In the midst of a global pandemic that has claimed over half a million Americans lives, I have been thinking a lot about the dead. One of whom at least peripherally is mine.
Nearly nine years ago, I sat listening as my father died. Two days earlier, I had received a call. He needed me to come over right away. Hospice was on site and they wanted someone there to help take care of his wife until her son could arrive when the inevitable happened. My stepsister-in-law had assumed that duty until she had suddenly departed a few weeks earlier for reasons I wouldn’t learn until I had a chance to speak with her after she came back with my stepbrother.
A few hours after I got there, my father slipped into unconsciousness, to return only once and only briefly. The hospice nurse said this was pretty typical. He was waiting for someone to take over responsibility so he could let go. I only had a couple hours to talk to him and confirm his arrangements and final wishes, which included cancelling my sister’s longstanding debt to the estate at my request. It didn’t benefit me (in fact it cost me), but did make life easier for my stepbrother. He would have had to enforce it, which would have been less than pleasant.
Over the intervening two days, I spent a great deal of time on the phone updating distant family. My aunt had already said her goodbyes to my father months before, and sadly parted on less than perfect terms, although not as bad as my stepsister-in-law. I talked to my stepsister-in-law and got increasingly evasive answers about the timing of their arrival which I only later understood.
I stressed to my sister that if she wanted to see our father before he died, she didn’t have much time. I was being told days at most. Theirs was yet another in a string of dysfunctional relationships within my immediate family. And yet, if she’d said the word, I would have moved heaven and earth to make sure she would have gotten to see him. I knew how to make that happen. I knew it might be important to her later. She declined to come, a decision I think she would later regret.
The next two days were kind of surreal. I had never witnessed anyone die before. Hospice told us exactly what to expect, down to the physical changes to look for that said the end was imminent. But they stressed that these were only indicators; they didn’t provide an absolute timeline. There are no hard and fast rules with dying, just strongly coincident trends. So, we waited as we listened to my father’s breathing change and watched his fingernails turn increasingly blue.
Because of the layout of the condo, hospice had set up his hospital bed in the living room, just by the sliding glass door that looked out onto the lagoon. Between that and having at least one and sometimes two hospice nurses there, along with my stepmother plus the two of us, his dying felt public, like he was on display. I am certain he felt that, too, from our final, brief conversation.
To give my stepmother as much privacy as possible, my wife and I spent most of our time either in the breakfast nook off the kitchen, where I reviewed a proposal for adapting a story of mine, or in my father’s spare bedroom office sorting and arranging all the documents my stepbrother might need later. He was the primary executor on the will and on the trust. He would be responsible for what happened to his mother, although she and my father had come to an agreement on what that would be. Because of her own long-term health conditions, she was unable to take care of herself so was unable to stay in the condo. She would die in a facility in Missouri less than three months after my father.
None of which really mattered when his final moments came. The previous evening, the night nurse had given us the heads up that the end was very near, under twenty-four hours. She would wake us if he began to change. He didn’t before the next morning when the day shift nurse took over and the unit supervisor showed up. They both reaffirmed the night nurse’s assessment. He wouldn’t be among the living much longer.
By nine that morning, all we could do was watch, wait and listen. My stepmother in her recliner, facing my father’s bed. My wife and I on a couch along the opposite wall, facing her. The hospice staff at the bar by the kitchen, trying to be discrete and give us what distance they could while staying close enough to witness and log his death when it happened.
The TV wasn’t on, which was unusual for my stepmother. It was May in Florida which meant the windows were shut because it was by then AC weather. Off and on my stepmother would get up and walk over to peer down at my father without saying anything, then return to her chair. For a short time, I sat by him and whispered reassurances that it was ok if he wanted to let go, and other words I will not share. The hospice nurses told us that he may or may not be able to hear us, even in unconsciousness. Near death experiences indicate hearing lasts until the very end, even after all other senses fail. I don’t think I was the right person to comfort him, but I was the one there.
For a long time, no one spoke. There was nothing to be said and really nothing to be done. We were all waiting for the next phase of the process which we knew couldn’t happen until after he was dead. Then we knew there would be a flurry of activity, the official parts of which, like contacting the mortician for pickup and assisting in getting a death notice in the paper, the hospice workers would handle. I knew I had a number of phone calls to make and had to plot out the proper order of who to call first, and who to ask to pass the information to who else down the chain to avoid as many hurt feelings as I could.
