Monthly Archives: June 2024

death

How talking about death can help us live better

The experience of being with my husband while he died was incredibly moving. It was heartbreaking and almost unbearable . . . and at the same time, it felt magical. I know magical may be a much more fanciful word than you were expecting in reference to death. I’m surprised to be using it, actually, and yet it feels accurate.

Being with Tom as he left this life felt momentous. I choose to believe that Tom still exists somewhere in some form and seeing myself as someone shepherding him into that next adventure felt like an honor. It was one of the most moving and special experiences of my life, and it filled me with a deep reverence for life itself. When I add up all these feelings in one word, I am left with magical.

For years, I’ve been captivated by the Ram Dass quote, “We’re all just walking each other home.” Being with my husband when he died felt like walking him home, being with him as he went to a place I couldn’t follow him to. Parting ways was heart wrenching, but the walk was a deep honor. Since then, I’ve felt such gentleness toward my fellow humans, recognizing that I am walking alongside them on their walk home, even if it’s just for a few moments. That realization makes every interaction feel special—and it is, I just didn’t always recognize that.

As someone who spent most of their life deeply fearing death, I was amazed to have such a powerfully positive experience with a loved one’s death. It was also tremendously devastating, leading to horrible anxiety and an intense grieving process that I expect will last until I die. The powerfully positive doesn’t cancel out the tremendously devastating. They exist simultaneously.

A few months after my husband’s death, I attended a grief support group in which one of the other participants mentioned being a death doula. I knew the term doula in reference to birth, but I had never heard of a death doula, so after the meeting, I googled it. I was intrigued.

Death doulas, also called end-of-life doulas, function much like birth doulas. Just as a birth doula shepherds a human into life, a death doula shepherds them out. Death doulas also support family members and loved ones in their grief. Death doulas can serve different functions for different clients, but it all boils down to being a supportive companion for a dying person and/or their loved ones. I immediately knew I was interested in being a death doula.

Last month, I started an 8-week course that will end with me being a certified death doula. What I most appreciate about the training is the constant reminder that people who are dying are still alive. Until a person is dead, they are alive and should be treated with all the respect we give the living. A lot of being a death doula is facilitating people living to their fullest for as long as they can.

Another important aspect of the work and one way we demonstrate respect for dying people is by being honest with them about their impending death. Instead of pussy-footing around the subject or sugar-coating it, death doulas talk openly with clients about pain, the process of dying, and death’s aftermath. If a client wants to know what death feels like, we tell them what we know rather than changing the subject. We support dying clients in having difficult conversations with their loved ones about what will happen after they die.

This is the kind of honest, straightforward talk I craved after my husband died.

I am also quite interested in working with people who do not have a terminal illness or any reason to believe their death is imminent but, like me, they want to get right with death, which in a lot of ways actually means getting right with the life you’ve lived and will live.

For me, recognizing the certainty that I will die and leave behind so many people that I love so crazy much inspires me to savor the deliciousness of every moment I have with them. It makes me see an afternoon nap not as a waste of time but as a delicious luxury, a few minutes of doing something just for the pleasure of it. It makes me a better listener. It reminds me that when I die, no one will remember me for how much I got done but for how I made them feel.

grieving

Three Years Out: Grief Is Familiar + Life Is Good

My husband has been dead now for three years. My life feels good. I’m comfortable with who I am. I date, I socialize, I host small dinners, I dance. I don’t feel injured all the time, like I did for a long time after his death.

The shifts in my grief during the third year have been subtle. While the first two years felt like they were full of upheaval and big tasks—going through the garage, learning how to be a homeowner, getting comfortable being the only human in the house—the third year has felt quieter.

A lot hasn’t changed in the third year. My husband’s picture is still on the lock screen of my phone and I still have some photos of him around the house. I still chant for his wellbeing. I see my therapist once every three weeks, and I attend a support group meeting every month or so.  

