When my father died a couple of years ago, my family asked me to take the lead in organizing his funeral. I was happy to take this role: I am an experienced cleric used to working with funeral directors, and I have a strong understanding of the funeral process. What I’d never previously experienced—at least not from the point of view of a grieving person—is how readily those involved in the ministrations around a death speak in euphemisms. Perhaps it was a token of my grief, but I was annoyed by how many people couldn’t even say that my dad had died; most people, including the funeral director, said, repeatedly, that he’d “passed.”
Does it matter? At one level, no. The phrase “passed away” has been used to refer to death for 500 years. Still, it troubles me theologically. I fear that the prevalence of using passed as a way of speaking (or not speaking) of death indicates a society frightened by the finality of death, one that has opted for an overly spiritualized response to the last enemy.
A common refrain in my clergy circles is about how, on visits to plan funeral services with the bereaved, the only person prepared to use the “D” word is the priest herself. The bereaved will typically resort to any number of euphemisms to avoid it. This is entirely understandable. Shock is a natural reaction to death and, as creatures of language, we may be inclined to retreat to clichés that seem to soften the blow.
Indeed, at one level, euphemisms are entirely comprehensible as strategies to avoid the things we struggle with most. As Voltaire noted, “One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.” This applies to any difficult aspect of life, not simply death. Terms like downsizing and rationalization have been used for decades in business settings to avoid speaking directly about job cuts. In almost every area of life that really matters or troubles us—from sex through to war—there are forms of words that have been found to smooth out what’s difficult.
If death is the greatest human fear, it is hardly surprising that most of us will find ways of avoiding talking about it. The sheer number of ways humans have of avoiding the “D” word is both a testament to our creativity and an indication of how much we fear death.
Yet I think one of the imperatives on us as Christians is to be as honest as we can about death. Priests in particular are called to help people to pray and prepare them for death. Ironically, in an age when Christians are often parodied as delusional fantasists, we in fact have something powerful to offer as people who model realism and honesty about death. And one way we do that is by avoiding euphemisms at the point of death. If euphemisms are deployed in part to soften the nature of something shocking and appalling, ironically they serve to draw greater attention to that which they are meant to conceal. By being carefully and humanely honest about the singular finality of death, both priests and laypeople may be key agents in helping the bereaved to come to terms with the simple fact that, in this life at least, their loved ones are gone.
I am not suggesting that Christians should be crass. I trust we will always be sensitive to death’s ability to strip any of us of our certainties. But the quiet acknowledgment of the final nature of death may be significant both pastorally and for mission. In being clear that death has a shocking finality about it, Christians—as people who are committed to resurrection and new life—may be better placed to speak the good news of Christ. One thing we should not be afraid of in our faith tradition is the bleak reality that God incarnate, Jesus Christ, actually died and died horribly. He did not fall asleep or pass over or, to quote George Eliot, “join the choir invisible.” He died, in a vile and appalling way.
Resurrection is predicated on death. This is a powerful message in an age and culture in which technology and market economics have created the illusion that life and growth are almost endless. Growth is taken to be always good—and to be fair, growth is often a sign of life. Yet Jesus invites us to remember that unless a kernel of wheat falls and dies it remains a single seed. Jesus himself models a way of living abundantly that is grounded in the unavoidable reality of death.
Increasingly I read stories of billionaires seeking to cheat death altogether. In a culture where medical technologies have extended life among the wealthy to unprecedented levels, Christianity retains a potent voice on the inescapability of death. Even more powerfully, the figure at the heart of the Christian faith, Jesus Christ, signals that a fulfilled and rich life is not by its nature dependent on its length. At a time when religious faith is often parodied as absurd, childish, and fantastical, there is a profound opportunity to speak to the privilege of individuals and societies that seek to isolate themselves from the facts of human existence.
I know that there is nothing much I can do, as an individual, about the use of passing as a euphemism for death. At the same time, I can think of no greater vocation as a person of faith than to speak honestly about death, trusting in that even deeper reality of God’s resurrection.
Recently, I’ve been reminded again how much words matter. And especially so when it comes to talking or writing about the death of a dear one.
For example, a friend told me she really is not a fan of the word bereaved. She prefers the word alone. I get it, and this is probably a better word for several reasons.
The death of a spouse or partner certainly results in a lot of aloneness. But it’s not limited to partners. The death of a parent, best friend, child or other dear one can leave one feeling very alone. It’s bigger and more personal word than bereaved.
In another example, a friend said she doesn’t care for the word grief anymore. The way I understood it, she meant that, as she had been learning how to cope with the death of her beloved spouse, the word grief felt as if it’s drawing her backward. This at a time she’s trying to adjust going forward without him. This made me stop and think.
I think these are two reminders of how complicated it is to talk about death, and how personal it is. So I started reflecting on myself. And I realized I have quite a list of do’s and don’ts as well! Mine center on common euphemisms. For instance, I personally avoid words such as lost, passed, passed away, late, taken, departed and other euphemisms. I would rather hear or read the actual word — died. Especially when it comes to my own loved ones.
