Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
My cousin Rosemary died when she was 21. The year would have been 1959 or 1960. Rosemary was a most beautiful woman, the only child of my Uncle Fred and Aunty Phyll. She died from what we then called Hodgkin’s Disease.
From the time of her death until her burial, her body rested in an open coffin in the “front parlour” of her parents’ home. Various people kept vigil with the body during that long week.
That’s the way it had always been done, but Uncle Fred and Aunty Phyll were amongst the last to keep the old custom. They, and folks of my own parents’ generation were very realistic about death. If Granny or Grandpa lived and then died in your home, you would be very aware of death. The body would be there for you to see, and the “front parlour” was often reserved for this laying out (and for Christmas and other special occasions).
There were other customs. If a parent, child or spouse died, the men and young boys would don a black tie, and women would wear black, or a black arm-band, stitched to outer coats. Thus, even folks in the street knew that you were in mourning. ( When the mother of my friend Tom Bees died, he wore a black tie for a whole year, and he was the last man I’ve known who kept that older custom).
When a neighbour died, we would close the curtains at the front of the house from the time of death until the burial. Thus, when we walked the streets, if we saw closed curtains, we knew that there had been a death in that street.
Similarly, we boys were taught that if a funeral cortege passed by, we were to doff the hat, and bow the head until the cortege had passed.
I regret the loss of some of those old customs. Of course it is easy to romanticise the past, and not all was “whole” in our former way of death. Many will remember when we dare not utter the word cancer, and perhaps referred to it as “the big C”, part of a conspiracy of silence. And many people died in extreme pain as a result of a common assumption that there was virtue in a painful death.
Our Western attitudes towards death and dying have been changed greatly by two happenings.
The first was the widespread and blessed acceptance of Dr. Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s work “On death and dying”. She helped us all to understand ourselves and our dying ones. She gave us a language to express that which we had dimly understood.
The second was the pioneering and remarkable work of Dame Cicely Saunders, the creator of the modern hospice movement. In her residential “St. Christopher’s Hospice” she blazed a trail leading to our expectation of death with dignity, and without pain. It’s hard to imagine a time when we did not have “Hospice” - a most necessary and gentle facet in our recent ways of death and dying.
But, and this is a gentle “but”, there is the “law of unintended consequences”. I think of two.
First, the misunderstanding of Dr. Kubler Ross’s work, which often leads to the expectation that grief can be processed. “He/she has to go through the grief process” we say.
Dammit no! Grief cannot be “processed”. It has to become part of who we are, and that may take a long time. (One of my regrets about 9/11 is that as a Nation we were led into early vengeance, leaving us no time to allow the grief of that dreadful day to become part of who we are.)
Second, the expectation that death is always alright. Less than two hours after the death of my friend Bruce, even as his body was being removed from the house, someone (a professional nurse who should have known better) said “ well at least he is in better hands”.
I wanted to say “ you mean the frigging undertaker” (though the word “frigging” was not in my mind!)
What possibly could have been “better hands” at that moment than the hands of Ben, Bruce’s partner, and Nelson, Bruce’s son, both of whom had cared for Bruce until the end? Not even the “hands of G-d” at that moment.
Death stinks. And as a person of faith, in the face of death, I live between two poles. Both are expressed in poems I’ve already added to this blog.
“Death be not proud” by John Donne (1572-1631) is the pole of faith. In it, death personified is given the finger.
“Do not go gentle” by Dylan Thomas is the pole of feeling. It is about Dylan’s father. He had been a Union man, a protestor against the injustices of working life. He was being urged to die with grace. “No” says his son the poet, “die as you have lived” - “rage, rage against the dying of the light”.
I live twixt those poles. And I miss Bruce so much.
From the time of her death until her burial, her body rested in an open coffin in the “front parlour” of her parents’ home. Various people kept vigil with the body during that long week.
That’s the way it had always been done, but Uncle Fred and Aunty Phyll were amongst the last to keep the old custom. They, and folks of my own parents’ generation were very realistic about death. If Granny or Grandpa lived and then died in your home, you would be very aware of death. The body would be there for you to see, and the “front parlour” was often reserved for this laying out (and for Christmas and other special occasions).
There were other customs. If a parent, child or spouse died, the men and young boys would don a black tie, and women would wear black, or a black arm-band, stitched to outer coats. Thus, even folks in the street knew that you were in mourning. ( When the mother of my friend Tom Bees died, he wore a black tie for a whole year, and he was the last man I’ve known who kept that older custom).
When a neighbour died, we would close the curtains at the front of the house from the time of death until the burial. Thus, when we walked the streets, if we saw closed curtains, we knew that there had been a death in that street.
Similarly, we boys were taught that if a funeral cortege passed by, we were to doff the hat, and bow the head until the cortege had passed.
I regret the loss of some of those old customs. Of course it is easy to romanticise the past, and not all was “whole” in our former way of death. Many will remember when we dare not utter the word cancer, and perhaps referred to it as “the big C”, part of a conspiracy of silence. And many people died in extreme pain as a result of a common assumption that there was virtue in a painful death.
Our Western attitudes towards death and dying have been changed greatly by two happenings.
The first was the widespread and blessed acceptance of Dr. Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s work “On death and dying”. She helped us all to understand ourselves and our dying ones. She gave us a language to express that which we had dimly understood.
The second was the pioneering and remarkable work of Dame Cicely Saunders, the creator of the modern hospice movement. In her residential “St. Christopher’s Hospice” she blazed a trail leading to our expectation of death with dignity, and without pain. It’s hard to imagine a time when we did not have “Hospice” - a most necessary and gentle facet in our recent ways of death and dying.
But, and this is a gentle “but”, there is the “law of unintended consequences”. I think of two.
First, the misunderstanding of Dr. Kubler Ross’s work, which often leads to the expectation that grief can be processed. “He/she has to go through the grief process” we say.
Dammit no! Grief cannot be “processed”. It has to become part of who we are, and that may take a long time. (One of my regrets about 9/11 is that as a Nation we were led into early vengeance, leaving us no time to allow the grief of that dreadful day to become part of who we are.)
Second, the expectation that death is always alright. Less than two hours after the death of my friend Bruce, even as his body was being removed from the house, someone (a professional nurse who should have known better) said “ well at least he is in better hands”.
I wanted to say “ you mean the frigging undertaker” (though the word “frigging” was not in my mind!)
What possibly could have been “better hands” at that moment than the hands of Ben, Bruce’s partner, and Nelson, Bruce’s son, both of whom had cared for Bruce until the end? Not even the “hands of G-d” at that moment.
Death stinks. And as a person of faith, in the face of death, I live between two poles. Both are expressed in poems I’ve already added to this blog.
“Death be not proud” by John Donne (1572-1631) is the pole of faith. In it, death personified is given the finger.
“Do not go gentle” by Dylan Thomas is the pole of feeling. It is about Dylan’s father. He had been a Union man, a protestor against the injustices of working life. He was being urged to die with grace. “No” says his son the poet, “die as you have lived” - “rage, rage against the dying of the light”.
I live twixt those poles. And I miss Bruce so much.
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