The Good Death (part 1)
What thinking about your own death can do for you and your fears.
“Vanitas Still Life” by Pieter Claesz, 1630. Very much like death, this work is in the public domain. Wikipedia.
My little grasshoppers, I have one week left as a vacationing idler in my parents’ home. As I prepare to depart my homeland, I want to leave you with my musings on the ultimate form of idleness. For nothing says “Rest” like Death.
The other day, I was talking with my mother about what makes humans human. I think the conversation started when P mentioned something about being animals, and I answered something along the lines of “Yes, but we are a special kind of animal.” But regardless of the context, the conversation derived into a more in-depth analysis of why we are a qualitative kind of special. I said the capacity to create art; my mother replied the need to bury our dead with a ritual. It turns out anthropologists think these are both expressions of the one defining trait of humanity- symbolic thinking.
According to the American Psychological Association, symbolic thinking is the ability to think about objects and events that are not within the immediate environment. It involves the use of signs, symbols, concepts, and abstract relations, as evidenced by language, numeracy, and artistic or ritual expression. Archaeological finds suggest that symbolic thinking may have evolved in humans much earlier than previously thought, possibly toward the end of the Lower Paleolithic period (i.e., more than 70,000 years ago).
Basically, this symbolic thinking is shown through burying our dead with ceremony, expressing a new kind of self-awareness with body ornamentation, and projecting our lives and minds through art.
But it was the answer- the need to bury our dead with a ceremony- that has stayed with me.
It used to be that people died at home, surrounded by family. And family would then tidy up the dead body of the person they used to know, wash it, comb the hair, and dress it in elegant clothes, as if the body were going to a party or a solemn occasion, which is exactly where that body was going, a party celebrating the life of the person it used to host, the solemn occasion of their departure to an unknown destiny. Nowadays, we outsource all of this. The bulk of people die in hospitals or nursing homes1, and the cadavers are taken care of by funeral home workers. This streamlined process has become convenient, efficient, and clean; one could say aseptic, even. And I am not here to criticise any of this, I really am not, but it strikes me that this whole business has had one fatal casualty- the conversation around death.
It makes sense: out of sight, out of mind, right?
We don’t talk about death anymore because we don’t think about it. And oh my, how life has suffered the consequences of that. The one thing that gives living any meaning, and we have developed all sorts of tricks to avoid contemplating the only event we cannot bet on happening or not. It wasn’t always like this, of course; this attitude of “don’t speak it, and it won’t happen” that is such a paradigm of magical thinking has come about, ironically enough, with the booming of scientific advances and medical intervention. Don’t get me wrong, I love medical advances. I am passionate about disease prevention and cure, and if the previous two are not possible, prolonging life, provided it comes hand in hand with a good quality of it2. It is inevitable to see many cases where quality of life is a fatal victim of this fight for time on earth, and this is due to many reasons, all of which are beyond the scope of today’s letter.
Advances in modern medicine have succeeded in not only postponing death but also slowing the dying process. 3
I wanted to touch upon two of what I think are the most dramatic reasons for having this misguided hope that death is not coming for us at some point- the inordinate worship of youth and the endemic lack of imagination that pollutes our collective brain.
I have written about my thoughts on our adoration of youth and its possible consequences (links below). Still, I think this quasi-religious stance we take on youth could also be a consequence of our growing incapacity to imagine ourselves as old and, Heaven forbid, dead4. I have also written about the lack of imagination and its consequences in my previous post, so now, why death? Well, because I think about mine a lot, and when I say a lot, I mean A LOT.
You are now possibly thinking: “What’s up with this middle-aged woman and her morbid thoughts?” But the thing is that in my line of work, it is inevitable to think about the inevitable- disease and death. Of course, this professional deformation can be problematic when one thinks everything is a cancer, but I have outgrown that phase. I went through medical school sure I had a brain tumour, then during residency, I was convinced a vague hip pain I had was also a tumour, and I asked a colleague in the radiology department for an X-ray, mumbling some excuse or other, and the kind radiologist must have kept a log of residents asking for X-rays looking for stuff because she didn’t even blink, just said- “Suuuuure, come on over here.” Then, I worked closely with a primary care physician for a long time, and when I remarked that everyone seemed to have cancer, she opened my eyes: “You see Ana,” she said, “after all my years in primary care, I have come to realize that, thank God, cancer is usually not what ails people.”