In one episode of “Downton Abbey,” actress Maggie Smith, who played the role of dowager Lady Grantham, had a visitor. When that person referred to her husband as “was taken,” she said something like this: Lord Grantham was not taken, he died.
Now I realize not everyone feels as strongly as I do about this topic. And I realize these other words are in very common usage, and friends and family do not mean to upset or irritate us by using them. Actually, even many clergy and funeral directors use those very euphemisms. So be it. And they are commonly written in obituaries and used in eulogies.
We already are well aware that most people struggle with what to write in a card or note to a friend. But how to refer directly to the person who died is a somewhat different challenge.
So what is the point? Well, I think it’s basically we need to figure out what your friend or relative prefers. It’s complicated of course. You may know the person well enough to know what to say. But a surefire way to know is — just listen to them. You will hear the right word.
The way humans live impacts the world. So does the way they die.
It isn’t death itself that creates an ecological nightmare, but rather the resource-intensive processes we’ve devised for dealing with the dead. On top of all the land that’s set aside for graveyards, building caskets requires around 30 million board feet of wood and 90,000 tons of steel each year (that’s more steel than you’ll find in the Golden Gate Bridge). Grave vaults guzzle up 1.6 million tons of concrete annually. And 800,000 gallons of toxic chemicals like formaldehyde go into embalming — chemicals that often wind up seeping into the ground. (Oh, and all these stats are for the U.S. alone.)
Cremation, which has edged out burial as the most popular option in the U.S., requires vast amounts of energy to maintain the 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit needed to incinerate a corpse, which can take two hours or more. In the U.S., the process releases about 250,000 tons of CO₂ into the atmosphere annually — the equivalent of burning more than 30 million gallons of gasoline — and a significant amount of mercury from dental fillings.
By now you may be thinking, “There’s got to be a better way.” There is.
We already have several eco-friendlier ways of dealing with the dead, and more than 50 percent of Americans are considering them. These methods can be as simple as wrapping bodies in cloth and lowering them into the ground to decompose, or as cutting-edge as human composting and mushroom suits. There are also culture-specific traditions like the Tibetan sky burial, in which the dead are dismembered and left on mountaintops to be feasted upon by vultures.
In her short story The Tree in the Back Yard, a finalist in Fix’s Imagine 2200 climate-fiction contest, author Michelle Yoon envisions a future in which green burial practices have become commonplace. In the opening scene, the main character, Mariska, chooses a tree that her father’s remains will nourish via a receptacle called an Eternity Pod. Later, when she goes to visit his final resting place, Mariska sees “Trees of all types, all ages. Trees as far as her eyes could see,” each one marking a natural burial site.
How close are we to the future Yoon imagines?
The modern green burial movement
Generally speaking, a green burial is one that encourages the natural process of decomposition. That means no embalming, fancy caskets, or headstones. In the most straightforward application, remains are placed in a simple box or cloth, and interred at a depth of about 3½ feet — roughly half the proverbial 6 feet under — where there’s more microbial activity in the soil.
The modern movement emerged about 30 years ago as some sought to reclaim the intimacy and filial responsibility that is lost when a third party takes ownership of the dead, says Hannah Rumble, a social anthropologist at the University of Bath’s Centre for Death and Society in England. “It was almost kind of a re-enchantment — this idea that our dead were a fertile source for new life, if we put them in sensitive ways back in the environment,” she says. “Rather than seeing a corpse as yucky and icky and something that needs to be sanitized and hidden away, actually the corpse, in its very decomposition, could be quite useful.”
Much like other eco-conscious movements — local food, right-to-repair, and living off the grid, for example — green burial, at its heart, is about reclaiming and re-familiarizing ourselves with a process. In this case, death.
In some cultures, elements of these practices are the norm already. Traditional Jewish burial involves family members washing and preparing the body, dressing it in a shroud, and burying it in a simple pine coffin, or no coffin at all. Although this practice is based on ancient Jewish law, it aligns with much of the green burial ethos. “It emphasizes simplicity, equality in death, and return of the body to the earth,” says Rabbi Seth Goldstein.
Muslim tradition similarly involves ritual bathing of a corpse, wrapping it in a cloth, and burying it without a casket, facing Mecca. In both customs, the funeral happens as quickly as possible after the person has died — which respects religious teachings about honoring the dead but also makes sense biologically. Without embalming or other forms of preservation, bodies must be interred ASAP, for obvious reasons.
Much like other eco-conscious movements, green burial is about reclaiming and re-familiarizing ourselves with a process. In this case, death.
