I was sixteen years old the first and last time I saw someone die.
I was at my grandparentsâ fiftieth wedding anniversary party in their communityâs Ruritan Club building. On the walls hung group photos of men, sometimes with my grandpa in the center, sometimes with my uncle Bailey, his brother. They switched off leading the club of local farmers in their small North Carolina town outside Elizabeth City, where their daddy had farmed and his daddy before him.
My family had driven down from West Virginia for the weekend, to celebrate my grandparents with everyone in their communityâthe farmers and their wives, the members of their church, the volunteer firefighters. Uncle Bailey was scheduled for a heart procedure the next week.
Bailey was my grandpaâs younger brother. He had served in Europe before he took over his fatherâs farm with my grandpa. When Bailey got home from the war, my grandparents had already started dating. Thatâs how Bailey met my grandmaâs younger sister, who became his bride. The brothers and their wives raised their families in two brick houses, with just a cow pasture between them.
Weâd just finished taking family photos, the cousins whoâd been raised far away from the farmâmy sisters and me, the âcity girlsââalongside the cousins who lived there. The picture I remember best is my mom and her brother, smiling while they stood behind their parents, who sat in white folding chairs, the place of honor marking their many decades together.
As I eyed the dessert table at the front of the room, I noticed Uncle Bailey there. He grabbed at the corner of the table as he collapsed. There was a scream. Then someone yelled, âJune, June!â My momâs name.
She crouched at Baileyâs side immediately. My mother is a physical therapist, and also the family member who remains uncannily calm in moments of crisis. My aunt, a nurse, and my dad, a doctor, got on the floor beside her. They started CPR. One-two-three. Breath, breath. One-two-three. Breath, breath.
Everyone else watched silently. Baileyâs wife, my aunt Ann, sat in a folding chair just feet away. Her children gathered around her. My grandpa watched too. One-two-three. Breath, breath. One-two-three. Breath, breath.
Someone had called the paramedics. No one talked much, save for a few whispers about whether the rain outside would delay the ambulance. The EMTs arrived quickly, though it seemed like forever, and we all watched as they rolled in a stretcher and pulled Baileyâs horizontal body up onto it. He didnât move. I remember his brown socks showing between the bottom of his pants and his dress shoes.
A few days later, we gathered again. The same people whoâd been at the anniversary party filed into the chapel at a local funeral home. I wore my anniversary-party dress to the funeralâIâd only packed one. In the reception hall afterward, the same kind of dessert table awaited us, with the same portioned-out sweets on individual paper plates. We celebrated Uncle Baileyâs life and said goodbye.
I later heard that the day he died, before heâd showered and changed clothes for the party, Uncle Bailey had helped deliver a calf. His dirty work clothes were still in the washer.
The next time I visited my grandparentsâ house, I noticed that the family photo taken just before Bailey collapsed was displayed prominently in their living room. I remember looking at everyoneâs smiles, how we didnât know what was coming. My grandma, though, was not going to hide the remembrance of her fiftieth wedding anniversary because Bailey died at the party. Getting a nice frame for an anniversary-party photo was what you did with group photos from a family reunion. Baileyâs death had its own set of prescribed rituals: covered dishes were delivered, the minister put together a service, everyone gathered at the funeral home chapel and then processed in a line of cars to our familyâs section of the town cemetery.
It happened, it was sad, and it was natural.
I did not grow up in my grandparentsâ farming community, so this kind of proximity to death, and the ready-made rituals for marking it, were not part of my upbringing. While my North Carolina cousins lovingly raised pigs and sheep for the livestock fair knowing full well theyâd be eventually slaughtered, I was the kid who picked out Old Yeller at the video store because of the Disney logo on the cardboard sleeve, and then, when the family dog gets shot at the end of the movie, tearfully demanded of my parents, âHow could you let us watch this?!?â
Today, when I learn that someone I know is gone or grieving, itâs not from local obituaries or phone calls but from texts and social media. Instead of gathering together in a church or funeral home, I most often experience death online. Iâll click around for the context and details, then Iâll end up leaving a clichĂ©d message of careâone that cautiously tries to navigate the grieving peopleâs religious views and my own. Sometimes I offer prayers, but more often I land on a secular message: Iâm âsending my loveâ or âholding you in my heart.â Then, the next time I talk to someone who also knew the person who died, we trade information about what we know to fill in any gaps.
And each time this happens, it feels like Iâm improvising, like I donât know exactly what to do or say when. This makes sense, because I was not trained to deal with death this way. In my family, after a death, you would go to a service, and then you found ways to be helpful. As a kid, I remember pulling into an unfamiliar driveway and staying in the minivan while my mom delivered a casserole dish to the front door. This was at a house Iâd never seen before, and would never see again. Someone had died, my mother explained, so we were bringing them dinner. This wordless care was how my mom reached out to people who were grieving or to those who themselves were at the end of life.