But that would come later. At that moment, we sat in an eerie silence broken only by one of us occasionally shifting position and my father’s increasingly ragged breath. At some point, I realized that we were all purposefully still, frozen, anticipating. Somewhere in those final minutes, I started counting the seconds between his breaths, which got longer and longer as time wore on. First a second, then two, then five, then ten. Each intervening pause of silence eventually interrupted by another sometimes sharp, sometimes struggling, sometimes almost startled intake of breath. I think the last pause I counted was twenty before the hospice supervisor called his death. By then, her words came as a relief.
Because I had been beside him when that moment of transition came, I never had any trouble accepting my father’s death. While I had some unresolved issues, as most people do, I understood he’d had his time to say anything he wanted to say to me. He never did. But I didn’t dwell on it as we both had our opportunity. In the end, of his own two kids, and his wife’s two, I was the one he called to take responsibility. The youngest of the four. The one he knew would go to bat for his wife with anyone against anything no matter what happened. I guess to me, while that didn’t say everything, it said enough. As I talked about in “Dead? Dead.” it took my stepmother a little longer to process his death, which, while completely surreal at the time, was not abnormal, especially for someone in her situation.
All of which came into sharp relief last spring.
Just before my wife’s birthday, I received a phone call from my sister. My mother was dead. She had been dead for an indeterminate period of time, which turned out to be just over two days as the hospital searched their records for any point of contact. Neither my mother nor her caregivers had given one when she’d been admitted to the hospital. No one had called to let either my sister or I know. No one had called any of her local friends.
Two months earlier, my mother had stopped answering my calls. I suspect because she mistook my concern for her well-being and my inquires as to whether she was getting everything she needed during the pandemic lock-down as “checking up on her”, an accusation she’d leveled during another health crisis eight years earlier, at the same time my father was dying, when she was in and out of the hospital and rehab on a bi-monthly basis. Our relationship had always been complicated. By this point, I would categorize it as somewhat estranged.
With the pandemic, as well as for other reasons, I didn’t help clear out her apartment. So, I didn’t have that stark marker as a confirmation of her death. I only had the initial silence followed by a series of increasingly agitated and recriminatory phone calls from my sister. Another complicated and strained familial relationship.
Three years earlier my sister had fought tooth and nail to become the executor of my mother’s estate to the point of subverting even the people who tried to help her make that happen. When the time came, she refused to take it up. By then I was in no position to. But I went out of my way to share all the information I had with her, and guide her as best I could, and then legally resigned any interest in my mother’s estate in favor of her. When things had started to slip sideways with my father’s estate, I had offered to do the same with my stepbrother so my sister would get a full share. Which in hindsight strikes me as equal parts misplaced loyalty and an overdeveloped sense of responsibility.
Or maybe it was just part of my unique grieving process, in both cases for something more than just losing a parent, some of which had happened decades earlier. The loss of a childhood, the loss of a family, the loss of any possibility of salvaging any of that, the loss of any possibility of acknowledgement of who I was or what I’d become. The loss of any and all illusion. All the remained was the present slipping moment by moment into a troubled, murky past.
Either way, when my sister became so upset by having my mother’s ashes physically near her because she thought they were cursed or possessed and couldn’t deal with them, I told her to mail them to me. Not exactly what I wanted, but not new territory for me either. My stepbrother had sent me my father’s and my stepmother’s ashes eight years before because he and his brother didn’t know what to do with them, and thought I might. So, I knew how to handle it.
Accordingly, as we’d done with the other two before, my wife and I scattered my mother’s ashes in an appropriate spot and wrote up a description of what we had done for my sister, my aunt and cousins, and my mother’s few remaining friends, and took a couple of pictures. By then, stealth burials had become a tradition in my family. It seems like that should have laid the matter to rest for me.
But it didn’t.
I have spent a great deal of the intervening time convincing myself that my mother was really dead. Some of that faded briefly when I scattered her ashes. Watching what remains of a cremated human body pour out from a container is a visceral experience. But it is also abstract. A couple pounds of certified and tagged ash and pulverized bone fragments do not have the same gravity as a body. Intellectually, I knew they were her, that there was no vast conspiracy in which she could still be alive. And yet, below the surface, my mind wasn’t quite ready to accept that my situation had changed. That something I had dreaded for many years had come to pass, and that everything would be ok. In that moment, I wasn’t sure it would be, for reasons that would take a great deal of mental energy to sort out. Energy, which at that moment, I just didn’t have.