Moving forward in the third year hasn’t looked dramatic. At two years out, I posted about still not being able to camp or raft and not being ready to part with my husband’s sock collection. I haven’t camped or rafted yet but doing a grief float is still on my radar. I have started giving away his socks to people who knew him.

Grief is familiar now, which makes it easier to tolerate, but it is no less intense or real. I don’t miss my husband any less or love him any less. It’s possible I love him even more. More time to reflect has meant more time to miss him and appreciate what he brought to my life. Writing this blog and memoir pieces keeps me in touch with my pain.

The saying that time heals is not true for me. Time has made the grief more familiar and comfortable but not less. Or perhaps I misunderstood what people meant when they told me, “It will get easier.” I thought they meant the pain would go away. I never believed them, having learned from my mother’s death 43 years ago that losing someone you love is a forever pain, but I hoped my suspicions were built on cynicism.

There are still rough days, but even the rough days are easier to tolerate than they used to be. A rough day doesn’t last a full day any more—it’s more like a rough half day lately. I still have the gut-wrenching full body sobs from time to time, but generally, I can function with my grief in the background. Again, not because there’s less of it or it’s less powerful, but because I am used to it now. I’ve learned how to function with it in the background and that feels normal to me now.

The biggest change for me in year three has been dreaming about him. For the first two years, I hardly ever dreamt about him, but in the third year, I have dreamt about him often. It’s always the post-stroke Tom in my dreams.

I have a lot of dreams where he’s walking. Very slowly, but he’s walking. In my dreams, I’m usually living my current life and he’s there, walking slowly toward me or with me. In my dreams, we’ve gone to street fairs, held hands on the beach, traveled to Europe and Africa, relaxed in hammocks together. In my dreams we dance together, him using a walker or standing nearly still while I shimmy around him. In my dreams, he’s disabled but there’s no pain and no drug haze. He’s always happy and at peace.

Sometimes I’m not sure if something is a dream or a sleepy memory. Often after I’ve put fresh sheets on the bed, he shows up in a dream snuggling into bed with a little sigh of satisfaction, just like he did in life. He pesters me to make him fried chicken and German chocolate cake. The dream Tom is exactly as he was in life.

I wake up from the dreams feeling happy and connected to him. Those dreams are the biggest gift of the third year.

death

What To Talk about with a Dying Person

Several years ago, one of my favorite colleagues was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer and her doctors anticipated she would die within a few months. The diagnosis was a shock. She was close to retirement and had been eagerly anticipating post-retirement life. She told me the news in her customary no frills way: “I’m a dead person.”

But she wasn’t dead yet and for the months she had left, I had no idea what to talk to her about. I saw her many times after I knew she was dying and every time, I carefully avoided the topic of her death. But it seemed pointless to pick up our usual conversation topics, which revolved around work, writing, and travel. None were relevant to her anymore.

I did my best to steer our conversations to our children or our shared history of living in Virginia—topics that felt “safe” to me. She wanted to talk about how her wife would fare as a widow, but I mistakenly thought I should just tell her not to worry about that and trust that her wife would be fine. In hindsight, I wish I had invited her to share her anxieties about her wife instead of shutting them down.

My husband wanted to talk about his death and how I would manage, too. He didn’t have a terminal diagnosis, but he felt that his death was imminent after the stroke and the seemingly endless complications he suffered. Three months after his stroke and nine months before he died, he begged me to talk to him about his death. I reluctantly agreed, certain that the conversation wasn’t necessary and would just be horribly depressing.

It was a very difficult conversation, but we both felt immensely better afterward. We were both able to feel peace, knowing that nothing was left unsaid between us. That conversation allowed me to remove him from life support when the time came with a clear conscience.

My friend and my husband are not unusual in their desire to talk about their deaths and the aftermath. I am learning now in a class I’m taking to become certified as an end-of-life doula that dying people often want to talk about their death and how their loved ones will do afterwards.

