On Death and Grief
18 December, 2017 // in The Coffeehouse Cleric // by Alex Rowe.
Caleb Wilde is a funeral director. It’s a family business, going back six generations on his father’s side, and five on his mother’s. A few days ago I listened to him give an interview about his new book, “Confessions of a Funeral Director: How the Business of Death Saved my Life.” Though very much alive, Caleb knows death intimately in a way only few people do. The thoughts he shared in his interview inspire much of what follows below.
As people of the modern West, we aren’t good with death. Many of us fear death. We speak about it using circumlocutions, in rather imprecise ways, like passed away, left us, went over to the other side. And while the pursuit of good health and longevity is no bad thing, I wonder whether our culture’s obsession with youthfulness and attractiveness is symptomatic of the way in which we are quietly afraid of our own mortality. Maybe, in many subtle ways, we are trying to flee death.
At the same time, death no longer plays such an obvious part of our lives as it has for our forebears. With the advent of modern technologies, clinical hospitals and clean hospices are the sacred spaces where our dying spend their final moments. Formerly, it was the living-room of a family home. The living-room became the dying-room. Similarly, we now have the professionalisation, indeed commercialisation, of funeral care, where dealing with the dead is again passed on to a third party, out of the hands of family or close friends.
The increase in these technologies and professions is, I hasten to add, no bad thing in itself. Often, quite the opposite. The point is, that they are distinctly modern phenomena. And I wonder whether they inadvertently contribute to our society’s awkwardness around death, distancing its reality from us, holding it back at arm’s length, and allowing it no closer.
Associated with our uncomfortableness with death, is grief. We don’t know what to do with it. I recently visited Newcastle Cathedral and as I entered I heard the sound of sobbing. Kneeling in one of the pews near the front was a young man, and his weeping filled the whole building. All the other visitors trotted around awkwardly in their usual touristic manner, a little surprised that in a building which they thought to be more like a museum, a monument of a bygone religious era, there was a man seeking peace and comfort from God.
I imagine, in a society that provides so few spaces to grieve, that this sobbing man felt he had nowhere else to go than a church building to express how he felt. I admit it, his weeping made me feel uncomfortable. It is not a sight I am used to seeing. But at the same time, I could not help but feel that what I saw was right; that in some way, despite the heavy atmosphere, the sadness that clung to the air, what I was witnessing was good, healthy, and necessary.
The truth is, grief is all around us. It’s all around us, only hidden and suppressed. Not all smiles on faces are real; often they are just masks, and the pain which makes us human lies close to the surface, desperate to make itself known, desperate to be heard and embraced. In our age of small-talk, the big topics are not often broached. It is often seen as “bad form” to get serious like that. But talk to anybody for long enough, go deep enough with anyone, and past stories of sadness and loss soon manifest.
When people tell of the most significant experiences of their lives, they rarely share how they earnt a promotion, bought a new car, or went on a lovely skiing holiday in Tignes. Strangely, it is usually the stories of sadness. The deaths and divorces, the break-ups and heart-breaks, the rejections and failures, are what mould us and which mark us out as people who are truly human, who truly live. These are the things that shape us. And here lies an unsual irony: it is often our experiences of loss that lead us to become more rounded and whole.
Though much more needs to be said, I end with this short note. Religion does well to acknowledge and attempt to understand the frightening reality of death and all else that we suffer. And our grief in such instances I think tells us something profound about ourselves. It tells us that we, as human beings, cannot be reduced to the primitive functions of survival and sexual reproduction, that ties of friendship run deep down into our souls, that fullness and flourishing is not only something we desire but something we feel we ought to have. Suffering is such an integral part of what it means to be human. Ultimately, however, if it feels like an injustice, perhaps that is because that is precisely what it is. Perhaps we were made for more.
Thank you for reading. The Coffeehouse Cleric is a Medium publication dedicated to asking the big questions of life. It features writing on three main areas: minimalism, spirituality, and learning. If you enjoyed this piece, please do share it with friends and family on social media.
