"Death and dying is that definitive experience in adulthood where we reconnect with what it felt like as a child to need, to want, to find dependency again. It’s that experience where we reconnect with the wild, but some adults have become too rigid, too in control for the wild of death."
-Caleb Wilde, Confessions of a Funeral Director: How the Business of Death Saved My Life
When I almost died at age 16, I didn't see a white light. I do remember the bright lights of the doctor's office penetrating my eyelids that kept fluttering closed; but otherwise, nothing. None of the "life flashing before your eyes" thing, either. It was just like going to sleep, but without the dreaming. My body was shutting down so fast from my liver failure that I wasn't having many thoughts at all, as my mom threw me into the backseat of our car and carried me around the doctor's office, screaming. I remember being annoyed at all the fuss between bouts of losing consciousness, and then waking up to find my skin yellow and an IV port in my ankle. Disoriented, I asked what had happened, and I was told that I almost died. I remembered thinking, "wow, that was actually pretty underwhelming." This was not my first brush with death, though it was the closest I'd come to actually peacing out forever, and it wouldn't be the last time, either.
I grew up with God- and death-fearing Irish Catholics, and the sheer lack of discussion about mortality and what comes after really charged the topic with tons of anxiety for me, especially since I've been pretty obsessed with and fascinated by death for as long as I can remember. And like my parents, I used to be terrified of it. Being as sick as I was as a teen, I lamented about death every day and imagined just how awful it would be. Besides the pain and loss of control, I associated death with the unnatural smell and look of embalmed deceased family members and the nauseated feeling these open casket wakes would bring me. After that liver episode, and as my health progressively worsened, I became pretty comfortable with the inevitability of my early demise. You could even say I made friends with death after 16 years of being sworn enemies. (This is not in a suicidal way, to be clear. Death is simply a very tangible possibility for someone as sick as I was, and I had to learn to live with that reality).
Growing up Catholic in the Bronx, wakes were a commonplace social event, and I've been to more than I count. I have lost many family members and a handful of friends, so death outside of myself is something I learned to accept early on in my life. While this odd death ritual of hollowing out, poisoning and dressing up the dead bodies of loved ones to put on display seemed to provide comfort and closure to those around me, it only gave me nightmares and spoiled my memory of the deceased. I couldn't help but wonder if this is how my relatives really wanted to be remembered, because it's pretty hard to get the image of their pale, powdered-up body out of your head. I always knew I certainly didn't want an open casket wake and I was mortified at the thought of my parents inevitably choosing that for me if I didn't survive through high school. So, I began writing up my death plans and last living will and testament in my bed after my recent yellow-faced brush with death. It didn't make me nervous to face my own death in this way; if anything, it felt practical. It eased my anxiety knowing that I was being proactive in ensuring my death plan was carried out to my liking. At that time, that meant being cremated and swapping out the Irish tradition of crying over my death in all black for the Irish tradition of getting drunk and being merry. My death plan has changed since then, but that's for another day.
By that point, and particularly after more signs of deterioration my body presented to me and my family, I had gone through all the stages of grieving that I was reading about in my high (home) school psychology class at the time, which made for some eyebrow-raising essays on my perception of death and Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's work. Death became such a friend of mine that I developed a fascination with all things morbid, grotesque to others. In high school, I consumed countless books and documentaries about the country's most brutal murderers and serial killers. I used to watch the Saw franchise before bed to help get me to sleep. (Don't ask why this was the only thing that stopped my night terrors because I cannot tell you. I've only had one nightmare I can remember about a horror movie I saw - one of the Nightmare on Elm Street films that reminded me of painful ear wax extractions in pediatrician's offices - which is impressive considering ages 8-18, I watched at least three horror movies a week.)
In college, I heavily researched right-to-die laws and the blurry line between life and death once brain activity has ceased but family members refuse to pull the plug because they still see and feel their loved one in a way that doctors may not perceive. I'm a faithful viewer and reader of Caitlin Doughty, who has a YouTube channel (called "Ask A Mortician") and multiple books confronting the topic of death, the death positivity movement and her experience as a mortician at length. If my disabilities allowed me to work outside of the home one day, I want to be a hospice worker, a death doula, or a mortician. This is not something I normally advertise to people, as we live in such a death-negative society and I'm afraid people will think I'm crazy.
I spent a lot of time in nursing homes when my PopPop and great aunt Florrie resided there in their last months of life, and I dissected the goings-on, especially the dysfunction, within these institutions. When my family did everything they could to avoid the fatal reality of my great Aunt Florrie's situation, uncomfortable being around her deteriorating state in an honest and engaged way, I served as her death doula with pride. The hours of soothing, loving touch we shared, talking about life and her fears, and the role I played as her deceased sister once she began forgetting who I was is hands down the most nourishing and spiritual experience I've ever had. It was an honor and a privilege to be Florrie's guide crossing over to the Other Realm, a heartbreaking and beautiful reminder of the temporary nature of all things, and the beauty in our reversed roles towards the end of her life. Of course, it was hard. But being there was necessary. Death is an enormous part of living, of the human experience, after all. I grieve every day for Florrie and PopPop, but the beauty of their life, legacy and the intense impact they had on this world before they left is never lost on me.
