I had been showing my son’s Japanese in-laws around Highgate cemetery, telling them what a doughty collection of fascinating minds and souls had the pleasure of each other’s company here. Yet afterwards I was struck with unexpected melancholy, as it hit me what a lonely thing it is to live out eternity far from the human interactions most of us have with family and friends while we are alive, and that lying in a chill grave alongside the commonest of beings or the greatest intellects was no consolation.
What I would like, I announced to my son and daughter-in-law, is to have my ashes kept in some container – nothing flash, a box will do – in the home we share and which my son intends to keep. I could be an ethereal presence among the family, listening in to the quotidian chatter and arguments, privy to all that the keepers of the family DNA say and do. At which my daughter-in-law gave me a beautiful smile and said that was fine with her. In Japan, they keep the ashes of their loved ones in a shrine at home so that relatives can hold loving rituals, have a chat or even seek comfort from remembered wisdom of their elders, and she would happily do the same for me. My son nodded: “If it’s what you want, that’s what we’ll do.”
The effect of being told that I can go on being with my family has given me a startling amount of comfort and made me feel infinitely less fearful of being dead than I had when I envisaged being tucked away in some burial ground.
Of course, it is not what everyone would want, but several people I have told about it have said that they, too, would like to be a part of the lives of their nearest and dearest and perhaps that we could design our containers…
So I was mightily upset at the pope (and thus far I’ve had a soft spot for him) saying that people should not keep the ashes of their dead at home, nor, I suppose, at the Sacred Stones burial mound in Cambridgeshire, which opened last week and is described as a “sacred space in a secular world” by one person wanting to buy a niche. Presumably, if we are not buried in a sacred place, we sacrifice God’s protection.
But like an increasing number of people, I do not have a faith led by a God holding out the possibility of eternal caring surveillance, nor belief in a higher force that will whisk me off to Elysian delights after my corporeal exit from the world. So far as I am concerned, death means death and, with it, nothingness.
And herein lies the crisis of our time, as a huge swath of us edges ever closer to the inevitability of a death that offers no comforting afterlife. We are terrified at the idea of that finality, of losing control over our lives and place in this world. In our culture where the defining mantras are self-help, self-improvement and demonstrating that you can defeat nature’s pattern of diminishing us as we age, death is the greatest insult and how often you hear of people angry until the end.
So it is certainly worth raging against ageism and the grim prejudices in our society that mean we torment body and soul in our efforts to deny the ageing process. But to be raging against the dying of the light, if it means we are in a state of rage at what we cannot prevent and because what comes afterwards seems so devoid of comfort, is a pitiful way to go.
Yet there are real signs of a healthy shift, if not a groundswell, with people writing interestingly and intensely subjectively about death as fact or fiction; TV programmes, still admittedly hooked into reality lifestyle, run programmes on the types of funeral to be had so that we can be involved in designing the way we will be seen off.
The Death Cafe movement, developed by Jon Underwood and Sue Barsky Reid, began in 2011 and has held cafes in England and 37 other countries. Its objective is “to increase awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives”, with no defined objectives or themes, just group-directed discussion over tea and cake.
The most eloquent and compelling argument for making death a subject we can discuss without embarrassment or discomfort with family, friends, children,doctors, carers is made by Atul Gawande in his book Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine And What Matters in the End. He explores humane, client-centred models of residential care, ways of involving our elderly in society in a fulfilling lifestyle until the end; the health and spiritual benefits that living as extended family may bring. Gawande has seen how terminal patients choosing quality of life over quantity – choosing not to have more invasive treatments despite this meaning less time to live – can be surprisingly happy.
As a surgeon and public health researcher, he knows that: “Mortality can be a treacherous subject … For many, such talk, no matter how carefully framed, raises the spectre of a society readying itself to sacrifice its sick and aged. But what if the sick and aged are already being sacrificed – victims of our refusal to accept the inexorability of our life cycle?”
Accept it we will be forced to do, so surely the very best we can do is get talking and make clear how we want our end to be: whether it is, as in the Netherlands, the possibility of calling in the doctor when life has become unbearable suffering; to being cared for, whatever the risks, in our own home; to gorge ourselves on hand-rolled chocolates and a litre of Remy Martin if we wish; to have the comfort of a pet for someone alone; or to choose the famous kindness of hospice care, so that we may cast off this mortal coil in the best way possible.
If our final wish to end up at home on the mantelpiece is granted, I’ll thank the pope to keep his disapproval to himself.
