Heidi Anderson, with her Nan and brother, has been thinking about life after death.
[O]n the 16th of August this year, my beautiful 96 year-old Nan passed away. Since then, I have rode one hell of a roller-coaster with my emotions all over the shop.
Nan and I always had a pact that if there were something on the other side, that she would come back and tell me about it.
She never believed there was anything else after you die and she would always say to me: “Once you’re dead, you’re dead. That’s it. There is nothing else.”
That is what terrifies me. The thought of “that’s it” petrifies me. I’m seriously scared of dying and for years this has given me anxiety.
I have worked with my psychologist about this fear. Dying is inevitable, but I still find it so hard to comprehend.
I’m not sure any of the sessions have helped, I still think about it a lot.
People constantly say to me: “Why stress about something you have no control of?”
Or, “You won’t know when you’re dead that you’re dead, so chill out.”
Heidi Anderson’s Nan, who passed away in August age 96.
Believe me, if I could switch it off I would but that’s easier said than done. It’s not the thought of how I die that bothers or upsets me, it’s the thought of the unknown. Not knowing what’s next.
This consumes my thoughts far too often and it’s something that I have tried to come to terms with over the past few years with no such luck.
When my Mum told me that Nan was dying and she wouldn’t recover from her fall, I flew straight to her bedside, along with all the family.
Saying goodbye to my Nan was the hardest thing I have ever had to do in my life.
Once Nan knew herself that she was dying and had accepted her fate, she called me into her room to speak. At this stage, she didn’t have much energy but she was putting all her fight into saying goodbye to people individually.
“Heidi, we all die. That’s life,” she said to me. “That’s the one thing are guaranteed in life. We’re born to die.”
Looking back, I think Nan was speaking to herself, as she too was always so afraid of death.
Over the next few days, Nan went downhill and eventually she stopped speaking and just slept.
Family came and went and said their goodbyes, but I stayed around.
I wanted to be with Nan as she exited this world. I wanted to hold her hand as she took her last breath.
Looking back, I think I also wanted to confront my fear of death. If I saw what actually happens, maybe I wouldn’t be so scared.
So I hung around the hospital like a bad smell, rarely leaving Nan’s bedside.
I played her music, told her stories and relived all our good times.
Unfortunately, by that stage she was no longer talking, but she would twitch her lips or flicker her eyes.
I swear she could hear everything, she just couldn’t respond.
In the end, I flew home to Perth. She was holding on and I felt Nan just didn’t want to die in front of any of her grandkids.
12 hours after I got home, Nan took her last breath with her three daughters at her side.
The nurses at the hospital said it was very common for people, when they’re dying, to choose who is with them.
Although I wanted so desperately to be with Nan, I felt she knew it was best that I wasn’t there.
When I arrived home in Bathurst for her funeral, I still felt that I wanted to confront my fear of death and see Nan.
Mum took me to the funeral home the morning of her farewell and I saw Nan for the first time since she passed away.
She was dead and she even looked it. No amount of makeup was hiding the fact that she was gone.
It hit me like a ton of bricks. Nan was dead and she was never coming back.
Thoughts started flooding my brain.
“Where is she? Is there something else out there? Is she with Pop? What happens? Where has she gone?”
Her body was there but that wasn’t my Nan.
My friends asked later if she looked peaceful and I found that hard to explain. She looked like she was gone and that is something I won’t ever really understand.
I’m not sure seeing my Nan in her coffin has helped my fear of dying, but it definitely gave me some kind of closure.
I am still waiting for Nan’s spirit to visit me and let me know if there is anything else out there.
I have had a couple of dreams about her and I talk to her all the time but I am yet to feel her or hear if there is life after death.
[J]ohn Anderson somehow survived the bloody mayhem of the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
But in that attack, Anderson, a crewman on the USS Arizona, lost his twin brother, Jake.
Jake was among 1,177 sailors and Marines from the battleship who died, many of whom were entombed when the ship sank in minutes after a bomb touched off a massive explosion in one of the magazines.
Throughout an active and full life, Anderson carried the guilt of not being able to find his brother.
Now, in death, the brothers from Dilworth, Minn., will be reunited.
Anderson’s cremains, along with those of another man who survived that attack 75 years ago, will be interred by Navy divers in the No. 4 turret of the Arizona on Wednesday, Dec. 7.
Their cremains will join those of about 1,100 sailors and Marines entombed in the wreck.
“When you grow up in the shadow of a hero, you don’t always realize a hero is there,” one of his sons, Terry Anderson, 53, of Roswell, N.M., said Friday, Dec. 2. “We have a great sense of pride.”
Karolyn Anderson, 73, said that it’s been a difficult year since her husband’s death Nov. 14, 2015, at the age of 98.
“This is what John would want. I want to do that for John, and Jake. It’s very sad for me, but I’m honoring his wishes and his memory,” the Roswell woman said of her husband of 47 years.