And due to the very strange nature of that act during the pandemic lock-down, that niggling feeling didn’t fully go away. I still found myself having to reiterate in an internal monologue that she was dead. I don’t think that’s because I was closer to her than my father. I wouldn’t say I was by the end. I don’t even think that it was fully because I was still afraid of her, though that certainly played a part. I think more it had to do with having witnessed my father die where my mother’s death was more remote both physically, mentally and temporally by the way the situation unfolded.
That reaction surprised me.
When my wife’s father died just over a year ago, her mother was somewhat insistent that she return home for the viewing so that she wouldn’t have trouble accepting it. As there was no way my wife was going to sit beside her unrepentant brother and pretend nothing had happened between them, or with the rest of her family, for even two hours of a visitation and viewing, that was never going to happen. As well, she had said her goodbyes the last time she had seen her father alive. So, she didn’t need to see him again with her own eyes to confirm that he was dead. She’d already set that picture in her mind.
I was fortunate enough to have done the same with each of my grandparents, so I knew what that feeling was like. There is closure in setting a final image in your mind beforehand, as I had with both of my mother’s parents the last time that I had seen them together, and then the last time I’d seen my grandfather alone. I’d done the same with my father’s parents, separated by a dozen years. I’d attended all their memorials, three of which involved trips north that I never want to take again by the way the family dynamics played out. Instead of reinforcing good memories of my grandparents, these trips fostered more familial trauma. I completely understood my wife’s refusal to do the same. Instead, she visited her mother several days after everyone else had left. Which, by the way, is something many grief counselors encourage to keep the situation from getting overwhelming for a new widow or widower.
As you can tell from some of the above, at the best of times death can be a messy business despite its mechanisms being pretty straightforward and simple. It’s complicated by we the living. The ones left behind. The ones who may or may not be able to confront the idea that everyone we know, everyone we’ve ever known, will eventually leave us behind. Unless we leave them first. Never mind our being willing to confront our own mortality.
Which may be why the rites surrounding death are some of the earliest human rituals that set us apart from other primates, and in general from all but a handful of other mammals. There is a primal mystery surrounding death, one which other species don’t appear to dwell on, or at least not to the extent that we do.
When we’ve had cats die, we have left out their bodies on the porch for a little while before we buried them in a kind of viewing to allow their housemates to see that they are gone. Usually, the living cautiously approach and sniff the dead, then look at us with a certain expression that is hard to interpret, and don’t go back. Only a handful who were very close to the dead call for their missing companion at night for some period of time, where they never called before. None have really searched the house to see where their friend had gone. It’s hard to know exactly what they are thinking or what they really understand. Something, from what I’ve seen.
Perhaps people aren’t much different. We just have more elaborate social ceremonies to help our fellows cope.
Different cultures have different customs regarding death. In some societies only outsiders are allowed to handle the dead. In others, only family. Preparing the dead is universal, especially washing and dressing or wrapping the body. Standing vigil over it until it can be buried, cremated or otherwise disposed of. Laying it to rest with treasured possessions, perhaps for use in an afterlife, perhaps just to honor their spirit or to keep them happy. We often mark the place we lay them to rest, sometimes with stones or shrines or other symbols, other times by using a sacred communal burial ground or just noting a private location in our minds. In modern western society, we send correspondence and make phone calls to notify friends and family of what has happened. We sometimes take pictures to share with others who could not be present. For legal reasons, we advertise deaths in papers and other public forums.
But most of all, we gather. We open our homes to visitations, to comfort and to receive comfort from family and friends. We feed the mourners, recognizing some have come long distances to stand beside us. We hold services and memorials. We hold wakes, not to wake the dead, but to be alert or wakeful ourselves. The veil between worlds is open. We are uncertain what might slip through in either direction if we do not pay attention. We share poignant stories and memories of the dead while trying not to speak ill of them. For some because we feel the dead can no longer defend themselves, for others because we are quite afraid that they can. We lay out the dead for viewings in funeral parlors or churches or other public venues, or sometimes in our homes on dining room tables, so people can confirm reality for themselves.
Dead? Dead.
