My family all dealt differently with my death.
I say my death because when you are diagnosed with a potentially fatal disease, you see yourself dying. The “potential” part gets thrown aside and everyone goes screaming into their imagination, haunting themselves with your grisly ending. My husband retreated, watched movies all night, distracted himself with work and ordered enough take-out for a Bar Mitzvah. When I nudged him to go to a support center, he said, “I can’t change the situation, so what’s the point? When I talk about it, I feel worse.”
As a group, we didn’t talk to each other about it. My college age children were in different countries, and my husband and I reported about the logistics of my care and updated them on my treatment. But we did not talk about death itself. I took long walks on the heath and imagined my family without me. At one point, I even decided on the bench they could put a plaque on to memorialize me. But I didn’t tell anyone. Strange for such a close family to be going through this trauma isolated in our own frigid towers.
Ten years later when I finished writing this book and my husband read it, he said, “If I had read this, I would have been able to talk to the kids and you. We could have gone through it together.” As Atul Gawande says about conversations about death, "If end-of-life discussions were an experimental drug, the FDA would approve it." And yet, in this country, only one third of US adults have an advanced directive.
I know why we didn’t speak about it. The death taboo in this country will strike you silent. But I have learned by jumping into the fire how to comfort those who are dying and come to some acceptance about my own exit. I now feel a sense of rightness about dying (although I hope it happens in my late 80s), and free to do the necessary things. When death makes another collect call, I’ll be ready and maybe have some hand in the shaping of the experience.
This book is a kind of death plunge pool. If we reckon with death, transformation can happen. Talking and thinking about death constructively is so much better than ruminating in terror. And we can handle it.
When we are conscious that we will die, we can alter how we live. Accepting its inevitability can make us grab on joyfully to the rope swing of the present, always aware of the deep water below. So as Thelma and Louise say at the end of their movie, “Let’s keep going” before they drive off a cliff.