“For years, John was hesitant to even talk about Jake, He always carried a guilt burden that he couldn’t get Jake. And finally one day, I said ‘John, you never really mention Jake, why is that?’ And he said. ‘I always felt funny that I lived and he didn’t. I always wondered why I was spared and he wasn’t.’ He just felt like he let himself down, and Jake down as well as the rest of the family.”
John and Jake Anderson were born Aug. 26, 1917, in Verona, N.D. Their family later moved to Dilworth, where the twins grew up and graduated from high school.
Both joined the Navy in March 1937.
John Anderson began his Navy career on the USS Saratoga, then transferred to a destroyer. He was in China when it was attacked by the Japanese.
“That left an impact on him. He had pictures of a Chinese refugee column machine gunned by the Japanese. Pretty graphic stuff,” Terry Anderson said.
Pictured from left are the battleships USS West Virginia, USS Tennessee, and the USS Arizona, after the attack by Japanese aircraft on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on Dec. 7, 1941.
In 1940, he was transferred to Hawaii and eventually to the Arizona.
John was a member of a crew manning one of the ship’s 14-inch turret guns, and Jake’s station was an anti-aircraft gun. John Anderson also had the duty of setting up chairs for Sunday morning worship services on the Arizona’s deck. After setting up the chairs on Dec. 7, he went below deck to have breakfast when he heard a “kaplunk,” looked out a porthole and saw planes bombing nearby Ford Island, he told columnist Bob Lind of The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead.
“They started hearing machine gun fire and explosions going off, and Dad went to the porthole of the ship out of the mess hall and that’s when he saw the Japanese planes flying by and he saw the orange balls and he knew the Japanese were there, because he had seen them in China,” said another son, John Anderson Jr., 47 of Carlsbad, N.M..
John Anderson said in accounts after the war that he then headed for his post, all the while looking for his brother, Jake. He made it to his gun turret, but before he could help load it, a bomb hit the turret’s top, bounced off and penetrated the deck. The resulting explosion killed many of the crew.
Shortly after, the forward ammunition magazine with 1.5 million pounds of gunpowder blew up, virtually splitting the Arizona, and leaving dead and dying men everywhere, he told Lind.
As the ship began sinking, a senior officer ordered Anderson onto a barge taking wounded men to Ford Island, and they picked up wounded men on the way.
Once on the island, Anderson commandeered another boat to go back to the Arizona with a shipmate, Chester Rose. On the way, they pulled survivors from the harbor, but then the small craft was hit and wrecked, and all but John perished.
“He talked about this guy Rose many many times, about how he lost his life trying to help, go back to the ship. After (many) years, he was able to locate the family and tell the family what happened to Rose,” John Jr. said.
John Anderson was wounded, but swam to land and grabbed a rifle and two bandoliers of ammunition. He then jumped into a bomb blast crater on Ford Island and told Lind that he thought, “Let ’em come!”
In a 2014 article, he told the Stars and Stripes newspaper that the next day a Marine patrol told him survivors of the Arizona were to gather on a nearby dock for a head count.
“Everybody I saw there had rags around their heads,” Anderson said. Bandages covered their arms, skin was scorched and hair was burned off. “Beat up something awful.”
Travis Anderson, 45, of Kurtistown, Hawaii, said his father passed on a very memorable lesson learned on that horrible day.
“I don’t remember what we were doing, but he said there’s a reason for rules and doing things the right way, and I kind of smarted off to him and he told me to listen,” Travis Anderson said. “He told me a story about a man locked up on the Arizona. He was in the brig and no one could find the key. Boy, that just hit me like a ton of bricks. That they were trying to get that guy out of there and they didn’t have the key. Pay attention to what you’re doing and do things right. I carried that with me the rest of my life.”
John Anderson joined the destroyer USS Macdonough, and fought in 13 major battles across the Pacific.
After his discharge in 1945, he worked as a movie stuntman and took night classes in meteorology. A friend later convinced him to join the Navy Reserves, where he served for another 23 years.
While in Hollywood, he met and worked with John Wayne and also worked on the set of the Jimmy Stewart Christmas staple, “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
Anderson moved to Roswell, where he was “Cactus Jack,” a disc jockey playing mostly country music. He met Elvis Presley and Eddie Arnold in that job.
Anderson later became a television meteorologist and a real estate agent.
“He went after it. He lived life to the fullest. It was like reading a Hollywood book. He really lived. I could just go on and on,” Travis Anderson said.
“He was a wonderful man, very charismatic. He was bigger than life,” Karolyn added.
The interment ceremony on the Arizona is unique in that it is the only ship in the U.S. Navy where the cremated remains of a survivor are returned.
“It will be a chance to say goodbye to dad and a chance to reflect on Dec. 7. A day we should never forget,” John Jr. said. “It will be a time … to thank God for all he did.”
[F]or many of us, grief from the loss of loved ones can be stronger than ever during the holidays. Hospice by the Bay is here to provide support. The need is great, so we are looking for additional professionals to join our bereavement team.