Although many may deny it, almost all these rites and rituals are intended for the living, not the dead. Funerals are for those left behind. One way or another, the dead are beyond caring. Many people will also tell you the horniest they’ve ever been is after a brush with death. Those documented and quite psychologically normal experiences are as intense and intimate as they feel inappropriate. Life reinforces life.
There is solid anthropological evidence for why many of these funerary rites exist. One predominant view is that they provide a coping mechanism to channel our individual grief and other often mixed emotions (relief, guilt, anger, fear, etc.). Another is that they reinforce social coherence through group bonding as we support each other in a time of shared pain.
That doesn’t always happen. Death brings out either the best or the worst in people. Often both. But without those ceremonial frameworks, I think worse is more likely than better. Without set societal expectations and guidance, things are more likely to get out of hand in stressful times. Death is difficult, a mental shock. The scars from the living often linger.
There also might be pragmatic reasons that our ancestors stumbled upon as they codified their practices. Primitive sanitation. Dead bodies aren’t generally healthy to be around after a short time. Unintended consequences. The lye from scattered ashes gets clothing down river cleaner, or even acts as a primitive disinfectant. Communal safety. Standing vigil might have started as simply as keeping dangerous scavengers at bay, either animal or human. Unless of course you favor sky burials. But even then, that feast is ritualized and out of plain sight.
The most intriguing explanation I’ve read is that burial or cremation began as an attempt to literally bury or destroy the evidence of death. The anthropologist who advocated it traces it back to sacrifice (making sacred) often through scapegoating (casting the community’s sins upon a person or a creature), then killing it or banishing it and making it divine. Which he believes channels our inherent human violence to prevent our strong tendency as primates to mimic violence with further violence in a destructively escalating cycle.
He contends that many of the earliest burial sites we’ve found through archeology house sacrificial victims. Once the dead were dead, early societies wanted to hide the evidence of the ritual to prevent reprisals from erupting. The one way to do that was to make the victims holy after the fact, so their sacrifice could be honored as benefiting the community at large.
There is a counterintuitive resonance point here. In popular Christian culture (not strictly doctrine or theology), our dead are transformed into angels, by any definition divine beings, who then reside in an unearthly paradise for eternity. It is not difficult to deconstruct that myth into a near universal concept of paradise being a reward for enduring the suffering of this mortal life, which serves as a coping mechanism. Again, in popular Christian culture, some of those angels watch over us and guide us, at least if we pay them the proper respect, like visiting their graves, offering them small sacrifices like flowers at various anniversaries, and remembering them at other important family social occasions like christenings or weddings. When you pull it apart, that’s an abstract form of ancestor worship which has been widespread throughout various world cultures at one point or another in their history.
Or, if you favor a slightly different view, some of those restless dead may attempt to enact revenge upon us as reprisals for the slights they suffered in life. They either use small, mischievous acts, or dire visitations in our dreams or during illness, mysterious times when the barrier between physical reality and the spirit world is lower. Like gremlins or the ghost of Hamlet’s father. Should these dead be particularly jealous of the life in which they can no longer partake, they may seek to seize us while our defenses are down. From that perspective, we celebrate them to remind them that we love them. We inter favored items with them to bribe them, to keep them content in their graves. Safely entombed in stone or underground. Or diluted in water. Or dispersed upon the wind.
Almost any way you look at it, anthropologically the dead are potentially fearful forces that most sane people have no wish to offend. Best to hide them away in their own special area, out of sight. Close enough to visit, far enough away that neither side is inclined to casually make the trip. Not grouped together in so large a congregation of graves that we can’t hold our breath as we pass them by to keep some opportunistic spirit from stealing into us.
As a species, we prefer to imagine that somehow this life continues beyond the transition into death. I won’t debate any particular religious belief except to say they are ubiquitous. Most of us would prefer to imagine at least some of our dead in a better, more restful place, at the very least free of pain, though a few we might like to see receive righteous punishment for their accumulated misdeeds. Heaven and hell. Or more benignly, circling back to continue learning and improving through reincarnation. Even the most atheistic among us sometimes like to imagine our atoms serving as building blocks in creating new life even if not through conventional reproduction.
In other words, we construct elaborate illusions in the name of psychological self-comfort. Humans rarely let our dead rest or even fully let them go. Many people visit their dead. Many more talk to them. In general, I don’t do the former but sometimes do the latter. Just as I also talk to quite (presumably) living people who are not here with me. Sometimes I argue with both kinds although they rarely have epiphanies.
