Milo & Button

We just adopted a dog. A 9 year old, overweight cockapoo named Milo.

He probably doesn't have many years left in him, but he seemed like the perfect fit to our family. Our daughter, an only-child, is absolutely smitten. Which means, she will also be absolutely heart-broken when Milo dies. 

The death of a pet is the first death that many children face. For me, the death of my cat Button was something I didn't have to face until I was well into my teens, but it taught me a few great lessons about death. Some of them were:

1) it's ok if you don't cry and it doesn't mean that you didn't love your pet.

Life translation - grief likely isn't going to hit us how we expect. I would argue that in terms of professional relationships, this is even more true.

2) sometimes a death is not about the death itself. (sidebar: my dad actually accidentally ran Button over with the family vehicle. At the time, I rearranged my cat's death to be more about my poor father - the trauma of running over the family pet mustn't have been easy on him! - than about me grieving my cat's death)

Life translation - it is ok- 'normal even' - to think about other people and their trauma or pain, when grieving a death in your own life. It doesn't have to diminish how you look at you own grief, but it may. And both are completely fine. 

3) laughter is fine. (sidebar: one day not long after Button's death, my friend was singing in class and our teacher jokingly asked someone to 'kill that dying cat'. I let out some sort of dramatic noise and then my peers and I started laughing... it was cathartic and quite hilarious to see my poor high school math teacher try to make amends for the comment!)

Life translation - death is a normal human occurrence. Laughter is a natural human reaction. Just because the two may interact at some point, doesn't make either one "wrong".

"Outsourcing death"

Like most things in today's world, we've gotten used to using vendors or outsourcing various duties to service-providers. Many of us hire people to clean our home, people to walk our dogs, and rely pretty consistently on pre-determined meal/grocery deliveries. It's just the way of the world now.

And in this mentality, many people would say that we also relegate the decisions we make to other professionals as well. Makeup artists, fashion designers, and hair stylists come to mind - who am I to say what looks better when they've done this their entire career? I defer completely.

Death is no exception.

The creator of the Death Café movement (Jon Underwood) has been quoted as saying that he initiated the movement because in his viewpoint, western society has become used to outsourcing our death discussions to those 'more qualified': medical professionals like doctors and nurses, or those involved in the funeral process like religious clergy and undertakers. According to Underwood, we've completely lost any remaining idea of involvement in the gravest of life discussions (pun intended).

I completely agree with Underwood. I think we figure that we don't have the expertise, so why bother talking about it? Why even bother considering it? But, the whole idea of the death café movement is that death is an individual experience. The talk isn't meant for the others in the room. It is talking, to encourage introspection and consideration of our own path, preferences, beliefs, and wishes.

And no one else will be an expert in our death narrative. It is for you and you alone. And for this reason, we really should start to consider what that narrative will look like.

GOT

 - Caution: spoilers ahead! - 

Well, unless you've lived under a rock for the past few days, you know that the HBO series Game of Thrones has now finished. And although the finale season seems to be very contentious, I think that it stayed fairly true to its beginnings, complete with plenty of death scenes and representations of mourning. 

Whether you watched the show or not, and whether you agreed with how your favourite character completed his/her journey, I'm guessing you are aware that death plays a pretty prominent role in the series. Some of it is very much a fantasy, containing unhelpful death imagery of zombie "wights", but other portions of the show genuinely did a great job at portraying the complexity of grief. 

In my mind, no other character demonstrated the tortured path of grief like Peter Dinklage's character Tyrion. Tyrion grieved for family his whole life as his family viewed him as a monster, so when he shoots and kills his own father with a crossbow, he is caught in between guilt and satisfaction, sadness and relief. All very plausible emotions given the story arc of that character. 

But in this last season, the final goodbye between Tyrion and his brother Jaime, and then Tyrion's reaction to seeing his siblings dead under the ruble of the Red Keep... well, let's just say that in my mind this was one of the best grief portrayals I have ever seen. 

