Did you know, you are going to die!
Have you considered what it’s going to feel like. Look like. Sound like.
If you have considered your own mortality, chances are its going to have been in a way that is ‘other’ to yourself. We are getting pretty good as a society , talking about death as an abstract thing that happens to someone else without ever really considering what that reality means for us.
Death can be messy or clean. Loud or quiet. Death can be alone or in company. There can be tears of anguish or relief. There can be pain or peace. While we might know all this, we rarely put ourselves in the picture.
If you talk to people diagnosed with a terminal illness, or read things they write, you will often come across the concept of ‘before’ and ‘after’ they knew they were dying. Now before their diagnosis, like you – they knew they were dying. After their diagnosis it becomes their reality. No longer an idea.
I think that in society, if we think of death at all, it is as an abstract, a thought, an idea – something for them but not for us.
An example of this is when someone gets old, we see it as a beautiful act of compassion to help that person – be it feed them, wash them, dress them, help them walk, write, read…. And yet so often the following breath speaks words to the effect of – that won’t be me, I don’t want the indignity of someone doing that for me. We reconcile people going into Nursing Homes as being the best place for them, all the while never wanting to end up in one ourselves. We talk about not wanting to be a burden in the same breath as talking about the honour it is to care for a person.
We romanticise these things and and we other them, all to avoid the reality of what they are. Complicated, messy, hard, beautiful and very, very real.
I was recently asked to facilitate a death planning party and it was such a good night. You can read more about that here. It was clear from the interest before and since that more people are looking to have these conversations.
We live in a culture of death avoidance. The medical system sees death as a poor outcome, a failure. Not so long ago, while I was funeral directing in the big industry, we had a client whose doctor, on the medical certificate cause of death, wrote ‘old age’ as the main cause. That certificate had to be re-done, apparently it was unacceptable to die of old age – you have to die of something, I was told.
I believe that there are some real benefits to moving past thinking of death as an abstract idea and taking ownership of it, getting a little more comfortable with your own mortality and the fact that at some point you will cease to be.
I’d like to share those with you.
There is a lot we can learn from the dying. As someone nears death the sphere of what is important to them shrinks. Where once a person prized a collection of frogs, suddenly they are happy to see it handed on to someone else. It’s partly legacy but it’s also a very finely tuned and somewhat innate filter of what is intrinsically important to that person. Chances are, it won’t be the frogs. There is an internal compass which governs the lives of the dying and it is through this lenses that we, as the not yet terminal, can start to develop the same sort of focus on what is truly important to us.
When it comes to planning in the western world, the law has a lot to do with how we treat death and what is expected both before and after it happens. Planning for your death, which you can not do without really considering it, makes the entire process easier for everyone around you as well as yourself. And there is actually a lot of planning to be done both before and after death.
Planning for before you die –
Enduring Guardian – who will make social, medical and welfare decisions for you?
Enduring Power of Attorney – who will make financial decisions for you?
Advance Care Directive – how do you want to be treated while you die?
Planning for after you die –
Last Will and Testament – your Estate, valuables, possessions, real estate, bank accounts
Emotional Will – legacy work and documents
Funeral/Ceremony Wishes – what do you want for you, for those left behind, do you have religious requirements, spiritual needs?
Body Disposal – burial, cremation or something else?
Before you die, if you don’t have appointed decision makers the State will step in and decide things for you if you need a decision maker. Once you die, it will be up to your executor and/or senior next of kin to make all of the decisions for you. They will be grieving and that will be hard. It will be easier if they know what you want. At this point, it is about you, but it is for them. Money can be lost in Court costs if your affairs are not in order, but more than that there are added layers of trauma and grief often associated with having to do guess work in death.
By doing the planning now, you create one of the best gifts for those that live on without you because it is the gift of your vision, your wishes and your instructions… the gift that they get to live on in the knowledge they respected your wishes and chose right for you.
When a person experiences the death of a loved one, when death becomes real or personal through a life limiting or terminal diagnosis, often their views, their lenses and filters, gain a little more focus. This witnessing, experiencing and being present for death opens door to a deep knowing of what it is that truly matters.
Once you know what matters to you, that’s when you get to decide what you do with that. What if today was your last day. What would give you peace?
It’s so hard to answer the question, what do you want? But when you know what truly matters to you there is perhaps one more important question – what don’t you want? Sometimes, people have a much better defined idea of their ‘hard line no’s’ – the things that are absolutely non negotiable. The clarity around this comes with thinking about mortality, getting comfortable with the uncomfortable.
So death. The great unknown, and yet we can learn to sit with it a while, let the reality of our limited time on earth sink in and become known to us. There are benefits to challenging this culture of death avoidance that we live in – it can sharpen our priorities, allow for much needed planning and ultimately help us make better life decisions and choices.