In a caregiving relationship, there is more to the story than just helping another person with their problems. There is an intimacy between people that comes with this sort of relationship and there is something more. There is that ominous something else in the room. Something only glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. Something that feels like the proverbial elephant in the room that bears down on conversation but no one wishes to acknowledge.
There is always death.
There, I said it.
Death makes us squirm. That end-of-life certainty that everyone avoids. Death is far more noticeable when helping someone as they progress through their final journey. It was probably there all the time. We just tumbled to the fact under these unusual circumstances.
Funny thing, though. As the loved one approaches their demise, death becomes a much more familiar entity. It is always underfoot but not obtrusive. Death becomes almost friendly.
Don’t Be Morbid
As we have seen in society in recent years, the intrusiveness of death can really put the whammy on some people’s behavior. Fear does funny things to people.
From officials of society, education and business doing a really good Chicken Little imitation, to a broader incivility problem among the public, the presence of a disease that has a solid track record of killing people (COVID-19) just made things real. Fear on a world wide scale.
Our views on death and the dying process are as varied as we are as people. Religion obviously has a profound effect as funerals and burials are a regular part of religious practice.
As a preacher’s kid, I was around a lot of older individuals in the church. They had a habit of dying naturally over the years, prompting the need to attend ceremonies that are ostensibly designed to send off the dead but in reality are only for the living. All that ritual and flowery language failed to inform me.
Close but Not Quite
As a teen, when people who were close to me began to die, I responded in a fashion like what we have seen in society in recent years. I just lost it.
Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross had it right. The first response to grief is denial. I could find no reason to connect the death of a friend with any sense of normalcy or natural process. (Besides, as a teenager, I was going to beat the odds and live forever.)
It is from these experiences of adolescence that I recognize so much of the weird behavior around us today. Having once gone crazy over death, I know that neighborhood. Am I ever glad I moved out.
Death Upon Arrival
With the start of my caregiver adventures, I was older and felt a difference that I ascribed to finally being more of a grown-up. I made sure to distract myself with the business affairs at hand. As I had done as a grad student, I just kept my head down and feet moving.
Eventually I had to pause to catch my breath and I realized things had changed. I had changed. Dad and his situation had not changed but I was finally seeing a something that I had spent loads of energy and years trying to ignore.
This was not something I had sought out but there it was, staring me in the face. It felt like those dreams or movie scenes where you see the charging demon descending upon you. You close you eyes to wait for the inevitable contact – but it doesn’t come. When you open your eyes, the vicious creature that you thought was going to devour you is calmly sitting next to you on the sofa.
That was my adult introduction to death.
I recognized death for the first time and blinked. When I opened my eyes and my heart to the experience, I began to understand the world and my self without the menace we place on our view of a final passing.
The truth, well my truth, is that I am developing an understanding of death. I have seen it in others, and I have found a connection to it in me. Don’t get me wrong – I have absolutely no interest in becoming more intimately acquainted with dying in the immediate future, but I have a fundamental understanding what I will someday be up against.
You too.
Death is that quiet passenger in the back seat of the car. Full of potential changes but choosing to quietly go along as I journey through my life. The uncertainty of what lies beyond will always be there but having seen others make the transition with this same passenger in tow (and the peace and acceptance that many of them demonstrated at the end), I may be arriving in Dr. Kubler-Ross’ final stage of Acceptance.
I like to think so, anyway.
“Just as when we come into the world, when we die we are afraid of the unknown. But the fear is something from within us that has nothing to do with reality. Dying is like being born: just a change”
― Isabel Allende
Dad's Back 