I hope that my story will inspire others.
For the past few years, I’ve been a member of Hospice by the Bay’s bereavement team. I haven’t always done this kind of work; I used to own a bookkeeping company and had also been a human resources director. People often ask me, “What prompted you to make the change?” “How are you able to do such heart-wrenching work?”
Like many who work in hospice, I have experienced profound loss, in particular the death of my father. Losing him was painful but also life-changing. Before, I had been afraid of death and dying — but something “switched” when I was with him while he was dying; I realized that being with someone at this time is a gift.
I can’t say that I handled my grief very well. I moved too fast and was also grieving the “empty nest” after my daughter left for college.
Ultimately, I sought help, and soon realized that it had been a long time since I had been involved in work that came from my heart.
So I went back to school for my graduate degree in psychology with a vague idea to work in the drug treatment field. But one day it came to me, really as a calling: I wanted to do hospice work.
After completing internships in inpatient hospices, I felt a need to round out my work by helping families and individuals who were grieving. I completed Hospice by the Bay’s Bereavement Internship Program and became a licensed marriage and family therapist.
Today, I work with Hospice by the Bay as a community grief counselor, providing crisis and ongoing counseling to individuals and groups as well as grief education to schools, workplaces and organizations in need. All of these services are available to anyone, whether or not their loved one was our patient.
I get a lot out of my work. Rather than becoming depressed or detached (as some might think), it is uplifting. I get to be a “holder of hope” as I meet people at a critical time of their lives — when they are vulnerable, in pain, and may be all alone with their grief.
No matter how emotional the work is, at the end of the day, it is rewarding to know that I am guiding people when they are rudderless and adrift in an ocean of grief. It is an honor. This work has a positive impact on my personal, day-to-day life as well.
I appreciate life more, because I know that it is short. I make more meaningful choices, treasure “the moments,” and experience an expanded capacity for love.
Bereavement work is not for everyone, but it’s a calling for others.
Hospice by the Bay invites qualified candidates to apply for our Bereavement Internship Program. A part-time and yearlong paid program, it offers highly professional training and supervision.
Candidates must have a master’s degree in mental health, counseling, psychology or social work, and be registered as an intern with the Board of Behavioral Sciences.
If you or someone you know is drawn to this type of work, is mature of heart, respectful, and in search of a meaningful placement, please contact Hospice by the Bay at sohri@hbtb.org.
For the right person, helping others through their grief can be one of the most rewarding experiences you will ever have. It has been for me.
“Did you know that your patient in 1152 just passed away?”
Krishna Constantino
[E]veryone at the nursing station turned silent and looked at the nurse who had delivered the news. I looked at her in disbelief, my brain struggling through a fog of confusion and surprise. I squinted at my patient list trying to remember who was the patient in 1152. Recognition finally hit and I remembered the little old lady that we saw during rounds two hours ago. I remembered gazing at her frail, tiny body and her pale, listless face and how we tried to communicate with her to no avail. We knew she had a Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) status and we knew she was really sick, but we had no idea it would happen so quickly!
Since there was no response from either me or the intern that I was following, she mumbled a hasty, “I’ll go call the family,” and left. I looked at my intern for guidance and I saw that he was staring at the floor, hands resting on top of his knees. It was a surprise for me to see him like this, far removed from his usual confident manner. Death had completely floored us both.
Doctors and other medical professionals have a more frequent and intense contact with death and dying compared to the rest of society creating a need for end-of-life care in medical curricula. However, multiple studies on medical students’ reaction to death show that most medical students feel inadequately prepared by their undergraduate medical curricula for experiences related to end-of-life situations. Death is introduced early in our medical training inside the gross anatomy lab. The absence of any identifying features made those hours spent in anatomy lab easier. Death takes its toll and what is left is an empty husk where a person used to exist. After anatomy lab however, there is very little exposure to the idea of death and dying. A survey of medical students from Duke University showed that the average medical student had experienced fewer than five patient deaths prior to graduation. In addition, few students experienced how to declare a patient dead and none received any formal training on this end-of-life skill.
I, on the other hand was not destined to be part of that statistic. After what seemed like an eternity, my intern rose up from his seat and dashed to another part of the hospital to seek out his senior. After discussing the turn of events and the necessary course of action, our little group convened in front of the door of the patient’s room where I received my first education on the procedure of declaring a patient death.
I lingered close to the door with a bit of trepidation. She was laying in the same position that I had last seen her two hours ago — face to the window, eyes closed. Her mouth was slightly open and for a moment, I merely thought that she was asleep.
“First, we need to check for reflexes. In here, we use two: the corneal reflex and the gag reflex.”
I watched in silence as both the resident and the intern performed these tests — all without a response. I watched as they both tried to feel a pulse. I watched with bated breath against all hope that there was still life ebbing underneath those veins. I let it out, deflated when both of them shook their head no.