But the thing is that my patients start to look like me.
I casually remarked to a breast surgeon, “Is it me, or are breast cancer patients getting younger?” to which he retorted, “It’s you, Ana; you are getting older.”
And it’s true, this inexorable passage of time, for which I am forever grateful since it certainly beats the alternative, has landed me in middle age. According to Eurostat (EU statistical page), in 2021, the life expectancy for women in Sweden was somewhere around 84.1-84.9 years (depending on the region), and in Spain between 84.4 and 88.2 years. So, doing some quick and completely flawed math, should no major illness afflict me, I have 40.4 years to live, 14,746 days, or in minutes 21,234,240- which is a number I can actually get my head around, like, in mathematical terms, it does not tend to infinity.
So I think about my own finiteness at least once a week; this past six months, I have ramped it up to once a day.
The Dance of Death by Michael Wolgemut. Turns out Death has plenty of accompanying pictures over there in the public domain Wikipedia.
And you might ask - “How do you think about your death?” but it is hard to put in words. I do not imagine myself in a casket or see my lifeless body lying on some bed. It’s more like- how will my children get on when I am not here? And then I find some more patience hidden in some unknown corner of my being, and I listen for the umpteenth time that Nirvana song P loves, or I caress CA’s sweet face when she is crying (again) because she cannot draw properly the legs of the girl in her picture and I whisper “you couldn’t do the arms two weeks ago and now you are nailing them,” or I succumb to E’s demands to read one more book to him. I do not have to fix their lives; they will be fine. I just need to be here with them right now. The same goes for C; he will be fine, but I hold his hand when we walk about town because who knows how many other occasions for holding his hand I have left?
When I say they will be fine, I mean it. I have met (too many) women who succumbed to death, leaving small children and loving husbands behind, and they mourned her, but still, they thrived thereafter. Love is indispensable; people are not.
I really think carefully about how I want to spend my idle time- it’s always with a project in the making, reading a book, writing, running outside, with my family, walking in nature, swimming in the sea, eating at a nice restaurant (little grasshoppers, life is too short to waste one single meal in McDonald’s, I’m sorry, but numbers do not lie), at home, with friends who make me laugh. That is it. Right there is my bucket list.
So you see, I try to do these simple enough things most of the time5. My goal with repeated practice of the stuff that is truly important to me is to be able to say to Death in all honesty, be at 45, 50, 60, 70 or 80: “You can come for me at any time; I am ready.”
Yours in divine (im)perfection,
Ana (idler at large)
PS: I was googling for an image for this post (the search was “Death”) and stumbled upon an article about a nun, Sister Theresa Aletheia Noble, who has started a “memento mori” project on social media. The article is linked here, but a quote from her devotional perfectly summarises what I wanted to convey here:
“Remembering death keeps us awake, focused, and ready for whatever might happen—both the excruciatingly difficult and the breathtakingly beautiful.”
Smith AK and VS Perijakoil. Should we Bury “The Good Death?” J Am Geriatr Soc. 2018 May; 66(5): 856–858.
What “good quality of life” means is as subjective as it gets, by the way.
Taken from the article cited in reference 1.
This is a classical chicken and egg conundrum.
Simple but not so easy, one gets caught up in silly things like recognition and career prospects, and (the wrong sort of) ambition.
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The pursuit of youth and beauty, and when to stop.
My wrinkles. Look at my 11. I like to think they are the sentinels of my thoughts. I have spent a lot of time frowning whilst in deep thought (or just pissed off) to acquire them.
Dr. Ana’s unsolicited advice column.
Geriatrix,a character from Asterix. This is how I’m feeling today.
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Nice writing. When I was small a funeral cortège drove down our street. I got excited because all the cars had their headlights on and it was daytime. Why do they have their lights on? I asked mom. To honor the dead, she said, and I was struck by that, it seemed very reassuring, that every person who died got a car parade with headlights, it made me feel good about humans as a species.
"But the thing is that my patients start to look like me."
This line got me (tbh the whole piece did.) I work at a crisis call center and I too think of my death and advanced age every day. It's heavy work but good daily exercise to flex my imagination muscles, imagining different crisises and tribulations befalling me keeps my even-keeled and I think, dare I say, happier.