Interestingly, I have noticed that Death has been a recurring theme in my daily life, whether in the clinic, with patients, or in ordinary conversations with friends and/or colleagues in the trivial encounters of life. Maybe because I opened a door for her when I wrote my last text, “Death and Dying”, or maybe simply because she is as natural as waking up every morning.
The fact is that we talk little or nothing about the real death of the body. In the text quoted above, I wrote and raised questions about the many symbolic deaths that we have in the various stages of life, but here I want to reflect on this death that literally takes us away, this death that deprives us of the physical presence of those we love, that punctuates the finitude of our physical body and that it hurts, it hurts a lot.
The first question is: why don't we talk about death? Why does this subject bother us so much that we prefer to pretend that we will never experience this?
I never forget that, at the beginning of college, a few years ago, I had to do a work on death and one of the authors I read was Maria Julia Kovacs who brought reports of terminal patients about the experience of death. I remember being surprised to learn that one of the greatest, if not the greatest, suffering for most of them was the pain they believed they caused their family members as a result of their end-of-life diagnosis and the grief they would go through. This suffering for causing suffering in the other generated a silence and an abyss between those involved. Last week, in a conversation at the bakery, I heard from a colleague, whose mother passed away earlier this year, that she and her mother didn't exchange a single word about death and dying during all the treatment and the time they spent together before. of death to happen.
If, on the one hand, we have suffering for causing suffering in those who stay, on the other hand, we have fear, discomfort, incapacity and so many other feelings that prevent those who will stay from opening a space for talking and listening to those who are experiencing the departure. . This is very serious! This is something we need to rethink!
It is necessary to talk about death and the grief that we begin to experience even before it arrives. You have to hear about death!
She is the basic condition of the human being, so we can even fool ourselves, trying to leave her in a dark room, but at any time and without warning she takes us, invades our days, but still we try to push her back into that room. So ask yourself, preferably aloud, "What does death mean to you?"
Propose this topic in a circle of friends during a regular meeting and raise questions about this topic with your family. There are so many opportunities to talk about it – soap operas, songs, movies, books, the death of acquaintances – so it's hard not to talk about something that is in our routine. Strange is that we play dead in the face of death.
And this strangeness leads me to the second question: when we are faced with the real possibility of death, whether ours or someone else's, what do we feel? Is this feeling so frightening that it robs us of words to the point of shutting us up and throwing us into a lonely abyss? Search in your memory what your encounters with death were like and allow yourself to feel the sensations arising from these memories. Open yourself to a reunion and be surprised by the strength that life gains in the face of death.
I've had a few dates. In the first one, I was a child and was taken to a wake (at that time, they took place in the families' homes, in their living rooms). Not understanding what was going on there, I kept playing, until an uncle picked me up and took me to the coffin to see the dead woman (she was my mother's godmother, if I'm not mistaken). She was lying there, still and with her eyes open. Strange… Very strange to see a dead person with their eyes open. I never forgot that scene. How is it possible to die and be alive? After all, for me, when I was a kid, having my eyes open was being alive. Of course I didn't want to go into that room anymore, I felt fear and distrust of that thing that was being dead. But a few years passed and going to wakes (no longer in houses) was something that was repeated a few times, not because of the deaths of family members or acquaintances, on the contrary. My maternal grandmother liked to go to wakes because they had accordion players, cookies and cafes, and that was a walk in the countryside. As I stayed with her, sometimes we walked along Avenida Saudade and the weight of those open eyes was lost in front of so many closed eyes. Fear and strangeness gave way to conversations.
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Another encounter was in adolescence, when all we believe we have is a pulsating life, dreams and rebellions to be lived intensely. It's a phase in which we lived the present with all the strength it could have. We laughed and cried like it was the last or only time. It was the time to live in a group, so friends were inseparable, until death knocked on our door and took one of us at 16, just like that, without warning, one night, returning from a club. And we were never the same again! Abruptly, the naivety of eternal youth was stripped from me. How can I die so young? How do you die from nothing, without being sick? What do you mean at sixteen to see a friend also at sixteen in a coffin and bury him? I remember having a fit of laughter in the middle of the wake. I just laughed and couldn't stop. Laugh at despair, at pain, at not knowing what to do there. That laugh denounced madness, the madness that is when a person ceases to exist, still existing in my history and in my memory. Maybe that was my first grief. I remember how the days after this friend's funeral went, how the group's reunions were filled with strangeness, sadness and silence.
Now, in my adult life, I have had a sublime encounter with death, a beautiful and unforgettable encounter that touched something so deep and sacred in me and that has made me feel a little intimate with it ever since. It was with my father-in-law. We were accompanying him in one of his numerous hospitalizations. He was terminally ill, lying on his bed, his left hand holding his eldest son's, his right hand holding his middle son's and, at his feet, his wife caressing and thanking the life they had lived together, thanking company they made for each other. I was sitting there on the couch, watching this scene and seeing in the equipment that death was approaching. I looked and felt the love, the sadness, the relief, the tears and all the contradiction that living and dying can have. I felt gratitude for being there, witnessing and living that moment when death arrived and took my father-in-law. And he was feeling the love of his children and his partner, he was knowing and feeling that he was not alone. He went after looking at each of us and seeing himself in our eyes, then I realized that there is no better way to meet death.
After these very personal accounts, to close this text I leave one last question: “If you could choose between a sudden death and an announced one, what would your choice be?”.
I want it announced. I want to have the chance to say goodbye, to convey what I'm feeling, to cry and laugh at the life I've lived. I want to be able to hug my son, my husband and whoever else is by my side in this coming time. I want to tell everyone that it was worth it, that it was beautiful and that, whatever awaits us, let's not be afraid to live death and talk about it. I want to be able to say that they can suffer and that I am suffering with them because of this farewell. I want to be able to ask them to experience grief, but to continue living, moving forward and being happy.
To die like this, of sudden death, only if we are all going to die together, otherwise I want to live every second I can, I want to die a very dead death, I want to look into her eyes and say that she is not a monster, but only a mystery worth unraveling. I want to stay here writing a lot, but I have an even greater desire, which is to read what you have to say about death. Tell me! Talk about death with anyone, but TALK!