As soon as we walked out of the room, I overheard my intern echo the exact same thought in my head. “Do you think we did anything wrong?” A hundred what-ifs welled up inside me. Was there truly anything we could have done to prevent this death? Modern medicine views death as something that can be resisted, if not avoided. This view of death is further compounded upon by modern society’s view of death which delegates all responsibility to physicians. While it is widely accepted that death is inevitable, it is the physician’s task to ensure that the patient is as far removed from death as possible. As Rudyard Kipling in his address to the medical school of Middlesex Hospital stated, “Death as the senior practitioner, is always bound to win in the long run, but we patients, console ourselves with the idea that it will be your business to make the best terms you can with Death on our behalf; to see how his attacks can best be delayed or diverted.” Little wonder that throughout medical education, death is continually seen as a failure.
Although medical schools are now integrating end-of-life care in its curricula, medical education should also engage students in a frank discussion of death and dying. Only by facing death head-on do we dissipate its power over us. The fear of the unknown has always been part of death’s icy grip over us but what if we learned to “disarm him of his novelty and strangeness, to converse and be familiar with him” as Michel de Montaigne recommended many centuries ago when death was commonplace and lifespans were short. Had I chosen to avoid that room, I would have missed out on one of the most important lessons in my medical education.
Each one of us has ideas surrounding death. I have always imagined death to be more dramatic than what I had experienced. In my mind, I keep seeing an entire healthcare team running back and forth — all working together to snatch the patient away from the jaws of death. However, my patient simply slipped away quietly, almost underhandedly. The way that she passed away seemed natural — as if she were merely falling into an eternal sleep. Gone was the drama, the action, the struggle for life. In its place was peace and acceptance of the inevitable.
This in turn gave me reason to think that perhaps, death is not a failure of medicine but rather a crucial part of being alive. Oftentimes, the best lesson in learning how to live is learning how to die as we see in the works produced by the likes of Oliver Sacks and more recently, Paul Kalanathi. As surgeon and Yale professor Sherwin Nuland wrote, “We die, in turn so that others may live. The tragedy of a single individual becomes, in the balance of natural things, the triumph of ongoing life.”
Julian Barnes, Joan Didion, Jenny Diski, Christopher Hitchens, Meghan O’Rourke and more address life’s ultimate question
By Anne O’Neill
[W]oody Allen famously quipped “I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” This resonates with all of us who live in a culture that promotes eternal youth through scalpel or scientific miracle and cold shoulders the icy certainty of death.
Kafka stated that “the meaning of life is that it stops” while Anaïs Nin, a daily diarist, wrote that “people living deeply have no fear of death”. Freud recognised that people sometimes did express fear of death, a condition referred to as thanatophobia. Freud felt that it was not actual death that people feared as our own death is quite unimaginable, and in our unconscious we are all convinced of our own immortality. Beckett wrote that “they give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more”. Joan Didion wrote that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live”.
Lately there has been much written about death, narratives and stories that aim to help us negotiate the emotional landscape of grief and death. The novelist Julian Barnes is a self-confessed thanatophobe who sometimes is “roared awake” and “pitched from sleep into darkness, panic and a vicious awareness that this is a rented world”. In his memoir on the fear of non-existence, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Barnes writes an elegant meditation on death and attempts to address his thanophobia. As an agnostic Barnes doesn’t believe in an afterlife and writes that “I don’t believe in God but I miss him”. He believes that the Christian religion has lasted because it is a “beautiful lie… a tragedy with a happy ending”, and yet he misses the sense of purpose and belief that he finds in a Mozart Requiem or the sculptures of Donatello.
There is a trend over the last few years for a new type of fiction, a genre that moulds memoir with biography to form a literature that feels fresh and hyper-real, a type of reality fiction for the modern reader. David Shields presaged this new trend when in his 2010 publication Reality Hunger he advocated a return to the “real” in literature and he railed against conventional plot-driven fiction in favour of the lyric essay and the memoir.
A memoir of illness and dying is always an emotional read and the pages pulse with life, strife and the emotional intensity of the author’s feelings and predicament. None more so than In Gratitude by Jenny Diski, who died earlier this year of inoperable lung cancer. Diski wrote a series of essays in the London Review of Books about life after her diagnosis with its frailties and sudden fragilities which have been published as this memoir. She writes that she feared the oncologist would find her response cliched after he gave her the prognosis and she turned to her husband and suggested that they’d better get cooking the meth like Heisenberg in the television series Breaking Bad.
Diski’s talon-sharp prose has never harboured a platitude and this memoir touches on her peripatetic early life, abandoned by neglectful parents and in and out of psychiatric hospitals, “rattling from bin to bin”. She was adopted by the writer Doris Lessing for four years as a teenager and shared family dinners with Alan Sillitoe, RD Laing and Arnold Wesker and listened to late-night intellectual discussions about philosophy and psychotherapy which she describes as “a dream come true, but I had to work out how to live it”.