If you're personally uncomfortable with witnessing other people's pain, does fictional character portrayal of the same type of pain also make you uneasy? If so, I encourage practice... and though GOT may not be everyone's cup of tea, I suggest you start here.

Mortality

Yesterday was World IBD Day. IBD stands for Inflammatory Bowel Disease - Crohn's and/or Ulcerative Colitis - and is basically a group of diseases where your digestive tract is chronically swollen, bleeding, and painful.

I have IBD. And when it hit and upturned my life completely, IBD made me face my own mortality in ways I didn't want, or expect.

Here's the thing about chronic disease. When you are going through the worst of it, you just don't think about it. And people all around you are telling you how strong you are. And if you're like me, you nod and say thanks... but it doesn't really sink in.

In fact, it didn't sink in for me through three very serious surgeries, the rapid loss of over 80 lbs, the time away from my family in isolation, the multiple hospitals stays, the severe pain, severe dehydration, or the shame, loneliness, desperation or tears. I just went with it. I never once thought about the severity in and of itself, or the fact that I quite literally was at risk of death.

But a few years past my worst stages, I look back, and I find shock. Every. Single. Time. I look at pictures of my emaciated body and all I see is a gaunt girl who didn't quite grasp what was happening. Maybe that was a coping mechanism. Maybe it was denial...

No matter what it was, when I look back today I am encountering my own mortality. I came close to death. I can't afford not to think about it. My disease is chronic. It means that although I have a fix in place now, I could very easily find myself back there again. So I need to think about death and what it means. Life is too short to just journey on through the toughest times without open eyes.

Denial may have seen me through my last bout with IBD, but I plan on living through the rest of my life - serious encounters included - with my eyes wide open.

I think we all should. Life is all around us. And the ostriches are simply missing out.

Netflix & chill out

Confession: I love a good binge-watch. When "Netflix & Chill" became a thing, naive and idiotic me didn't understand there was double-entendre... I honestly just thought 'yeah, of course Netflix and chill, because chilling out while binge-watching is awesome!'

Well, double-entendre or not, I have your next binging assignment. I heartily recommend watching The Casketeers. It is a show based in New Zealand, about Māori funeral directors. It is much more about the behind-the-scenes family/friend dynamics, but the little glimpses of death education it provides make me happy.

Communication, empathy, professionalism, humour, witty banter. This show has it all.

Talk is not cheap

When it comes to the topic of death, talk is like a powerful antidote. If we don't talk about death, it tends to take on this mystic power, and we enable it with avoidance. Fear is a powerful motivator. And we give that fear extra power by lying to ourselves. Our society has mastered this actually. "It's morbid to talk about death" - sound familiar?

But a death renaissance is happening. And I'm all for it. Death still scares the living daylight out of me (see what I did there?), but the more I write, talk, and present on this topic, the more I realize that I am taking a bit of its power away.

This is an article from 2017, but still so relevant: https://undark.org/article/death-dying-america-anthropologist/

No matter what your profession, no matter what your stockholders, death has a 100% certainty to affect you in your workplace. Talking about it won't even the odds, but do it anyway.

Death to social media (on social media)

Related to yesterday's post... READ THIS:

https://hyperallergic.com/497552/the-dead-may-outnumber-the-living-on-facebook-in-50-years/

"...the number of dead users could grow as high as 4.9 BILLION before the end of the century"?! Whoa, Facebook... I think it is time to figure out how we can get a handle on this.

Sidebar - does your workplace use a database of any kind? Are there parameters with what to do with a person's digital record once they die? I work in fundraising. For us it is pretty straightforward (at most charitable organizations anyway). Donor in lifetime becomes "Estate of donor" in death if the organization has been confirmed to be making an estate gift. If not, a donor's record is often 'closed' to one extent or another, being marked 'deceased/dissolved' alongside Foundations or Companies that have folded.

On social media, I'd rather be "deceased/dissolved" when I die as opposed to 'In memory of" to live on in perpetuity.

I'll leave my legacy how I see fit, thanks. I don't need an old high school acquaintance posting pictures of me at 17 to remind everyone how awkward I was.