Although straightforward burial can be made more sustainable, an increasing number of alternative methods that promise to make death not only sustainable but beneficial to the earth have captured the imaginations of entrepreneurs and designers — and some have become legit options. Human composting (or, as proponents prefer, “natural organic reduction”) made headlines earlier this year when Recompose, the first fully operational human composting facility, opened its doors in Kent, Washington. Colorado legalized the process this year, and Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, New York, Oregon, and Vermont are considering it.
Then there’s the mushroom suit, which actor Luke Perry was famously buried in. The sleek, black “infinity burial suit” is made of organic cotton and specially cultivated fungi, which the company claims help detoxify the corpse and deliver its nutrients to the soil.
What’s shown in The Tree in the Back Yard is a form of tree burial — the burial of human remains (cremated or otherwise) in a biodegradable “pod,” from which a tree will grow, letting the remains nourish its roots. Italian company Capsula Mundi (or “the world’s capsule”) has designed egg-shaped urns intended to feed saplings planted above them. So far, the only product it has on the market is an urn for ashes, but the company intends to pilot a larger pod that could hold a human body.
Legal and cultural barriers, and the future
The largest obstacle to something like Yoon’s vision of a full graveyard of trees growing from burial pods is not the technology, but the stigmas and laws it needs to overcome.
Death is a deeply emotional, ritualistic affair in most parts of the world, and customs (or outright rules) around dealing with the dead can be stringent. “Unless you’ve got a country whose population follows one particular cultural or religious tradition, I think it’s kind of impossible to say that you’ll have a wholly burial culture or a wholly cremation culture in a country,” says Rumble. Some religions necessitate cremation, like Hinduism, while other teachings support burial in specific ways. According to Rumble, that means there will always be a need for multiple options.
But that doesn’t mean newfangled approaches like tree burial and human composting can’t be compatible with religious teaching and rituals. For Goldstein, who lives and practices in Washington, human composting has become a real option for members of his community. And although it isn’t traditional, Goldstein finds that the practice can uphold Jewish teachings and values and shouldn’t necessarily be dismissed as non-Jewish.
“I can’t declare pork to be kosher all of a sudden,” he says. “But other things have more fluidity, in terms of the intersection between spiritual values and tradition and new technologies.” Goldstein puts the onus on himself and other religious leaders to find opportunities to make meaning out of these new approaches, rather than saying no to what people of faith want for themselves or their loved ones. “Sometimes people ask me, ‘Is this OK?’ And I think that really what they’re asking is, ‘How do we make this Jewish?’”
As for simpler green burials replacing the chemical- and resource-intensive methods, other barriers must be overcome. In the Western world, the sanitized approach to handling dead bodies doesn’t just reflect our culture — it has also made its way into our laws. Some states require embalming or refrigeration of bodies that have been dead for more than 24 hours. If families haven’t planned ahead, that doesn’t leave much time to make arrangements at a natural burial ground.
“Some jurisdictions [also] mandate the use of concrete liners,” Goldstein says, which wouldn’t traditionally be used in Jewish burial and aren’t compatible with the green approach, either. In 2008, a county in Georgia passed an ordinance requiring leak-proof containers for corpses, due to a complaint about a proposed green burial site. Most states allow home burial on private property, but some also require special permits to do so and a handful of states mandate that a funeral director be on hand.
Even if it’s not law, each cemetery sets its own policies and requirements. According to the Green Burial Council, only 335 cemeteries across the U.S. and Canada offer green or conservation burial options (there are more than 144,000 total cemeteries in the U.S.). A majority of those are hybrid cemeteries, and some are also Jewish or otherwise affiliated.
But the list has been steadily growing. In 2018, 54 percent of Americans said they were considering a green burial, and 72 percent of cemeteries reported increased demand for eco-friendly options. There are all kinds of reasons for the shift, beyond the desire to live (er, die) more lightly on the planet. Natural burial options may be cheaper than ones involving ornate caskets, concrete vaults, and granite headstones. When a grave site is incorporated into the landscape, there’s no need to maintain or decorate it, which removes the fear of placing a burden on family members — or becoming the sad spectacle of an unloved grave.
And the desire to return to the earth, which has echoes in many religious teachings, appeals to many on a spiritual level. “Whether through the lenses of personal faith or secular society or science, we all recognize that circular notion of life and death,” Rumble says. Natural burial speaks directly to that, whether it’s in a simple cotton shroud or a mushroom suit. “The fact that, perhaps, you exist in some other form because your body’s gone back to the soil, that offers great solace to people,” she says.
And in fact, that very mindset shift may turn out to be more important than the emissions saved or the trees planted. As various forms of green burial begin to take root, they reinforce the idea that we humans are part of the natural world, and we have a responsibility to nurture it — in life as well as in death.
‘To discuss dying, we need to use the language of death. Not, perhaps, with the wit and beauty of Clive James, but with simplicity, describing the process by which each of us will end our lives.’