Diski with her unique sense of directness and humour writes that she makes an ideal candidate to play the role of a cancer patient as her lifelong favourite places are bed and sofa and she lives like one of those secondary characters in Victorian literature who constantly languish on the fainting couch. Diski described herself as being “contrary-minded”, delighted at breaking taboos and pushing boundaries. Controversial to the end, she likens having cancer to “an act in a pantomime in which my participation is guaranteed, I have been given this role ….I have no choice but to perform and to be embarrassed to death.”
Christopher Hitchens was on a book tour for Hitch 22 when he experienced the first health crisis that was the beginning of his demise. However, this pugnacious and witty writer was able to channel his experiences into his end of life memoir Mortality, which begins with the line “I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death”. When the emergency services arrive to collect him Hitchens feels a psychogeographical shift taking him “from the country of the well to the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady”. Hitchens concedes that he has become a finalist in the race of life and quotes from TS Eliot’s Prufrock:
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker / And I have seen the eternal footman hold my coat / and snicker / And in short / I was afraid
Hitch decided to live dyingly and extolled the consolation of friends who came to eat, drink and converse with him even as these earthly delights become impossible for him as the cancer progressed. His memoir is life affirming, punchy and rich with morbid humour, noting that when one falls ill people tend to send Leonard Cohen CDs. He doesn’t experience rage at a terminal diagnosis as he feels that he has been taunting the Reaper into “taking a free scythe in my direction” and that he has now succumbed to “something so predictable and banal that it bores me”. His wife Carol Blue in the afterword to this memoir writes of the man she admired and loved and ends with the lines that in death as in life Hitch still has the last word.
Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking begins with the death of her husband of 44 years, the writer John Dunne, and brings the reader on a journey through the land of grief that she entered in the aftermath of his loss. In the opening lines of this poised but passionate memoir she writes that “life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.” She writes about the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event and writes that when we are confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how “unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell.’’
Didion gives the reader an unflinching account of grief in the year when the shock of Dunne’s death “was obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind”. Despite the unshakeable reality of her husband’s death Joan’s thinking enters the realm of the magical and she writes that “we do not expect to be crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes”.
Zadie Smith wrote that Didion is essential reading on the subject of death and I have bought many copies over the years for grieving friends who have found comfort in its reading, recognition of their suffering in its pages.
The Long Goodbye by Meghan O’Rourke is an unstintingly honest memoir about the loss of her mother Barbara to colorectal cancer. O’Rourke is an award-winning poet and she writes about the consolation that she finds in reading Hamlet. Shakespeare’s hero holds up a mirror to O’Rourke’s own duality of emotion; emptiness and anger, despair and longing for relief. O’Rourke can understand why Hamlet, who has just lost his father, is angry and cagey. He is told that how he feels is unmanly and unseemly, his uncle greeting him with the worst question to ask a grieving person “How is it that that the cloud still hang on you?”
O’Rourke felt a resonance with Hamlet in her grief state when she felt that to descend to the deepest fathom of it would be unseemly and was somehow taboo. She writes that nothing prepared her for the death of her mother, even knowing that she had terminal cancer did not prepare her. There is a stark unearthing of truths in this memoir. “A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky, unimaginable.”
Doctors face death daily and Dr Paul Kalanithi became a neurosurgeon because with its unforgiving call to “perfection, it seemed to present the most challenging and direct confrontation with meaning, identity and death”. When Breath Becomes Air opens with a description by the author of a CT scan that he was examining where the lungs were matted with innumerable tumours, the spine deformed and a full lobe of the liver obliterated. This scan, though similar to scores of others that he had examined over the previous six years, was different, different because it was his own. Kalanithi wrote his memoir in the aftermath of this discovery, fusing his medical knowledge with his love of literature to produce a work that is more than a memoir: it is a philosophical reflection on life and purpose. Kalanithi and his wife have a baby Cady who was eight months old when her father died. His memoir will be his legacy to his little girl as “words”, he writes, “have a longevity I do not”.
The Iceberg: A Memoir by Marion Coutts tells of Coutts’ partner Tom Lubbock’s death from a malignant brain tumour. This account of illness and decline is told with an artist’s eye and in poetic prose that is both razor sharp and suffused with emotion. Coutts writes that there is a filmic quality to their life. A friend suggests that the director is Bergman, “shot flat without affect but deeply charged, with a fondness for long shots, no cuts, ensemble scenes, dark comedy and the action geared always to the man in the bed even though he is frequently off camera.”
Death is the inevitable full stop in the essay of life. Christopher Hitchens quotes this poem by Kingsley Amis in his memoir Mortality: Death has this much to be said for it/ You don’t have to get out of bed for it/Wherever you happen to be/ They bring it to you – free.
