DEATH AND LIFE : Learning about Both
On the 02 February 1996 my father died unexpectedly from heart failure. To tell you the truth, it wasn’t that unexpected. For many years prior to that he had been battling ill health and was in and out of hospitals.
To this day, I am filled with dread when the phone rings in the middle of the night. It almost always means death. I flew back to South Africa the next day. My father was gone. Not only out of life but also out of sight. The fear of death gripped us.
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Death
My Father died on the 02 February 1996. He was 64yrs old. He died suddenly from heart failure. It wasn’t unexpected. For many years prior to that he had been battling ill health and was in and out of hospitals. Yet it came like a thunderclap.
To this day, a quarter of a century later, I am filled with dread when the phone rings in the middle of the night. It almost always spells tragedy. I flew back to South Africa the next day. My father was gone. Not only out of life but also out of sight. The fear of death gripped us.
My family have always had an aversion to death. To death itself and talking about it. My mother in particular. She would tighten her lips and dart her eyes, meaning that she felt uncomfortable and didn’t want to discuss the topic any further. “Not dinnertime conversation,” she would say and her voice would send the silent message, “You’d better not be going there.”
This left me with so many questions that my family would, and could not answer about my father’s death. Like, what did my dad look like slumped on the bed when my mother came back from the shower? What did my dad look like in the coffin as I sat there in the chapel? Was he even in the coffin?
Am I the only one who has thoughts like that?
For 20yrs I carried around the trauma of his death and my inability to deal with it. What a burden. That trauma developed into irrational fear. Fear of sudden heart failure at age 25, even though I was fit and healthy. Panic attacks became my constant companion. What a burden on my young family.
In 2016 I felt the need to walk towards my fear and applied for a job at Dunweg. They are one of the local Undertakers in the area where i lived. I got the job as Facility employee. A facility employee is someone who does all those physical things around a person’s death. I would pick up the deceased from the hospital or home and prepare the body for the funeral. I had never seen a dead person before that first day on the job. By the end of it, I had come face to face with death. I’d seen it.
My first thought, once my heart beat returned to normal, seeing my first deceased person was , “Oh, so this is what dad must’ve looked like - peaceful.”. And it was. No matter the cause of death, the deceased person I had the honour of looking after, always looked peaceful.
I came to the point where one day I thought, “This is how mom will look when she dies.”. I know that may seem a strange thought, she was still alive at that point, but it wasn’t. It acknowledged the fact that we are not immortal, that loved ones will die and that we should acknowledge this fact to get the best out of every day with them.
When my mom died in 2018, I was prepared. I gave her the care and respect she deserved. I have no regrets.
Dunweg taught me so many things. They are true professionals who care for the dead and the living. They help families say goodbye in a way that honours the deceased and their family. I also saw Dunweg help families come to terms with death in a healthy and healing way. I am sure that they represent the majority of undertakers in the Netherlands.
Losing a loved leaves a hole that cannot be filled.
I learnt that being open and honest about death minimized the crater of my loved one’s death, minimized trauma in the future and allowed me to focus on life.
Life
I realised that the fear of death had stopped me from living. Sitting down with death, as I had at Dunweg, and having a good conversation with it, opened me up to life. To live life without fear.
I am no longer scared of dying or death. My panic attacks have disappeared. I now walk towards things that scare me, instead of away from them. I am not reckless, just not scared.
I live for the moment and day. I do not know what will happen tomorrow or over a year. Life has become fuller and richer because of the power of now. I dream the craziest things and visualize me failing and getting up and trying again.
I know they don’t sound related but my fear of death was also a fear of failure and full commitment to life.
At the end of every day I rate how my day was. I want every day to be an eight out of ten or up. That is my goal until death comes knocking.
Learning About Both
It takes courage in our modern world to want to move closer to death. To seek it out as it were. In times gone by death would have been more readily available. Death was not sanitised and shipped off as easily as it is today. Today it seems like Death is only reserved for professionals, like the Police, Medical workers or Undertakers. What a great burden we place on their schoulders. It feels to me like we have lost sense over sensitivity. I feel as if we have forgotten the connection between Death and Life.
I am not saying that that i want to see more of it and certainly not violent death. I just think the dialogue needs to be opend up again.
I know that working for an undertaker helped me process the trauma of my dad’s death. It is not for everyone, working for an undertaker, yet it provides a profound love of life.
I had to learn about death to learn about life.