away from home, she occupied his room, awaiting their reunions as a serene matron.
But Martha was aging, slowing down, suffering the onset of dementia. In the second week of July, she began to deteriorate, and Ben rushed home to be with her.
The end of Martha’s life would be eased by injection. “I told her I loved her,” Ben said, stroking her nose as he used to do when she fell into sleep. “I would like to imagine there was a moment of recognition, or forgiveness. I think she knew what was coming and was thankful for it.[…] I believe she died feeling warm, comforted, smelling my skin and remembering those first months[together].”
Ben’s pain is real pain. My pain on hearing his story is real, too; it stings in the eyes and weighs on the chest; it flutters in the pulse of every loss I have experienced, myself. Because this is one place where all of us meet. Every single one of you reading has been here. And we can all grieve together.
“I have been told that pets should not be treated like humans,” Ben told me. “But Martha was my human. She cared for me, she spoke to me, knew me. To grieve for her as anything other than an equal would be false.”
I agree with him. I know that there are other losses; lost children and lost parents, lost spouses, lost friends. There are even losses without death — the end of a relationship, the loss of a nation upon seeking asylum, the loss of illusions about people we thought we knew. And here is the more important thing I want you to understand:
They all matter. Every one of your losses hurts, and that hurt is real.
The grief still comes in waves, and it will for some time. That’s true for all of us, never more so than now. It’s been important for me to revisit death and grief on the other side of a global tragedy that — in truth — has not finished unfolding yet.
I have been in my own deep grief for a friend who has not died, but who is dying, their last year of life also the year of Covid-19. Sometimes our grief is something carried with us in before death, when we hear its footsteps and know its approach. I hope I can be there for my friend’s last moments. And in a way, I think everyone who has grieved will be there, too, a community of mourners that stretches backward in time and outward to those we love and even to people we have yet to meet.
I want to thank Ben for sharing with me. And I want to thank all of you for reading this series on coping with death. Be gentle with yourselves. Be gentle with each other. In our approach to death, as in our approach to living, let us lift up and support one another.
May all things ephemeral be made lovely in their brevity.
Brandy Schillace
https://brandyschillace.com/
Author. Historian. Adventurer at the Intersections.
Ph.D., Case Western Reserve University, May 2010