Death, where is thy sting?
On a crisp day in December, roads greasy with snow, a bright young woman hosted a Death Café in our local library. Eight of us gathered with tea and sinfully extravagant chocolate cake with drippy caramel between the layers to chat about death.
The conversation was far-ranging and produced easy laughter far more than I, at least, had anticipated.
I learned about alkaline hydrolysis – water cremation -- which I think is going to be my preferred dissolution. The cadaver is rocked gently for several hours in warm water with a bit of alkaline (think lye) added, by which time the flesh has been sucked from the bones. They’re retrieved from the nutrient-rich sterile water and pulverized – as are bones following cremation by fire – and there your tidy remains are, ready for whatever your loved ones decide to do with it.
Amanda Lytle, our facilitator, who is a death doula, told of an alkaline hydrolysis business that offered to bottle and store the water to use for watering flower beds on their property, plots available to replace monuments. It reminded me of the efficiency of aquaponics, where water in which fish have lived (and excreted) is used as a base in which to grow food.
Amanda mentioned the metaphoric balance of coming into the world in a bath of water (absent the lye) and leaving the world similarly.
It all seemed poetic to me.
Of course we spoke of other things, of where and how death takes place, the legalities and rituals surrounding it, the helpfulness or otherwise of people and systems. Some of us had questions, some had relevant experience, all of us appreciated the opportunity to speak openly and candidly about thoughts and feelings (and information) usually kept private.
If there was a theme, it was the importance of communicating our wishes to those who will preside in some way over our death. If there was a lesson, it was that death is an everyday companion to life. Like a shadow, I thought. You may not always see it, for sure you don’t spend your life focusing on it, but it is inevitably there. It is proof of your existence.
When I visited Green Care Farms in the Netherlands last spring – these are small, non-medical residences for people with dementia – I came away with a three-part mantra, the last piece of which is ‘Live till you die’. The residents in the two locations I visited tended to participate actively in community life until about a week before they died, which was also my experience with my husband.
My sense was that the residents were given permission to choose to exit their lives when they’d had as much life as they could manage. I was raised on a farm where the cycle of life and death was contextual, so this made easy sense to me.
What also comes to mind is my mother, who, far away in Alberta, hung in with pervasive ill health for months while I was managing my husband’s cancer treatment. She got up and dressed to meet with me when I was at last able to travel. She wanted to know if I was likely to become a widow at age 52, the age she was when she became a widow. I said not probably. I went my way, to honour the obligation that had bought my plane ticket. She went back to her bed. When I visited the next day, she’d turned her face to the wall, and six days later she was dead.
I know this reeks of wanting to control death, to grasp the thistle of fear of the unknown.
But what’s the alternative? To constantly look over our shoulders to gauge the whereabouts of the shadow? To whistle in the dark? To focus sequentially on the parts of our body and mind that don’t function as once they did and cajole them into renewed youth?
I yearn for our culture to embrace death – our own personal death, not just an airy construct – as the final chapter of a life fully lived. And to craft it to our liking, to the extent possible.
The enthusiasm of the eight who gathered for the Death Café suggests I am not alone.
