When a friend’s father died following a long illness, her advice for us was: “Have the conversation!”
She was telling us about the long talk she’d had with her father before his decline. They discussed what he wanted or didn’t want at the funeral, where everything (from chequebooks to cupboard keys to will) was kept, what should go to whom, and even a list of people to call.
“Have the conversation,” she urged. “It makes everything easier, not just for you, but for them.”
It’s never easy to talk about death, especially since so many families specialise in never talking about the difficult things. Too often, when an older family member talks about dying, they are shushed. “Don’t be morbid,” we say. “Don’t talk like that. You’re not going to die anytime soon.”
Why don’t we let people who are near the end of their lives talk about it? How lonely it must be for a person, already facing so many medical and psychological issues, to be even more isolated because they can’t have a frank conversation about something so.... inevitable.
We understand that “getting it out” helps with feelings of upset, fear or anger, but though approaching the end of your life can cause all these feelings and more — if you can’t talk about it with family, the people who love you and will miss you the most, then who can you talk to? If people stuff their fingers in their ears every time you want to give post-death instructions, how do you feel at peace?
The sad truth
The trouble with taking the comfortable route is that it becomes a habit. But the sad truth of our lives is that anything easy in the short term almost always results in insidious but deep damage in the long term — whether it’s avoiding the dentist, not going on a run, or not hearing out a troubled family member. It’s the choice between the short sharp pain of an injection, or the long-drawn suffering of disease.
As many of my peers approach the fringes of middle age, they realise that being in a family that doesn’t, at least sometimes, collectively choose the injection, is an isolating experience. And with ageing parents they know that time is running out, but the pile of the unspoken, the misinterpreted, the misremembered and the unheard lies huge on the living room carpet, with more and more being added every day. (After all, the only way a gunfight stops being a gunfight is if both parties choose to put down their weapons.)
Between some people, the pile is so big, they can’t even see each other any-more, and yet they continue to pretend it isn’t there, until conflict is ignited. Then, instead of sitting down and respectfully sifting through the pile discarding as they go, they pick things out at random, hurling them at each other. They spend the next few days walking carefully around these unearthed objects, but soon it’s all pushed into the pile again, out of sight in plain sight. I’m not a tidy person, but I know that’s not how you clean out a room.
Reading this, it’s easy enough to identify with the person who needs to talk about death — all of us have things we need to say that aren’t being heard. What’s far, far harder is recognising that sometimes you’re the person who needs to take their fingers out of their ears and let someone talk to you about death, or whatever else it is that makes you so uncomfortable. So rarely is the least you can do is also the most you can do.
Gautam Raja is a journalist based in Los Angeles, USA.