I wish I had told my friend how much I would miss her. I told her I loved her, but I wish I had told her how much I would miss our conversations and her dry humor. I wish instead of brushing off her concerns about her wife I had invited her to share her worries. I thought my job was to resolve those worries or minimize them, but it’s clear to me now that I was wrong.

My therapist would remind me that I did the best I could at the time. I did not yet know how to hold space. I did not understand that when you are talking to a person who knows they are dying, they get to pick the topics. This is only fair since their time is limited. Whatever they want to talk about should be talked about.

Now I know.

Now I think “what’s on your mind?” might be the best question to open with. From there, allow silence, allow your own discomfort, and put aside your ideas about what “should” be talked about. It’s not really about you. If a topic comes up that you don’t know how to talk about, it’s ok to say, “I don’t know how to talk about this.” Let them talk about it. Maybe all you need to do is listen.

Aging, Buddhist life

Embracing Aging

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This month I’ll turn 55. I hated birthdays as a child because of family dysfunction, but after my stroke when I was 27, birthdays finally felt meaningful. Making it to 28 did seem like something to celebrate. Now I celebrate all birthdays with gusto—mine as well as those of other people. So much can happen in a year and I love taking the time to reflect on that and appreciate it.

Even the difficult events and developments of a year can be seen as milestones worth savoring. Living three years without my husband is a grim milestone, but it’s also motivated me to explore being a hospice volunteer and becoming a living kidney donor, two things I’m very excited about. I’m proud of the ways I’ve grown out of necessity in my 55th year—for example, taking “date night dancing” off my calendar and reframing my relationship with my house. I don’t regret the growth, despite it all coming from adversity.

Aging means facing adversity. There’s no way around it; with aging comes loss—loss of relationships, loved ones, ambitions, and more. Sometimes because of those losses, we grow. Other times, the losses open up opportunities. Other gifts of aging come simply with age itself.

When I hit 47, the age my mother was when she died, I thought about how I was having experiences that come with age that she never got to have, like having a relationship with my teenage daughter. When my sister and I traveled together, I did so with the knowledge that my mother and her sister never got to do that. When I had my first hot flash, I laughed out loud, thinking, “Well, Mom, you never got that treat, did you?”

Once my husband died at 61, the lesson was sharpened: aging is something not everyone gets to do. The aspects of aging I might have complained about in the past now take on a different meaning: they are things he will not get to do. It’s easy to think of aging as a series of bleak losses. Our independence and health may ebb away or disappear suddenly. Loved ones continue to die. With those losses, though, we may find unexpected spaciousness.

I don’t mean that we ever stop missing or loving what we have lost, but that in addition to those losses, there are some gains. And those gains can be appreciated and even celebrated. I welcome my new interest in hospice work, which feels like a calling.

I’m trying to approach aging in both a practical way—it will happen whether I like it or not, so might as well make the best of it—and a Buddhist way, which is to reduce suffering by letting go of attachments. For example, when I recognize myself feeling attached to things my younger body could do easily that are now not so easy, I try to be grateful for the ease of the past rather than angry about the loss. Anger about the loss assumes I have a right to hold on to that ease. But it was temporary, like everything.

I do enjoy many aspects of aging. Feeling less pressure to please others is quite liberating. Being comfortable in my body, familiar in a loving and appreciative way with its quirks, is lovely. I wish my husband had gotten to experience more of aging’s rewards.

Many of the wonderful gifts I am experiencing with aging are available only because I’ve suffered losses. Several of my most cherished relationships deepened with my husband’s stroke and death. The older we get, the more likely it is that we will experience loss. Every loss will hurt—I don’t think that ever stops—and also present opportunities to connect with others.

The loss that comes with aging also provides motivation to reflect on what matters. I have clarity today about what matters that I couldn’t have had earlier in life simply because it took me 55 years of history on this planet to get there. That clarity was earned.