James 24:7

Many people in the corporate world dread the annual performance review.  As the appointed day draws closer many managers and employees feel an ache in the pit of their stomachs.  The face-to-face of it, the inherent judgment involved in the process, the knowledge that someone’s livelihood is on the line and a host of other factors contribute to the anxiety of conducting the annual review.

The common wisdom in the world of Human Resource Management (another horrid phrase that) is that the anxiety associated with the dreaded day could be lessened if the importance of performance, the criteria by which performance judgments are made, and the actual performance of the employee was made a matter of regular discussion rather than being pushed off to one anxious day of the year.  Making the topic of performance a regular subject of workplace conversation helps to lessen the anxiety on the big day.

Parents dread having “the talk” with their children…you know the one about “it”.  The thought of having to sit down with their child to describe the “birds and the bees” is almost more than some parents can bear.  (Indeed, it is a topic that many never bear because they never have it!)  More than a few children learn about sex through the process of “working on mysteries without any clues”. 

Not a few educators suggest that the reason parents find it so difficult to talk about sex with their children is that they push the topic off to one “big day”…one big dreaded, nerve wracking day.  Contemporary advisors suggest that if bodies, in all of their wonder, were more a matter of daily discussion, actual talk of sex between parents and children would be less an occasion for the ingestion of benzodiazepines.

The principle applies when it comes to the discussion of death.  We would all find it easier to discuss death and dying if that inevitability was more a matter for regular conversation.  If the topic of death and dying came up more regularly in our families we might find it a little easier to discuss “final preparations”.

I have to give credit to my mother on this score.  While there were many things she was not prone to discuss, death was not one of them.  That made life a lot easier for me after she was diagnosed with leukemia in 2001 and given only a few months to live.

I remember one day in particular after I had taken her to Emory Hospital to meet with a leukemia specialist.  He did nothing to soften the initial diagnosis.  Without treatment she might last three months, with treatment she might last eight months.

As were driving to my house, I asked her if she understood what the doctor had told her.  In a matter of fact way she said, “I am going to die”.  There was no fear in her voice, no anxiety, no trepidation.   “I am going to die.”

I have thought a lot about those four words and that conversation since that moment.  How was it that my mother could be so matter of fact about the impending inevitability of her death?  And how was it that we could have such a matter-of-fact conversation about  it?

Certainly part of her calm could be laid to her Christian faith.  She believed that death was a step into the next phase of life.  However, I do not think that her peace was only because of her faith.  I think it was because death was not a stranger to her and therefore not a stranger to us.

My mother had some advantages that most of us do not have.  For one thing, she grew up in a farming community.  Although her family did not own land, they farmed cotton fields and grew their own crops.  When they needed meat for supper, my grandmother would walk into the dirt yard, snatch up a chicken, and wring his neck.  In the winter they would slaughter a hog, a bloodbath if there ever was one.

Funerals were a way of life.  Having a large extended family within walking or wagon distance meant that death was often only a mile or two away.  Feeling sorrowful was a way of life as some great uncle or great, great grandma or second cousin was always standing on the banks of the Jordan casting a wistful eye.

Circuit preachers washed down death in the precious blood of Jesus.  The threat of hell was only a taffy pull or dance away.  Dancing led to sex and sex led to death and death led to hell.  (My mother often commented that had she come home pregnant when she was a girl, her daddy would have killed her.  See the connection?)

She brought those country values into town.  I remember her sage comment when I was a little boy, weeping over the death of my little Easter chick: “James, these little deaths will prepare you for the big ones.”  (That sounds funny to me now, but I think it’s true.  How we are ushered through the little losses of life prepares us for how we navigate the big ones.)

Every morning through my elementary and high school years I awoke to the sound of droning organ music and the “Obituary of the Air” on WLBB radio.  While the station’s Wurlitzer moaned “Rock of Ages” in the background the solemn announcer would say, “Mrs. Sally Johnson of Roopville passed away on Tuesday.  She was a life long resident of Carroll County. She is survived by her children.”  And my mother would say something like, “I grew up with her.  She could run fast.”

On an annual basis she and I would visit the cemetery so she could remind me where all of the relatives were buried.  On days I would visit we would take a ride out "into the country" to find someone who had been misplaced over time.   Only four days before she died she walked my brother through the graveyard for one last visit before she joined that beloved band.  (I think to her the thought of being forgotten was a far more fearsome prospect than dying.)

Of course we had to get through our own obituaries and funerals.  Great grandfathers, grandfathers, grandmothers, great aunts and uncles, and cousins.   I grew up between the fact of death and grief in the old ways and the contemporary obliteration of it.  Given the distances between us, I barely know my relatives outside my immediate family.  Chicken comes in cellophane and nobody but nobody talks about death outside of mob movies and horror flicks.  To visit a funeral home is to visit a Chevrolet showroom.

It seems to me that these important discussions, which we must have, would be made much easier if we quit pretending that death is not inevitable and that its arrival is altogether shocking.  My mother and I could honestly face her end because we were not strangers to the topic.

 

More next time…

A couple of days ago I updated my status line in Facebook to report that my wife and I had taken a walk in the woods and spent the better part of our time talking about “end of life” issues: living wills, trusts and what we would prefer in terms of “the disposition of our remains”- a non-poetic phrase if I ever heard one. 

