“I’m going to talk about death – and why we need to try and become friends”

In the next 600 words or so I’m going to use words that we don’t like to say very much. They’re simple enough words I suppose but that doesn’t make them easy.

Because the words represent something that is universal, expected, common, human, permanent, irreversible, inevitable – and yet remains one of the great mysteries of life itself.

That’s right – I’m talking about the “big D”. “Passing away.” “Going to the eternal reward.” “Pushing up daisies.”   We could spend all day coming up with euphemisms to avoid saying it but the word is: death.

We have a funny relationship with death. It’s all around us – I would bet that anyone who’s reading this right now has experienced the death of someone or something (more about pet loss in later blogs) and I bet you’ve also experienced one of the following:

1. Feeling like you can’t talk about it openly and honestly with some of the people in your life. If you really open up you’ll make things harder for them because, after all, you’ve “got to be strong”.
2. Feeling that you are either “overemotional” or “not emotional enough” – that somehow you are not behaving correctly or the way you “should” after someone you love dies.
3. Feeling that there is a time limit on your grief and that you should be “over it” by now.
4. Feeling that your loss does not deserve sadness because of the way it happened.
5. Feeling that you don’t have the right to grieve – after all, the person who died wasn’t your sibling, partner, parent or very close family member so really, what’s wrong with you? Why are you so attached?
6. Feeling into the truth that you will die someday, and that’s a really scary prospect.
7. Feeling that without the presence of the person who has died, you might actually die a little too and never be happy again.
8. Feeling that everything you thought you knew is now turned upside down and nothing makes sense.

I could go on and on.

So what do we do? How do we overcome this fear of saying it out, of talking about death, maybe looking death in the face – maybe even coming to terms with it as part of our lives? How do we handle all of those uncomfortable, achey, questioning feelings that come along with death whenever it pops up?

I don’t know for sure, but as far as I can tell there is no magic pill, no special elixir, no self-help book, no training course, no all-powerful guru that can take away all of those feelings and answer all of our questions or fill all the holes that are left behind when the people in our lives leave us in this way.

But one thing that has helped me – and I’ve met death a few times now since childhood in ways that I wish I could have delayed or avoided – is to talk about it. And funnily enough, in the work that I do, I seem to meet people all the time who want to talk about death and how they’ve managed it and what they believe about it. We just have to allow ourselves to have the conversations, little by little, naturally, as they happen.

So let me introduce you to “death”. Not my friend, exactly, but a part of my world and my life. In a strange way, death has helped me understand everything else that happens in my life. So here we go:

Dead. Dying. Death. Died.

There – we said it. And we’re all still okay – let’s just keep talking.