Tending to Endings

Tending to Endings

January 3, 2020

I didn’t know what to expect from a Death Café. I think I imagined costumes, though I knew that wasn’t it. Café seems to suggest something artistic or French. Would everyone be in black? Would people be preoccupied with the afterlife? Would someone try to sell me a funeral plan or a cemetery plot?

I walked into the room in the Healthwise building in Boise to find four circles of chairs in a large carpeted room. No stage make-up in sight. No mortuary brochures. Just people dressed in fleece and flannel, or just-from-work clothes. People dressed like this was December in Idaho. By the start time, most of the chairs were full and the room was humming with conversation. Apparently, a fair number of people in Boise (all different ages) want to spend a Monday evening talking about death. I was one of them.

For most of my life, I have not been a fan of endings. I preferred beginnings—a fresh start, an open road, the sense that anything could happen. I did my best to avoid goodbyes, often distracting myself from them with new adventures.

Recently though, I’ve seen endings in a new light and up close. In 2016 I was present for the death of two friends, and then, last year, I spent much of the last five months of my mother’s life by her side. These experiences were profound and challenging and beautiful and most of all humbling.

In fact, the last time I felt a transformation as big was 25 years ago when I gave birth to my twin sons. Why didn’t someone tell me, I thought. Of course, they had tried. But until I felt that wave of change course through my own body and my own heart, I had no idea of its power. I spent the next five years writing about birth and motherhood and little else.

In the U.S., something even more true about death than birth is that we rarely talk about it until it is upon us. Sometimes, not even then.

There are reasons: fear of the unknown, the worship of all things youthful, a belief that dependency is somehow shameful. To mention end-of-life can feel like naming a failure, taboo in a culture that considers anything possible with enough sweat, intention, and networking.

However, I have come to believe this tendency to ignore endings has a high price.

Particularly with my mom’s death, I learned that there were things we could do to make moments better, more livable, sometimes even more meaningful. My father and sisters and I seemed to stumble upon these things in the nick of time, rather than having resources at the ready. We were my mom’s caregivers and emotional support and spiritual guides and yet, we had no prior training.

Like birth, death up close is very different than I imagined. It is less scary and more mysterious. It is bigger and more painful and more intimate and more beautiful. It is more interesting.

I am not alone in recognizing that we may want to rethink our approach to endings. Surgeons are writing books on mortality, hospice has become mainstream, and dozens of people in Boise, Idaho show up at a Death Café on a Monday evening in December. Many are looking for ways to make this final stage of life less frightening, less lonely, more integrated with the rest of life.

I am not sure of my own role in this arena, but I’ve been preoccupied lately with figuring that out. I have read books, subscribed to podcasts, applied to become a hospice volunteer, attended death cafés, considered new coursework and new careers. Most of all, I’ve been doing what I do with things that attract and confound me. I write.

Ultimately, death is not poetry, or philosophy, or theory. It is experience. And like all of the other experiences in our lives, our choices often lie, not in what happens to us, but in how we prepare, perceive, and respond to them. Do we shut down or do we stay open? Do we draw close to community or do we isolate? I suppose my current obsession is because I believe that if we keep our hearts and minds open even to death, we will gain something unexpected, something true.

And so, with this new year and a new decade begins my new blog about endings. This is not a column that that will argue for a particular approach to caregiving or dying, but rather, a place to explore resources and ideas and, most of all, to find support. One of the biggest things I learned as one of my mom’s caregivers is that the specifics of any chronic debilitating illness do not lend themselves to simple answers. Even opinions I thought I was firm on regarding end-of-life care often seemed irrelevant in the complicated landscape of Alzheimer’s and cancer that pervaded the end of my mom’s life. What I believe people need most—caregivers and loved ones as well as those near death—is a supportive, kind community as we navigate the challenging, sometimes unbearable, terrain.

If you are interested in joining me on this gentle expedition—I hope you will subscribe to my blog below. (I won’t share your email address with anyone.) Next Friday I will write more about my experience at death cafés in Boise, which I found helpful and engaging. And in future weeks, I will find other people and places and resources in Boise and beyond. If you subscribe, I will be able to send the post directly to your email. You can also find each week’s post at laurastavoe.com, where you can contribute to the conversation and peruse other resources.

Thank you for reading. I wish for you a new year full of beauty and light.

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