We no longer feel comfortable naming death, and we’ve lost the etiquette that told us how to support the dying and bereaved
Not for the first time, I find myself playing death-euphemism bingo as TV and radio news bulletins tell us that Clive James has “passed away” after living with leukaemia and Jonathan Miller, who had Alzheimer’s, has “passed on”. Of all the departures from life mentioned in broadcast media over the past few days, it seems the only one with a D-word attached is Gary Lineker’s dog, Snoop. Snoop died.
We are abandoning the language of death. Fear of saying the wrong thing to dying or bereaved people causes friends and family to say nothing, to “talk positive” or to avoid them altogether. Bereaved people frequently talk about others crossing the road to evade them. Mentioning death becomes impolite. Perhaps it’s even becoming rude to die.
But it isn’t only saying the words aloud that has stopped; we avoid considering our own mortality. In the UK, a country with a 100% death rate, only 40% of adults have written a will. Worse, a mere 6% of us have nominated a lasting power of attorney, a person to make medical decisions on our behalf should we become temporarily or permanently unable to do so for ourselves. In other words, we seem to take some action to manage our affairs after death, but we don’t engage in planning for the dying itself. How did this happen? And why does it matter?
As 20th-century medicine transformed our life expectancy, familiarity with death at home was replaced by an expectation that modern medicine would save the lives of those sick enough to die, and return them to health, to work and to family life. The once familiar process of dying became overlooked as hospitals used newly developed drugs, machines and operations to postpone death.
Death itself became a failure to save a life; an unwanted medical outcome; an adverse event. An increasingly secular society drifted from traditional spiritual practices around a deathbed, but found no new rituals to replace them. We no longer feel comfortable naming death, and we have lost the etiquette that told us how to visit the dying and support the bereaved.
But should it be taboo? I have seen that the dying, and the elderly who recognise that their survival is becoming a numbers game, are grateful for an opportunity to discuss their wishes, but people around them are often too uneasy to join the conversation.
Not talking about death won’t prevent dying. I recall an unconscious man in his 90s in a hospital emergency department. With multiple medical problems for years, that day he had collapsed at home and not regained consciousness. “Please do something,” begged his desperate sons.
“What did your dad say he would want to happen, if he was ever sick enough to die?” I asked them. The D-word made them blink. They looked at me like helpless rabbits caught in torchlight. They had never discussed it, they told me.
Then one of them, speaking slowly and looking anxiously at his brothers, said, “Dad did try to talk to me about it last year. I told him to stop being maudlin.” Then, one by one, his brothers described the occasions when they, too, had ducked the conversation when their father had tried to broach it. There were tears.
Their mother saved the day. She and their father had agreed that they would not want intrusive medical treatments. “Let him go, boys,” she told them. There were more tears. And then, as they sat with him around his hospital bed over the next several hours, he died the way humans die: deepening unconsciousness; automatic breathing cycles, fast then slow on repeat; some rattling as his breath bubbled through saliva at the back of his mouth; pauses between breaths. Utterly unaware. Finally, an out-breath that just wasn’t followed by another in-breath. Knowing what to expect allowed his family to recognise and follow his progress through the usual sequence of changes in breathing, helping them not to misinterpret noisy breath sounds as drowning, or distress, or breathlessness. Such misinterpretations haunt people’s bereavements.
That encounter stayed with me for a long time afterwards. We can’t keep explaining the process one family at a time. This is a public health problem: there is a pressing need to address the public (mis)understanding of dying.
To discuss dying we need to use the language of death. Not, perhaps, with the wit and beauty of Clive James, but with simplicity, describing the recognisable process by which each of us will finally end our lives. Dying is not a medical event, but a deeply personal and social experience.
Nobody ever tells me “I wish we had never talked about it”. I have lost count of those who regret not having tried.
Bobbi Manka, right, works with her colleague Jen Gallois, left, at Tyson Fresh Meats on Dec. 11, 2018, in Elgin. Manka’s co-workers helped her following the death of her husband, Dan Manka, in January 2016.
Bobbi and Daniel Manka were settling into bed after a night out dancing when Daniel stood up, clutched his chest and gasped, “911.”
Just like that, Bobbi Manka lost her husband of 44 years and gained “a hole in my heart that will never be replaced.”
But she has found comfort where she didn’t know she would: at work.
Grief after the death of a loved one inevitably follows people to work, where employers and co-workers often are unprepared to handle the immediate sorrow or the surges of pain that ambush mourners at milestones like birthdays and holidays.
Some of the shortcomings can be linked to insufficient bereavement leave policies, but often what fails is the human response to a suffering colleague.
“We have become an increasingly death-denying society,” said Amy Florian, CEO of Corgenius, a Hoffman Estates-based organization that trains businesses on how to help grieving clients and employees. “And when we don’t talk about it, we don’t know how to do it well: how to accompany people through grief.”
Florian said employers would be wise to prepare for the impact of grief on business as aging baby boomers, who are staying in the workplace longer, move toward the end of life.
“We are in for a death boom, we are in for a dementia boom,” said Florian, a fellow in thanatology, the study of death and bereavement. “All of these things are going to happen but firms are not prepared for it.”