The writer Katie Roiphe wrote The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End in part to sate her curiosity about death and dying. It is an account of how the writer found beauty and comfort in the stories of how her literary heroes faced up to dying. For Roiphe religion has never been consoling and feels like a foreign language. She, like many book lovers finds comfort in novels and poems. As a child recovering from serious illness Yeats’s Sailing to Byzantium resonated with her. She becomes ambushed by the beauty in the deaths of her literary heroes, Dylan Thomas, Susan Sontag, Freud and Maurice Sendak. Sontag “fought her death to the end, believing on some deep irrational level she would be the one exception”.
Roiphe feels that writers and artists are more attuned to death, that they can put the confrontation with mortality into words in a way that most of us can’t or won’t. The last taboo has been dealt with by memoirists, essayists and poets. If, according to FR Leavis, literature is the supreme means by which you renew your sensuous and emotional life and learn a new awareness, then these publications are a gateway to enlightenment.
“Who would enjoy the sun if it never rained? Who would yearn for the day if there were no night?”
BY MARIA POPOVA
“Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead,” John Updike wrote, “so why … be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?” Half a millennium earlier, Montaigne posed the same question somewhat differently in his magnificent meditation on death and the art of living: “To lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago.”
Yet mortality continues to petrify us — our own, and perhaps even more so that of our loved ones. And if the adult consciousness is so thoroughly unsettled by the notion of death, despite intellectually recognizing it as a necessary and inevitable part of life, how is the child consciousness to settle into comprehension and comfort?
Now comes a fine addition to the most intelligent and imaginative children’s books about making sense of death — the crowning jewel of them all, even, and not only because it bears what might be the most beautiful children’s book title ever conceived: Cry, Heart, But Never Break (public library) by beloved Danish children’s book author Glenn Ringtved and illustrator Charlotte Pardi, translated into English by Robert Moulthrop.
Although Ringtved is celebrated for his humorous and mischievous stories, this contemplative tale sprang from the depths of his own experience — when his mother was dying and he struggled to explain what was happening to his young children, she offered some words of comfort: “Cry, Heart, but never break.” It was the grandmother’s way of assuring the children that the profound sadness of loss is to be allowed rather than resisted, then folded into the wholeness of life, which continues to unfold. (I’m reminded of Maria Kalman’s unforgettable words: “When Tibor died, the world came to an end. And the world did not come to an end. That is something you learn.”)
This warmly wistful story begins outside the “small snug house” where four children live with their beloved grandmother. Not wanting to scare the young ones, Death, who has come for the old lady, has left his scythe by the door. Immediately, in this small and enormously thoughtful gesture, we are met with Death’s unexpected tenderness.
Inside, he sits down at the kitchen table, where only the youngest of the kids, little Leah, dares look straight at him.
What makes the book particularly touching, thanks to Pardi’s immensely expressive illustration, is just how crestfallen — broken, even — Death himself looks the entire time he is executing his mission, choked up with some indiscernible fusion of resignation and recompense.
In the quiet, the children could hear their grandmother upstairs, breathing with the same raspy breaths as the figure at the table. They knew Death had come for her and that time was short.
To stall the inevitable, the children devise a plan — believing that Death only works at night, they decide to keep refilling his coffee cup until dawn comes, at which point he would have to leave without their grandmother. Here, too, one is struck by the ordinariness of Death, for what can be more ordinary — and life-loving, even — than to enjoy a cup of coffee at the kitchen table?
But Death eventually curls his bony hand over the cup to signal that the time has come. Leah reaches her own tiny hand, taking his in hers, and beseeches him not to take their darling grandmother. Why, she insists, does grandma have to die?
Some people say Death’s heart is as dead and black as a piece of coal, but that is not true. Beneath his inky cloak, Death’s heart is as red as the most beautiful sunset and beats with a great love of life.
Death is once more overcome with kindness and compassion for the children, so he decides to answer Leah’s question with a story, hoping it would help them understand why dying is natural and necessary.
He tells them of two brothers named Sorrow and Grief, who lived in a somber valley and went about their days “slowly and heavily” because they never looked up, because “they never saw through the shadows on the tops of the hills.”
Beyond those shadows, Death tells the kids, lived two sisters, Joy and Delight.
They were bright and sunny and their days were full of happiness. The only shadow was their sense that something was missing. They didn’t know what, but they felt they couldn’t fully enjoy their happiness.
As Death is telling the story, little Leah nods her head, for she can tell what is to come — the two boys meet the two girls and they fall in love, two perfectly balanced couples: Sorrow and Joy, Grief and Delight.
Death tells the kids:
It is the same with life and death… What would life be worth if there were no death? Who would enjoy the sun if it never rained? Who would yearn for the day if there were no night?
Something difficult and beautiful has sunk in.
When death finally gets up from the table to head upstairs, the youngest boy is moved to stop him — but his older brother puts a rueful hand on his shoulder and gently discourages him.
Moments later, the children heard the upstairs window open. Then, in a voice somewhere between a cry and a whisper, Death said, “Fly, Soul. Fly, fly away.”
