In the End

Tending to Endings (fifty)

I am incredibly grateful for all who have joined me this year for what I initially called a gentle expedition. End-of-life is not the topic I ever saw myself writing about in the past. Sure, the idea of death has come into my mind often enough. I am a ponderer. However, most often, thoughts of death arrived as a fleeting fears that I tried to contain or make sense of or explain away. Most of all, I tried to avoid them. 

As a child, I was even afraid of words associated with death. There was a road sign near my house marking a Dead End, and when alone, I always pedaled faster past it. I was concerned to attend what my mom called a wake (did the dead person ever wake up?). The word cremated seemed especially icky, and the concept utterly terrifying. I found funeral homes unsettling and strange, all the windowless rooms and thick upholstery; the shiny wood coffins lined in satin brought to mind images of vampires. Cemeteries were places to visit on Halloween and only if you were very brave.

I was a child who was easily frightened for sure, but going through this list, I also notice how often our cultural representations of death are paired with images of horror and fear. 

Even as I got older, I rarely attended funerals or memorial services, and when I did it was because I felt obligated. They were something to get through. I didn’t know what to say to people I was close to who had lost someone. I didn’t know how to grieve when someone I knew and loved died. Often my experience of grief felt solitary. 

Throughout my life I have written about my obsessions which went, in rough chronological order: swim team; boys; nonviolent activism; pregnancy, birth, and motherhood; wild rivers and wild places. I was not interested in the actuality of death, and for the first fifty years of my life, I had the luxury of not being faced with it too terribly often. 

Then, within a four year stretch, I experienced four deaths of women who I was very close to: Pat Lambert (November 13, 1933 – February 2, 2015), Susan Gardner (March 25, 1959 -July 17, 2016), Ellen Erksine (November 6, 1952 – July 19, 2016), and Jane Stavoe (August 28, 1939 – April 9-2019).

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Pat at her 80th birthday party; Susan holding a future sled dog; Ellen on game day.

I was present for the deaths of three of those women. Susan and Ellen each died unexpectedly and within two days of each other, one in Portland the other in Boise, and I somehow made the seven-hour drive along the Columbia and over the Blue Mountains to the bedside of each in time. I saw the body of each of my friends go from inhabited and alive to uninhabited and dead.

A couple years later, I accompanied my mom up to that same door. The whole time my mom was on home hospice care, I was aware of what a gift it was that this was not the first time I had attended a death. I had far less anxiety about what might happen which made it possible for me to just be with my mom.

On Sunday the New York Times ran two different stories about the physicality of death. “The Movement to Bring Death Closer: America’s Home Funeral Guides Want Us to Be Less Afraid and More in Touch with Death,” is a feature by Maggie Jones that I listened to on The Daily’s Sunday Read, but is also available in print. “What is Death?: How the Pandemic is Changing our Understanding of Mortality,” is an opinion piece by BJ Miller, a hospice and palliative care physician. I found them both compelling and Jones’s feature on home funeral guides particularly rich in story and resources.

Jones writes of home funeral guides,

Their goal isn’t to persuade every family to have a multiday vigil; it’s to support them as they choose the kind of goodbye they want. For some families, that’s as simple as asking a funeral home to wait several hours before picking up the body.

We didn’t have a home funeral guide when my mom died, but we did have a knowledgable and experienced hospice team who were able to suggest things that made a big difference.

I think there was a time when I would have said I don’t need to see my mom when she’s dead because I want to remember her when she’s alive. I certainly would not have known ahead of time that I wanted to help care for her body, but when our nurse Noel asked if my sister and I wanted to help bathe and dress her, we both very much did.

Even after Noel left, we waited a few hours before calling the mortuary. While I felt deep sadness, and the utter stillness of Mom’s body was profound, I was not frightened. In some ways my mom looked more like she did when she was well, free from the confusion of Alzheimer’s and the pain she had lived with for so long. And between the time of death and when the two young attendants came from the mortuary, stopping at the foot of her bed to bow their heads before lifting her, I had gone to be by her side many times. The memories I have of those hours we spent with my mom’s body are quite comforting to me now.

In each of these cases, with my mom, and with Susan and with Ellen, I was not trying to be near mortality, but rather, be near my loved one, which is probably how most of us are eventually tricked into sidling up to death when we finally do.

And Pat’s death, too, which was the first of the four and the one I experienced from a distance, taught me a great deal. When I first learned Pat was in the hospital with pancreatic cancer, I hesitated rather than heading to the hospital with some of my friends. By the next day, Pat was not up for my visit, and when I called later, she didn’t feel well enough to talk. Pat died less than a week after her diagnosis, and I never had the chance to say goodbye. This still brings a lump to my throat.

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Looking Ahead

I am tempted to share ideas I plan to write about for Tending to Endings in 2021, but then I remember how I thought this year I would be writing from the field–volunteering at hospice centers and visiting mortuaries and nursing homes! It was not a good year for field work, but it was an excellent year for reading and research and reflection and writing about questions big and small. Thank you for staying with me!

Recently I have received three part-time teaching opportunities related to death and dying which was unexpected and wonderful. Teaching has always been my favorite way to learn, and I’m sure it will add to what I will have to share here. I will let you know when I have more information about those courses (two are workshops and one is a full semester class) as well as the family memoir class I will offer online.

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With love and gratitude,

Laura

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