Being prepared includes understanding that grieving individuals will cope differently, and employers should accommodate their unique needs, Florian said.
Nearly 90 percent of employers say they offer paid bereavement leave — usually three days for an immediate family member — but that’s not nearly enough time for many people, especially when the death is sudden, she said. Employers might want to consider more generous policies as well as expand them to accommodate deaths beyond immediate family, as losing an aunt or friend can be just as devastating if the relationship was close, Florian said.
No federal law requires employers to give workers time off to grieve, though Illinois has a law, which went into effect two years ago, that provides up to 10 working days of unpaid leave for the death of a child at companies with at least 50 employees.
Florian said employers also should not expect grief-stricken employees to function normally when they return to work, as their concentration is shot, their minds are disorganized and they may be prone to making mistakes. Some employees will need additional support for a month or two once they’re back on the job, such as flexible work schedules, more breaks, adjusted expectations and someone to catch errors, with the assurance that their performance reviews won’t suffer, she said.
Educating co-workers on how to best support a grieving colleague can also help. Many people fumble awkwardly as they try to express sympathy, or avoid the topic altogether because they don’t know what to say, Florian said.
“What is often very shocking for people to learn is that ‘I am so sorry’ is not the best thing to say when someone dies,” Florian said. “The focus is all wrong, it’s on the comforter and not the griever.” Better to ask about the person who died — what they were like, how it happened, making sure to use his or her name, she said. If someone doesn’t want to talk about it, they will close the door on the conversation, she said.
Bobbi Manka pokes her head into Scott Leckrone’s office at Tyson Fresh Meats on Dec. 11, 2018 in Elgin. Leckrone, Manka’s boss, and other colleagues provided emotional support to Manka after her husband died in January 2016.
Manka, 64, who lives in Genoa, a town about 65 miles northwest of Chicago, said she was surprised to discover how often people didn’t ask how she was doing after her husband died suddenly of a massive heart attack two years ago.
“They are afraid that they might trigger something and you might start crying,” she said. “Even if I did, it would have been a good thing.”
But Manka, an administrative assistant in the Tyson Foods sales office in Elgin, was pleasantly surprised at how her colleagues stepped up during her crisis, even though she’d worked at the company only two years at the time and no one from the office had met her husband — the kind of guy “who would take his shirt off and give it to anyone,” she said.
Her boss and a colleague not only attended his “celebration of life” but stayed through the event and got to know her family, she said. When her three days of bereavement leave were up and she couldn’t bring herself to return to work, she was given an extra week off unpaid. She was eager to return when she did.
“My world had been rocked so incredibly hard that coming back to work helped me, because the house was so empty,” Manka said. “Work was my safe place for a long time.”
As she struggled to adjust to her new reality, Manka sought counseling from Tyson’s chaplaincy program, a network of 100 chaplains employed by the company to help Tyson workers navigate life challenges. She found solace in the Bible verses she was given and the advice about how to help her children through their grief as she dealt with her own.
Small kindnesses in her office of 12 have made a big difference, she said. On Manka’s first birthday after her husband’s death, her co-workers presented her with a big cake and card, and told her “we want you to know you’re part of the family,” Manka said. On her wedding anniversary, or when anything happens that triggers memories, her boss can detect a shift in her mood and urges her to take a walk and clear her head.
Such accommodations pay off in the long term, Florian said.
“People who felt they were treated compassionately during times of grief are incredibly loyal to their employer,” she said.
Grief last year cost employers an estimated $113.27 billion in reduced productivity and on-the-job errors, a calculation that takes into account not only the deaths of loved ones but also other traumatic losses such as divorce or home foreclosures, according to the Grief Recovery Institute, an organization based in Bend, Ore., that trains therapists and counselors in grief recovery.
That estimate is up from $75 billion the last time the nonprofit released its Grief Index in 2002, a increase driven by inflation as well as changing workforce demographics as the population ages, said Operations Manager Ed Owens.
Yet employers are rarely proactive about addressing grief in the workplace, and typically only seek help when an employee has died and co-workers need support, said David Fireman, executive director of the Center for Grief Recovery and Therapeutic Services in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood.
“If I had my druthers, (grief training) would be a built-in component to employee orientation,” Fireman said.
While the aging population is one source of workplace grief, another is the city’s violence. Fireman’s organization last year counseled students and faculty at the Chicago Waldorf School after a teacher at the school was killed by a stray bullet while she waited at a nearby Red Line station. He continues to be available to them because “grief is a process and there might be delayed reactions,” he said.
GrieveWell, a nonprofit in Ann Arbor, Mich., that provides grief training to employers and peer-to-peer support for grieving adults, is trying to raise the profile of grief as an “unspoken public health issue” with dangerous consequences if it is not addressed, said Amy Milanovich, former executive director.
