JANICE TURNER
December 2 2017, 12:01am, the times
While distracting ourselves with small talk and shopping, the really important conversations are put off until too late.
My father died in the early hours and when his care home called to tell me, they asked about “arrangements”. Only then did I realise we hadn’t made any. Could he stay just a few more hours while I consulted my mother? (I didn’t wish to wake her yet, 200 miles away and alone.) No, his body must go, right now.
It is the protocol of many homes to whip away the deceased. Undertakers remove the dead discreetly by the back door. It is thought better that the old don’t ponder bleakly upon mortality, witness their own inevitable fate. So the next day they just see Maisie’s empty place at breakfast, pass her room being cleared. We blinker horses to keep them calm.
Death regrets: I have a few. Not things left unsaid. (Much is covered by “I love you”.) But failing to face the inevitable; not making plans. He was terminally ill, for God’s sake. Why did I not probe to find out exactly how long he had, so he didn’t die alone? The last days are hard to predict, I was told. But I was scared, squeamish, didn’t press to know more.
I’d carried these thoughts around unspoken for five years, until on Wednesday I attended a “death café”. This is not some sinister gothic coffee shop but a group of strangers gathering to address the subject we find hardest to discuss. (There is cake, which helps.) And death, it quickly transpired, is not a single issue but a field almost as rich as life itself.
Anxieties are fuelled by refusing to confront our most basic fear
One woman recalled sitting with her declining father while over many sessions he reviewed his whole life as if it were a book or a play. A man described his mother’s insistence on giving her body for medical research. When he objected, saying students might take her corpse to the pub, she replied: “If they have fun with me, that’s great. And anyway, this is not about you!” Yes, death is for the dying. But what about afterwards? She wanted no memorial: the family ignored her. Should the dying have a right to dictate the grieving rituals needed by those left behind? Do they have obligations to write goodbye letters, to tie up loose ends, or do we now ask too much? We moved on to our own deaths: we were all middle aged, yet no one had done more than write a will . . .
It was fascinating; we could have gone on for hours in a thousand directions from legacies to the afterlife. Sad but uplifting, it was the most fulfilling conversation I’ve had for months. No blathering small talk, just big, profound stuff. Unlike the usual dinner party topics (bloody Brexit) it left us all feeling closer, not more divided. We were all just fading, fallible humans trying to make sense of our remaining allotted time.
The death café movement was founded by Jon Underwood, who died this year aged 44. He pursued the mission of the Swiss sociologist Bernard Crettaz to liberate death from “tyrannical secrecy”. Underwood believed that our anxieties, depression and addictions are fuelled by refusing to confront our most basic fear. He organised death cafés in music festivals, offices, front rooms. Some attendees are young people for whom death seems wholly hypothetical, others are old or sick, looking for solace and truth. “Death denial,” he said, “is the energy that drives the motor of consumer capitalism.” Stay calm, go shopping, carry on.
The café I attended was part of the International Longevity Centre conference where Professor Douglas Davies of Durham University remarked that we divide into “death thinkers” and “death avoiders”. The latter generally swerve other difficult conversations, about relationships or personal failings. “Life style and death style,” he said, “tend to converge.”
Death is seen as too ghastly and unhygienic to look at head on
Our whole society is death avoidant. Most of us will die in hospitals, not at home. I’ve never seen a corpse. My family believed children shouldn’t attend funerals, so when both my grandmothers died I stayed home helping northern matrons to butter ham rolls. Now there is a trend for funerals without the dead: unattended “direct cremations” followed by a broader celebration of a life. Some people, such as the author Anita Brookner and David Bowie, insisted upon no funeral at all. As if a loved one just disappears. It is the very opposite of Indians by the Ganges throwing sandalwood upon a pyre.
Although I’m otherwise quite forthright, I realise now that I shut down my father when he tried to talk about death. “If I’m here then . . .” he’d intone when discussing future plans. He was always trying to tell me where important papers were kept “when anything happens”. Oh, don’t be so morbid, Dad, not now.
But when? Death cafés, like bereavement groups and counselling, are secular substitutes for the religion we’ve lost. Without faith it is harder to navigate mortality, to formulate new rituals rather than repeat those reassuring ancient words. It is even harder to break down the modern medical notion that death must be sanitised because it is too ghastly and somehow unhygienic to look at head on.
The end-of-life care organisation Gold Standards Framework gives every person with only a year to live a gold card. This allows them the right to assistance and counselling at any time and priority at hospital admissions, because they have so little time to waste. It suggests that care homes put an icon — a butterfly, a dove — on a resident’s door when they are nearing the end, so their neighbours are forewarned and can perhaps say goodbye.
Our lives will not just be longer but more tapered: fewer sudden ends, more time to plan for death. We should not be smuggled in shame out the back door, but leave with honour through the front.