We weren’t discussing that because either one of us is planning on checking out anytime soon.  I brought it up because I love my wife and daughter too much to leave those decisions up to them when I am on my way out or dead.   And… I love me enough to not put myself in that position should-God forbid- I be on the decision-making side of the matter.

I received several positive comments and a couple of jokes in response to my post.  I appreciated the jokes and the comments.  I also received a couple of emails from people who asked me how we went about getting into that discussion.   More than a couple of people suggested that those kinds of discussions are difficult to broach because one or the other of the parties involved suffers from what I call “inevitability phobia”- an irrational fear of the inevitable.

So, I thought I’d write about this topic for a bit to get my thoughts down on paper and maybe help a few other folks have “the talk”.   

First, note this: you only have three opportunities to talk about it.  You can talk about it while you can still pretend that you are only speaking “theoretically” (“Uh…dear, on the off chance that you should ever die, how should I ‘dispose of your remains?”).   You can talk about it as you are dying  (“Uh…dear, the doctors say you only have a day or two left, do you think it would be a good time to have ‘the talk’”?)  Or, you can let others have “the talk” after you are dead.  (“Well…what are we supposed to do now?”)

In my humble opinion, holding off until you are gone is unfair to your loved ones.  To refuse to “have the talk” or to act as if you don’t care or are never going to die or that it’s “just too hard”…in my book…is all the same thing- a cop out.  Buck up.

Waiting until you are dying to have the talk is no good either.  Think about it…do you think you are going to feel like making final preparations at the same time that you are sick, trying to get well, or otherwise barely conscious? 

I have been on the slow boat to glory and trust me…when you are close to dying you don’t really want to talk about it.  And, the folks with whom you are finally making plans don’t want to talk about it either.  Chances are they want to talk about the opposite- about how you are going to make it and dance with you great, great grandchildren at their weddings in 2090.  The thing to talk about when you are dying is not death but life and memory and love.

I found out the hard way that the time to discuss death is not generally while you are hanging out with it.  When I was laid up in the hospital with a damaged heart that was trying to decide whether it wanted to cooperate or punch my ticket for the glory train, no one in my family wanted to talk about it.  And, while I was lying there with my head spinning and nauseated from medications, I wasn’t real wild about the idea either.  Trust me: when the Grim Reaper is riding a pink elephant through the room no one wants to talk about anything but the elephant.

The time to talk about dying and all that goes along with it is while you can have a bit of emotional distance from the event.  Linda and I didn’t have any problem discussing it the other day in part because neither one of us anticipates that it is going to happen anytime soon.  We know it could happen anytime but we didn’t anticipate it while we were doing something so “lively”.  We were walking in the woods, listening to the birds, and laughing at the dog.  Seemed like a good time to talk about dying.  No biggie. 

Now why are folks so afraid of talking about dying?  

I think part of the reason is that they have not ever witnessed someone dying.  As a parson, I have been with folks in the hours and minutes before they died.  While I have had a few conversations with people who were terminally ill in which they shared their fears about dying, I have never been in the presence of anyone who was actually dying and exhibiting fear.  Admittedly, on a few occasions that has been because they had “been made comfortable” with morphine or some other drug.  However, on other occasions when that was not the case, no one that I have ever seen in their final hours sits there with eyes as wide as pie pans railing against the dimming of the light.

I think part of the reason for that is that no one really knows what it’s like to die.  We have our metaphors (“It’s like falling asleep.”)  and some of us have had our near death experiences.

I have had some extended runs of ventricular tachycardia, which is what often precedes sudden cardiac arrest, and can tell you that that is like taking the down elevator into a dark space.  I’ve never found it frightening because I am too busy thinking something like, “Where’s the ‘up’ button?”  (And, no, I have never seen a light or a fire...thank you very much!)

Since we do not know, nor can we know, what it is really like to die before we actually do it (‘sort of dying’ doesn’t count and neither does being resuscitated since both of those are not ‘death’) we cannot really fear death.  What we can fear is our image of death; our expectation of what death is and what death will be like.  What we can fear is the little film we run in our heads about “what it must be like to die”, which is another way of saying is that we can fear our selves and the little horror shows we write, produce, direct and perform in the theaters of our minds.   

I think another reason we fear discussing our deaths is because we believe that talking about it somehow brings it closer.  We seem to believe that if we talk about it, “it” might happen.  We have probably heard people say things that underwrite that fear.  “Why Harvey and I were just talking about Doris and she called on the phone!”  Somehow we think that thinking about something or talking about it will make it so.  Perhaps we have enough such coincidences in our lives to suggest that it’s true.

However, we think about and talk about all kinds of things and they never happen.  While I have no way of proving it, I venture to guess that most of what we talk about or think about happening does not happen- or at least not on the heels of our talking or thinking about it.

Death comes when it comes and not because “we were just talking about it!”

There may be a host of reasons as to why we do not want to talk about our deaths or make any plans around them but I’d bet that those are two good ones: (1) we are afraid that talking about it will bring it about and (2) we think we know what it is well enough to fear it.

I think if we could admit that (1) we have no idea what death is like (and therefore have no real basis for fearing it) and (2) thinking something does not make it happen, we might be a bit more open to discussing it with those we love and who love us.