Unresolved grief, a clinical term that refers to intense mourning that persists for a long time and interferes with daily functioning, has been linked to an increase in heart disease, stroke and cancer, she said.
The workplace has become increasingly important as a source of support as community traditions that used to surround people in mourning have been cut short amid a social expectation to get back to life as usual, she said.
“Everyone around is someone who could be in grief and everyone needs to be someone who can support them,” Milanovich said. In addition to conducting business lunch-and-learns on the topic, GrieveWell offers a deeper training in active listening for employees who want to be the designated ear colleagues turn to in time of need.
ComPsych, a Chicago-based provider of employee assistance programs, has seen a steady increase in crisis counseling calls about bereavement, likely because employers have become more aware of the need for mental health support, spokeswoman Jennifer Hudson said. Employees over 60 are the most likely of all age groups to seek bereavement help, the company’s data show.
Eric Freckman, a certified financial planner in Palatine, said grief training at his firm has led to improved relationships with clients, who often find themselves navigating unfamiliar bank accounts and investments when a spouse or parent passes away. Increasingly, grief strikes even before death as more people live longer with diminished capacity, he said.
People tend to make emotional decisions around money, especially when they’re grieving, so it takes empathy to guide them to the best decision, Freckman said.
“There’s the answer in Excel of what they should do,” he said. “But getting people to actually do that is very difficult.”
Financial adviser Eric Freckman, left, meets with Keith Leust, of Barrington, at the Guillaume & Freckman office on Dec. 27, 2018, in Palatine.
Freckman said he used to be “sort of terrified” of talking with clients about their loved one’s death, and would avoid it by sticking to discussing numbers. But after training with Florian at Corgenius he feels comfortable engaging in conversations about the loss — “How did you find out?” he asks. “What was it like for you?” “Are there phone calls we can make for you?” — and leaving the paperwork to later meetings. Ninety percent of clients want to talk, and the care shown has helped solidify trust, he said.
“We keep track of people’s birthdays, we try to call and let them know we’re thinking about them, that we know it’s a hard day, the first Christmas alone,” he said. “It’s all relatively simple stuff when you think about it.”
The simple stuff can make a big difference, Florian said. She knows from experience.
Florian was 25 and a new mom to a 7-month-old boy when her husband, John, went to a business meeting and never returned. A farm insurance agent, he was killed when his car was struck broadside on a rural Iowa road on a sleety February night.
“I felt like my future had simply evaporated in an instant,” Florian said. “And nobody knew what to say to me.”
Florian, a stay-at-home mom at the time, felt “every breath was different” after that day, as she adjusted to the empty pillow, the coffee for one, the realization that “anyone could die at any time.”
She felt alone as many people avoided talking about her husband after the funeral. She was grateful to those who did, especially when they said his name.
“It’s such a comfort to know that John’s life made a difference, that someone remembers besides me,” she said. “That his death left a void in the world, not just my life.”
Florian noticed the various ways well-meaning people’s support was insufficient. They’d ask if she needed anything, but she felt bad taking advantage of those offers, worried she’d be a burden. More helpful, she said, was when people identified what needed doing and offered to do it, such as shopping for groceries, weeding the garden or babysitting her son.
Florian recalls working with a financial professional who would change the subject when she started to tear up. So she was impressed when another financial planner, on their first meeting, looked at her file and said: “I see that you are widowed. Tell me about John.”
Her experience propelled her to get a graduate degree in pastoral studies and advanced certification in grief counseling, and she taught ministry courses on death and grieving at Loyola University for 11 years.
Decades after John’s death, Florian is remarried, and her sadness lives alongside her joy. She can still be sent into a sobbing fit in the grocery store aisle when she hears a certain song – and that’s OK.
“The point of healing is not to forget,” she said. “The point is to remember.”
We’ve lost our way with death, says Kevin Toolis – but the Irish wake, where the living, the bereaved and the dead remain bound together, shows us the way things could be done
Kevin Toolis … ‘My father’s dying, his wake, his willing sharing of his own death, would too be his last parental lesson to his children and his community. A gift.’
[I]n the narrow room the old man lay close to death.
Two days before, he had ceased to speak, lapsed into unconsciousness, and the final vigil had begun. The ravages of cancer had eaten into the flesh leaving only a skeletal husk. The heart beat on and the lungs drew breath but it was impossible to tell if he remained aware.
In the bare whitewashed room, no bigger than a prison cell, 10 watchers – the mná caointe – the wailing women, were calling out, keening, sharing the last moments of the life, and the death, of this man. My father. Sonny.
“Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us now, and at the hour of our death.”
In the tight, enclosed space, the sound of this chorus of voices boomed off the walls, the ceiling, louder and louder, reverberating, verse after verse, on and on, cradling Sonny into death.
This death so open, so different from the denial of the Anglo-Saxon world would, too, be Sonny’s last parental lesson.
How to die.