They hurry upstairs, where their grandmother has died — a moment of great sadness, enveloped in warm peacefulness.
The curtains were blowing in the gentle morning breeze. Looking at the children, Death said quietly, “Cry, Heart, but never break. Let your tears of grief and sadness help begin new life.”
Then he was gone.
Ever after, whenever the children opened a window, they would think of their grandmother. And when the breeze caressed their faces, they could feel her touch.
Keely Dowton (right) and her mother who died last year.
[D]uring this time of the year death appears in a guise of make up, costumes and candied treats. Often portrayed by colourful eccentric images, celebrations such as Halloween and the Day of the Dead were traditionally about remembering the dead and the memories of lost loved ones.
But talking about death is not easy if you’re British. When broached, the topic seems to make people feel uncomfortable and can even be judged as a morbid conversation subject. But death is part and parcel of what it means to live. We talk about having the ‘time of our lives’ or ‘living life to the full’ but often try and forget what inevitably follows.
We wanted to talk more about death so asked readers for their experiences of grieving and what death means to them. Here’s what some of them said.
‘Grief is so overpowering – it consumes you’
Having lost my mother 17 months ago the experience of losing her is still very raw for me. Mum went to her doctor with a minor stomach upset and died four weeks later with an aggressive bowel tumour. She had no previous symptoms and wasn’t even unwell. It came as a complete shock with total devastation to her family.
Grief is so overpowering – it consumes you. First the numbness and autopilot mode then the heaviness of despair, then the oceans of tears, then the questions of the pointless, futility of life. Then anger, then deep despair, then numbness and repeat. Repeat. 17 months on and I still question all of it; but I cope by leaning on my loved ones and I cope by using my mum’s strength to spur me on. Ironically, she is the one that gets me out of bed in the mornings.
My life has changed drastically. After mum died I resigned from my job, married my partner of 22 years (we married on mum’s birthday as a gift/gesture to her), I got a dog and am now planning a move with my husband to Sri Lanka for a few years. I see my life in two parts; my old life with mum and my new life; one I didn’t want or choose but one that I’m trying to embrace. I try to live my life as my mum wanted; with gusto and enjoying the little things. I’m trying at least.
Keely Dowton, 44-year-old teacher living in Essex
‘I said ‘Good morning’ to a photo of him each day’
I lost my father seven years ago. It was totally unexpected and at the time I could not deal with it. I said ‘Good morning’ to a photo of him each day as I did in person before. I threw myself into planning the funeral, keeping busy meant not thinking about what had happened.
Just after he passed away, I noticed a robin that would watch me when I was gardening. The robin visited the garden most days and would look towards the house. There are some people who think that symbolises that a loved one who has passed is okay. That brought me some comfort even if I don’t completely believe it. I like seeing robins in the garden, even when they are being fiercely territorial. Seeing them is associated with my dad now. I talked about my dad in the present tense for a long time, maybe a year after he had died. Even now it feels incorrect to talk about him in the past because he lives on in my heart and mind. He always will. That’s love.
Anonymous, 39-year-old teacher living in the Midlands
Joanne and her husband
‘Dealing with death is relatively easy compared to getting on with life without them’
Death means my husband. It is something I’m familiar with now as I have lived through his. I lay with his dead body for half an hour and felt peace. Other people’s death isn’t scary for me anymore but mine is as I fear for my children.
I think it’s more difficult to talk about death if you haven’t had any personal experience of it. A lot of the time it’s very clinical, with the funeral director taking the body away fairly swiftly. There’s not often the chance to spend time with the dead and say goodbye. It’s almost frowned upon. I took some pictures of my husband dead; before and after he was embalmed. It doesn’t feel right sharing that fact with people as I’m worried they’ll think it weird. It didn’t feel weird to me.
Even though my husband suffered with all the indignities of cancer I believe in the end he had a good death. He’d put his affairs in order, planned his funeral, said goodbye to loved ones and ultimately died in my arms. If if wasn’t for the fact that he was only 48 it would have been perfect.
Dealing with the death was relatively easy compared to getting on with life without them. That’s the hardest bit. When the funeral flowers and cards stop coming. When friends no longer bring cooked dishes round. That’s when the shit hits the fan and you see the size of the hole they have left.
Joanne Baker, 47-year-old full-time parent of two children living in Guiseley
‘I gave her a bag of popping corn – she was being cremated and would have loved that!’
The death of my mother last year was like watching a transition from pain to peace. I miss her so much. The horror of the last 12 hours in A&E and hospital side ward as she slipped into unconsciousness will never leave my memory. The nurses were kind but no one could save her from her journey. As she took her last breaths, I told her to go find her mum now and that we would be OK. It was a privilege to share those moments but terrifying.
I’m a Christian. My mother pre-paid for a cardboard coffin, and at her request we pasted all the grandchildren’s art work on it. Her lid was open and we spent an hour talking to her. Her spirit felt close. I placed momentoes in her coffin and a bag of popping corn just for fun in her hand. She was being cremated and would have loved that!