I think sometimes we believe we will get finally get straight answers from the dead once they have been freed from their earthly biases. But in general, the dead keep their secrets. Dead men tell no tales, at least not willingly. I think if we get answers, it is more often in our dreams, and then only because of our intuition processing events that we often refuse to accept while awake. Or through years of psychologically intense counseling, which often amounts to much the same thing.
Perhaps in burying or cremating the dead, we are merely trying to conceal our own grief, our own pain, whatever form that might take. Humans, like all animals, avoid pain in almost any way they can. Sometimes to the point of self-delusion.
Which leads me back to acceptance.
As I said, it quite surprised me that I had to remind myself that my mother was dead until just recently. I hadn’t felt that at all with my father, my grandparents, my uncle, a friend’s mother who helped shape me, or the best man at my wedding. Sure, I’d felt sadness and a similar sense of loss with some. I missed our conversations and correspondence dearly in others. But I never had to remind myself the situation was real. Normally, I would expect part of that with my mother was old trauma resurfacing, except I know other people who have gone through the same with a much more stable family history. Although they often felt differently about their dead.
The closest I have come to the feeling I had was with several of our feline companions who died. I think because I interacted with them more day to day, and so had to get used to a new routine that did not include them where they had been nearly omnipresent before. But with all but one of them since we’ve been in this house, we had a physical body to view and enough time with it for the situation to set. In the one case we didn’t, we eventually received a credible report of his death from a neighbor. Although before we did, we had a pretty certain feeling he was dead.
Last spring was different. I think part of it certainly stemmed from the suddenness of my mother’s death. I think part, too, from the bizarreness of the circumstances, both leading up to her dying and of the broader virus lockdown, both of which consumed a great deal of my psychological bandwidth, both of which contributed to a feeling of distance and isolation. And then there were the living who would complicate the event going forward no matter what I did.
But honestly, I don’t think it was any of that. I think a lot more of it came down to expectations. With my father, there was never an expectation from him or from anyone else that I would help. He made it clear throughout his life that I was not the son he wanted. He said as much to me directly. So perhaps there was a modicum of redemption when he called me in the end, not any of the three other steps/siblings, not his sister. Maybe because that was an admission of me being somehow worthwhile. In doing so, he gave me the power to deny him, although I chose not to. I suspect he knew I wouldn’t and relied on it. I had stepped up before where others hadn’t. Or maybe I was just the last, best choice he had.
With my mother, there was always a sense of obligation, from her and from others in my family. An obligation I no longer felt, nor felt the need to live up to. And yet, when the moment came, she chose to inform none of us. Like a feral cat, she slunk away privately to die. That level of rejection is pretty difficult to comprehend or accept.
But that lack of acceptance, that having to remind myself she was dead, was not out of a particular sense of sadness or grieving. It came with a certain measure of freedom and relief. It wasn’t that I could never speak with her again, it was that I didn’t have to. I no longer had to dutifully send cards and gifts, or make phone calls and get admonished or rebuked for caring or for trying to do what was right, in spite of the consequences, in spite of what it cost me. That I wouldn’t ever receive her calls again after her choices had caused her life to slip sideways, when she expected me to bail her out. In the end those choices killed her, or at least significantly contributed to her death.
It took those months to realize that I could finally set her burden down. And a burden it had become.
With my mother, like my father, there were really no larger, unanswered questions. Both my parents made their positions clear over the fullness of time, through words and deeds. As had I. Theirs had not changed, nor had mine. With both of them, long before their deaths came, I had already begun to disengage, if only for my own psychological stability. In a way I hadn’t had to with more favored friends and family even when I knew their deaths were imminent.
And yet, I did the same for my mother as I had done for my father and my stepmother. I performed the final ritual of laying her remains to rest, if not for me for others who, while they couldn’t or didn’t want to directly be a part of it, I believe needed it on some level for their own acceptance and mental well-being. I wrote up what I’d done knowing the people I shared it with might want to feel included in some way, where I was more ambivalent.
So perhaps on some level, I felt that instinctive need to honor then hide away my dead. To scatter their ashes to wind and water, only I know exactly where. To safely entomb them behind walls of light so we all might finally get some rest in peace.
© 2021 Edward P. Morgan III