If you have never been to an Irish wake, or only seen the movie version, you probably think a wake is just another Irish piss up, a few pints around the corpse and an open coffin. But you would be wrong.
Kevin’s father, Sonny Toolis.
In the Anglo-Saxon world, death is a whisper. Instinctively we feel we should dim the lights, lower our voices and draw the screens. We want to give the dead, dying and the grieving room. We say we do so because we don’t want to intrude. And that is true but not for these reasons.
We don’t want to intrude because we don’t want to look at the mirror of our own death. We have lost our way with death.
On the Irish island where my family have lived in the same village for the last 200 years, and in much of the rest of Ireland, death still speaks with a louder voice. Along with the weather reports of incoming Atlantic storms, the local Mayo country and western radio station runs a thrice daily deaths announcement enumerating the deaths and the funeral arrangements of the 10 or so daily freshly departed. There is even a phone line, 95c a minute, just so you can check up on those corpses you might have missed.
There should be nothing strange about this. In the absence of war and catastrophe, humans across the planet die at an annual rate of 1%; 200,000 dead people a day, 73m dead people a year. An even spread. It’s happening all around you even as you read this article; the block opposite, the neighbouring street and your local hospital.
If the local radio in London or New York did the same as that Mayo station, the announcer would have to read out the names of 230 dead strangers, three times a day, just to keep up.
Of course, if you live in a city such as London, where 85,000 people die each year, you would never know of these things. Such a very public naming of the dead, an annunciation of our universal mortality, would be an act of revelation in the Anglo-Saxon world. And likely deemed an outrage against “public decency” – which would almost certainly lead to advertising boycotts and protests.
More shocking still then would be the discovery of another country where the dying, like Sonny, the living, the bereaved and the dead still openly share the world and remain bound together in the Irish wake.
And death, in its very ordinariness, is no stranger.
My father, Sonny Toolis, was too a very ordinary man. He was never rich or powerful or important. He never held public office and his name never appeared in the newspapers. The world never paid him much attention and Sonny also knew the world never would. He was born poor in a village on an island, devoid of electricity, mains water and tarred roads, in much the same way the poor have been born in such places for most of human history.
Sonny never got the chance to get much of an education and worked most of his life as a foreman on building sites earning the money to pay for the university education of his seven children.
Sonny was good with his hands though. Useful to have around if things went wrong with the electric, the drains, or you needed the furniture moved. He had his limitations; he did not like strange peppery foods, he wasn’t very comfortable wearing suits, and he was terrible at giving speeches at weddings.
He did have a great singing voice, played the bagpipes and the accordion, and taught his children to sing by what he called the air – by listening along. In the 1960s, he bought a 35mm German camera, took pictures, and ran the prints off in his own darkroom. He even shot film on Super 8. But it was never more than a hobby. Like a lot of us, Sonny had some talents he would never fully realise in life.
But Sonny really did have one advantage over most of us. He knew how to die. And he knew how to do that because his island mothers and fathers, and all the generations before, had shared their deaths in the Irish wake and showed him how to die too.
His dying, his wake, his willing sharing of his own death, would too be his last parental lesson to his children and his community. A gift.
The wake is among the oldest rites of humanity first cited in the great Homeric war poem the Iliad and commonly practised across Europe until the last 200 years. The final verses of the Iliad, the display of the Trojan prince Hector’s corpse, the wailing women, the feasting and the funeral games, are devoted to his wake. And such rituals would be easily recognisable to any wake-goer on the island today.
For our ancestors, a wake, with its weight of obligations between the living and the bodies of the dead, and the dead and living, was a pathway to restore natural order to the world, heal our mortal wound, and communally overcome the death of any one individual. An act, in our current, thin psychological jargon, of closure.
Through urbanisation, industrialisation and the medicalisation of death, the wake died away in most of the western world and death itself came to be silenced by what might be called the Western Death Machine. But out in the west, among the Celts, this ancient form of death sharing lives on.
When he was 70, my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer – still among the most fatal cancers among western men. Sonny never flinched. He did not want to die but when he knew he had no choice, he never wasted the time he had left. He wasn’t angry or embittered but something wiser – he accepted his death. He got on with his dying the same way as he had got on living, day by day, pressing forward, husbanding his energy.
Sonny’s time had come but neither he nor his community denied his impending death. Unlike the shunning of the Anglo-Saxon world, his house filled with visitors who came to see him because he was dying.
Dying is an exhausting, self-centring act. Sonny, always a powerful physically imposing man, rapidly shed powers like a snake shedding skin. His world shrank to two rooms and Sonny knew he would never see the end of that fateful summer.
Sonny’s fatherhood was ending and my own beginning. Our last words together on his deathbed were very ordinary, bland. “I’ll let you go, son,” he said as I left to return to the city. When I returned, he had lapsed into a coma and could no longer speak.