Jayne Gale, 47-year-old nurse
‘I did not cry at the funeral, nor did I go to view his body’
I experienced my dad’s death at the tender age of 13, in June 2003. I did not cry at the funeral, nor did I go to view his body. I couldn’t believe he was gone for good. Many times I dreamt of bumping into him on the street. I thought he would come back, even though I knew and understood that he wouldn’t.
I think most people find it hard to talk about death either due to a trauma or the death of a loved one, and in many African customs it is taboo to do so. Though it’s been 13 years since my dad left I still weep as if he just died. He was my hero. I have been praying over it, and God has helped me to accept the reality, and to stop living in denial.
Grace, 26-year-old living in Nairobi
Mourners attend a vigil for bus driver Manmeet Alisher at a Sikh temple in Brisbane, after he was burned alive when an incendiary device was allegedly thrown at him while he was letting passengers on at Moorooka
‘There is nothing to fear about death’
I lost a little boy who was just two months old – he suddenly passed away one night unexpectedly. I did not understand how this could happen to me – not even as a punishment because I felt I had never done anything that would have deserved such a chastisement.
This was when I started to try to find an answer, so I began reading about what happened after death, the meaning of life and death, why we are here on earth and so on. I got the answer after 30 years of research, so I know now why this happened to me. To me, death means to continue to live in a different form in another dimension where I will be able to meet all my dear ones who died before me and most importantly review all my past life on earth. I will then know if and how I have progressed spiritually. This will be done without judgment, just with love. Then, I will examine and decide what still has to be improved and go back to earth for another experience.
In 2012 my mother died at the age of 84. She suffered a lot and wished she could die as soon as possible “waiting for the angels to take her”. One day she had an accident at home while cooking – she was burnt and taken to hospital where she died two months later. At the very minute she died, I felt filled with an unutterable sensation of happiness which I couldn’t explain at first and I understood when I was told the precise time when she died. I was so happy that she had been freed at last. My sisters got depressed and didn’t understand my reaction at first, but I told them how I felt and they agreed that it was the best way to deal with our mother’s death.
I hope there will be more records similar to mine, so that people grow aware that there is nothing to fear about death – no judgment, no hell, no punishment – only love exists.
Jean Louis, 65-year-old retired teacher living in France
‘Those who talk openly and honestly about death tend to have a more peaceful, meaninful time at the end of their life’
Popular media images of death and dying often portray an image of inevitable suffering, as does frequent media coverage highlighting the inadequacies of health and social services in providing good end of life care and support. As a result, many people live in fear of death and the dying process and ultimately do not have the death they would have preferred.
Problematic issues including misconceptions, unspoken anxiety, lack of control, or the loved ones of a dying person perceiving the dying process as a ‘bad death’ can all contribute towards problematic grief. My own observations of dying people and bereaved relatives are that those who have talked openly and honestly about death and dying – and who have planned for what they would like to happen when the time comes – tend to have a more peaceful, meaningful time at the end of their life.
Katie Shepherd, 43-year-old clinical nurse specialist in palliative care, and permaculture designer living in Spain and Yorkshire
A skull on a turntable.
‘I dealt with the deaths of those close to me quite badly. It’s why I’m an undertaker’
Death has shaped my entire life, literally. I became an undertaker, something for which you need no professional qualifications almost 17 years ago after seeing Nicholas Albery of The Natural Death Centre talk about a different way of approaching funerals, environmentally, socially and religiously. I had a welter of family deaths as a child, most of whose funerals I didn’t go to. Now we do the opposite, encouraging as much family involvement as possible.
It is entirely understandable that people find it difficult to talk about death. The implications of our own extinction and that of the Earth’s are huge, particularly now we are at a stage when even the planet may die. I dealt with the deaths of those close to me quite badly. It’s why I’m an undertaker – do what I say, not what I do.
My father’s death two years ago was sudden and unexpected. The family gathered, and we supported one another. Tears, yes, but plenty of loving laughter – he had an offbeat personality in some ways with a great sense of humour, even around death: he’d always said (in jest) that when he goes he wanted to be stuffed and sat in a chair so he could be glowering at people!
Of course there is the awful reality of his loss in all our lives, the desperate sadness that he’s not here in the physical. He genuinely hadn’t an enemy in the world, and family, friends and colleagues past and present, travelled from far and wide to be at his funeral.
I know that he’s still present though, with countless confirmations of that, so we still go on walks together (a shared love of nature) and we ‘chat’ daily. It’s the next best thing to being in the same physical universe.
Angela, 55-year-old artist and writer living in Ireland
‘It is far easier to grieve among family and friends’
My father died while I was working in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s. My brother sent a telegram, but my employers (who had my passport in a safe) did not pass the telegram to me. I found out a few weeks later via a letter from my mother which started from the premise that I knew already. From this experience I learned that it is far easier to grieve and move on if you do it among family and friends.