I don't believe in heaven. I believe when I die, my consciousness lives on, or at least my life force, and that can later find a home in a human baby, a crow or even a sunflower. But my family believes deeply in the concept of heaven (they don't believe in Hell, which is refreshing), so I like to imagine all my deceased relatives in the heavenly realm they've talked about in life, reunited with spouses, siblings and parents they relished in seeing again in their dying days. I personally don't get the whole "embalming and displaying dead bodies to cry over" thing, but I do appreciate it for a couple of reasons. One, it's extremely moving to see the impact of closure that seeing the dead, with efforts made to make the deceased look alive, one last time has on my family and many others. It's sure as hell not for me, but it makes me happy that, in a family that makes very few emotionally healthy choices, my relatives have a ritual that works for them. But also, and perhaps most importantly, being exposed to so many dead bodies starting at such a young age really helped me get comfortable with the appearance and inevitability of death. Still, this particular death ritual troubles me deeply and I avoid beholding the unnaturally arranged and done up dead body at every wake I've been to as an adult. I especially won't touch or kiss the body if I do get pressured into kneeling at the casket because the last time I did that, it was very troubling.
Did you know that morticians have to go out of their way to make sure an embalmed body doesn't leak at open casket viewings? And did you know that folks who have died of things like liver or kidney failure tend to make the leakiest corpses? Well, one precaution they take to avoid leakage is wrapping the body in bubble and/or seran wrap before dressing them. Well, my grandma was the last embalmed body I touched and she died of kidney failure...so, she was a little leaky. When I went to touch her hand, I heard the sound of bubble wrap shifting under her outfit. And unfortunately, a little leak of corpse juice was forming a small stain on her satin blouse. That was just too much for me, to be honest, especially when it's my Mema.
But having to be in a room with a dead person among crying relatives who, as the night goes on, turn into chatty and laughing family members nursing a drink or a cookie in a napkin, being with death started feeling normal, and less and less scary.
The only thing that bugs me, especially since it seems to only cause more pain and suffering for my loved ones, is my family's practice of completely avoiding the topic of ancestors; as if in death, their mom or sister or cousin or child ceased to exist, erasing much of their legacy and stifling Big Grief in order to avoid reliving the emotional pain. I tend to be much more death positive. As my appreciation for the Catholic wakes I've been to and "Ask A Mortician" might indicate, I approach the subject from a place of curiosity and reverence rather than fear. I tell stories about my ancestors all the time. I connect with ancestral spirits, visit graves and contemplate what it means to be alive (since death tends to inspire those thoughts in me). I have an ancestor altar in my home, and I keep my PopPop's World War II uniform and a sweater of Florrie's that still has her smell on it in my closet to serve as a constant reminder of their continuous presence in my life. Loss is still loss, but isn't the power of grief so amazing? I feel it directly correlates with the power of that person's presence and love on you and, wow, we are so lucky as humans to be blessed with people who make us feel that way when they're gone.
"Instead of giving a timetable to grief and how we relate to the death, an icon or a shrine accepts that grief and death are still here with us even now because we simply have ongoing bonds with the deceased...You aren’t sick with grief; you’re healthy with grief. And you don’t need closure; grief will always be the in-between, and that's okay."
-Caleb Wilde, Confessions of a Funeral Director
Death isn't something we can control or avoid. So, like with other things my anxious brain has obsessed about over the years, I've learned ruminating on something like that doesn't change anything for better or for worse. Death is death. There's nothing I can do about it.
I see it as a time of release and mercy when I see family members who, in the end, are completely at peace with their pending death and welcome it with open arms. That's a pretty beautiful thing to see, especially since not everyone completes the grieving process before they die. I see it as a time to reflect on the dying or deceased person's impact on the world, and how little pieces of them live on in me and the natural world around me. I see sitting bedside during someone's deterioration as a rich time for encouraging storytelling and following up on my responsibility to honor and remind others of the legacy of the dying. I learned a lot about my great Aunt Florrie in her last months of life, as she blessed me with story after story she had never told me before. She also, for the first time, communicated her feelings to me, and, in her deteriorating mental state, I served as a guide as she began to relive childhood traumas I was learning about for the first time.
In Wicca, the cycle of birth, death and rebirth in nature is seen as the central truth of existence and is embraced whole-heartedly. In my craft, this includes manifestation spells (birth), banishing/release spells (death) and starting new chapters in life facilitated by this life-death-rebirth cycle. This is why I gravitate towards death-centered goddesses like The Morrigan and Hekate.
We see the cycle of life every day: in the moon's phases, in plants dying in the winter and returning in the spring, in the falling leaves, bare trees and juicy new buds. We see it in the ravens picking apart animal carcasses, in little baby rats being born, and in the snakes when they shed their skin to start over, renewed. Life and death are everywhere, and they cannot be independent of one another.
I've been severely ill so many times in my life that I still experience a wide-eyed euphoria when I come out of things as small as a depression or the flu. I'm aware that I'm apart of this life-death-rebirth cycle, and so I relish in knowing every day that I am blessed with waking up or getting out of bed or having less pain in my body. But at the same time, when I'm hitting rock bottom with my health, I don't fear death, either. I'm actually grateful for the reminder of my mortality, and for my body to be apart of the cycles of this big, beautiful universe that is so much bigger than myself; that I, too, will experience the transition and rite of passage known as Death. So why not embrace it?
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