But our parting was fitting. There was no more mystery to share. No revelation to be uncovered. Our identities as father and son had already been written out in the deeds of our life together; Sonny changing my nappy, not losing his temper in my teenage contrariness, encouraging me in my education and the summers we shared on building sites when I worked alongside him while still a student. And in all the countless ways he showed me in his craft how to be a man and father myself.
Sonny died just before dawn on the longest day of the year at home in the village of ancestors. No one called for help, or the “authorities”. He was already home with us. His body was washed and prepared for his coffin by his daughter and sister-in-law. He was laid out in his own front sitting room in an open coffin as his grandchildren, three, five and nine, played at the coffin’s feet.
His community, his relatives, some strangers even, came in great numbers to pray at his side, feast, talk, gossip about sheep prices or the stock market, and openly mark his death in countless handshakes and “Sorry for your trouble” utterances.
We waked together through the night with Sonny’s corpse to guard the passage out for his departing soul and man the Gate of Chaos against Hades’ invading horde lest the supernatural world sought to invade the living world. Just as the Trojans too before us had watched over Hector’s corpse. A perpetual quorum; dying in each other’s lives and living on in each other’s deaths at every wake ever since.
It was blessing of a kind, an act of grace. We give ourselves, our mortal presence, in such death sharings, or we give nothing at all; all the rest of our powers, wealth, position, status, are useless.
To be truly human is to bear the burden of our own mortality and to strive, in grace, to help others carry theirs; sometimes lightly, sometimes courageously. In communally accepting death into our lives through the Irish wake we are all able to relearn the first and oldest lessons of humanity. How to be brave in irreversible sorrow. How to reach out to the dying, the dead and the bereaved. How to go on living no matter how great the rupture or loss. How to face your own.
And how, like Sonny, to teach your children to face their death too.
Knowing how to communicate about death gives us the language to discuss end-of-life topics.
By Deb Rawlings, Christine Sanderson, Deborah Parker, Jennifer Tieman and Lauren Miller-Lewis
[T]alking about death and dying is taboo in many parts of the world.
So it’s no wonder many people avoid talking about it. Or they struggle to find the right words.
Whereas once, we were more comfortable talking about death, now we have become creative in avoiding talking about it.
We resort to euphemisms (alternative words that are softer or less direct) to soften the blow.
For instance, we talk about people “passing” or “gone” rather than they’ve died or are dead, just two examples from a rich history and range of euphemisms we discovered in our research.
What we did and what we found
We ran an online course, open to anyone around the world, on death and dying.
The aim was to open conversations about the topic, and to promote understanding about death as a natural part of life.
Over two years, we asked 3,116 participants from 39 countries about how they talked about death and dying.
They told us of alternative words or phrases to describe death instead of the words “death” or “dead”.
They volunteered varied, often humorous alternatives such as: “wrong side of the grass”, “taking a dirt nap”, “worm food”, “cashed in their chips” and “staring at the lid”.
But the most widely used euphemism was “gone”. Variants of “passed” were also very popular, like “passed away”, “passed over” and “passed on”.
Some of the euphemisms we found for death and dying. The larger the print, the more common they were.
There were also historical phrases that still make sense today, such as: “shuffled off” or “shuffled off this mortal coil,” from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (published early 1600s); “six feet under” (from around 1665, referring to how deep plague victims needed to be buried); and “promoted to glory” (used by the Salvation Army since the 19th century).
One common Australianism was “carked it” (also spelled “karked it”), a phrase that confused participants from other countries.
Some participants said euphemisms were acceptable if it was culturally inappropriate to be more direct.
This was particularly so for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander participants, who preferred “finishing up” and “passed away”.
People mainly said they used euphemisms because the words “dead” or “dying” could upset people or were too harsh.
Some participants said they had heard many euphemisms, but wouldn’t dream of using some, for instance “kicked the bucket”, for fear of causing offence.
Most participants said they speak openly about death and dying but could understand why others don’t.
Over two-thirds of participants were health professionals, and while many of them were comfortable talking in plain language, they often used the phrase “passed away” in some situations rather than “died”.
Many participants use euphemisms when others do, and are guided by them in conversation.
Is this a problem?
Does it really matter if people use such euphemisms? Not always.
But sometimes euphemisms can lead to misunderstandings and confusion. Think of the commonly used “gone”.
One participant talked of an aunt who was waiting to hear about the health of her husband.
The aunt received a phone call telling her that her husband had “gone” so she asked which nursing home he was transferred to.
The caller had the awkward task of clarifying her husband had died.
Then there’s the word “lost”. One participant received a phone call from a friend who had “lost” her mum:
I was confused and said, “Why? Where did she go? How can she be lost?
Other participants talked of receiving condolences such as “I’m sorry you have lost your son,” only to wonder whether they should feel careless in misplacing him.
Communicating about death and dying is important
Euphemisms have their place. But being able to talk openly (and clearly) about death and dying is important as it helps normalise death and avoids confusion.
If health professionals use euphemisms, they need to consider whether patients really understand what they’re trying to say.