âThe most important thing we can do to someone who is dying?â writer Anne Lamott advised. âShow up; listen; nod.â But in my adult life, I live far from many people I love, and showing up at their doorstep is not always an option. My husband and I have two little kids and both work full-time, so we are doing well if we manage to cook for ourselves a few times a week. Suffice it to say, I have never delivered a casserole.
Our experience is more the rule than the exception these days. Across the country, people are gathering around death less frequently than in the past, and when we do come together to memorialize someone, it is increasingly done in individualized, do-it-yourself ceremonies. The funeral home industry in America, for example, is grappling with decreasing demand for both funeral services and burials. âWe have become more transient and less traditional, so the notion of cemetery plots for families to visit holds less significance,â US Funerals Online reported in 2018. The group reported that cremation was the choice in a majority of deaths, with cremation providers reporting that 80 percent of their business is âdirect cremation.â People are collecting the remains of their loved ones and taking it from there.
At the same time, we are less connected to houses of worship that have traditionally seen us through the hardship that any death brings. As of 2019, more than a quarter of Americans claim no religion, a segment of the population that has tripled in the last twenty-five years, coinciding with decreasing trust in religious institutions. Meanwhile, Americansâ belief in some kind of afterlife has remained remarkably consistent, hovering around 70 percent since World War II. Itâs not so much that we are understanding death in a more secular way. Itâs that more of us are grappling with the meaning of life outside of religious institutions.
More personalized, individualized death ceremonies mean that communities of grievers have no guidebooks, rituals, or straightforward to-do lists to center them in their moments of greatest vulnerability. âAfter my motherâs death, I felt the lack of rituals to shape and support my loss,â author Meghan OâRourke wrote in her memoir about her motherâs death, The Long Goodbye. âI found myself envying my Jewish friends the practice of saying Kaddish, with its ceremonious designation of time each day devoted to remembering the lost person.â
And then came Covid-19. We lost the ability to sit with one another at the end, or to gather and memorialize the people we were losing. People who belonged to houses of worship were no longer able to gather there. We werenât even able to follow Anne Lamottâs advice, to just show up to accompany our dying loved ones. All we had were words and the seeming impossibility of knowing when and how to start that difficult conversation about death.
The pandemic accelerated trends that were already happening. We are now more on our own in navigating grief and healing in our relationships. When someone in my life died during Covid, and when people in my life lost loved ones during Covid, no matter how much I would have preferred to show up at a memorial service and offer a quiet hug, that wasnât an option. I had to step up and struggle for the words to acknowledge death and loss. I had to learn to talk about death.
The objective of hard conversations about death is to express care. Before death, with people who are aging or who become ill, we have to ask what kind of care they need and want. When death is circling, we express care for those who are leaving and those who will be left by telling them what they mean to us. When death has happened, we show care by grieving, checking in, and remembering together. Thatâs what we can do.
Still, these exchanges are delicate. They are happening within newly fragile relationships, and you have to pay attention to pick when to listen and when to speak. What you need to say may be too painful for someone to hear. A dying person may not want to talk to you about how they are dying; that may be the last thing they want to consider, even as time runs out. A well-meaning friend might try to offer you comfort while you grieve, but be too afraid to acknowledge the finality of death. âYouâll get through this,â they say, unknowingly diminishing the loss instead of being able to sit with you in it.
We are often tentative in our conversations around death, so they end shy of real connection. Or we long to problem-solve our way around pain and loss or decline, but we canât. We have to just talk about, and witness together, what happens when death comes into our lives. It happens to all of us eventually. As William Faulkner wrote in As I Lay Dying, âIt takes two people to make you, and one people to die. Thatâs how the world is going to end.â Death comes for each of us, and no words can change that fact. Skipping the conversation about death because the words arenât coming easily is shirking away from deathâs ultimate challenge: to use our time well and with intention.
But while death is unavoidable, it comes in many forms that change its meaning and impact. Death can be sudden or protracted, too early or at long last. It strikes through accidents, suicides, overdoses, or, most often, in hospital beds. We lose our partners, children, parents, and siblings; we lose pregnancies, coworkers, high school acquaintances, and famous strangers. How and when we encounter death reveals who is taken care of by our society and who isnât. I explore these distinctions in this chapter, but I try to avoid the silent hierarchical competition that can bog down discussions about grief and death. I treat all deaths equally, because if a person is grieving, a person is grieving.
Over the years, Iâve sought to learn from those who have navigated death and loss, trying to understand which kinds of words helped and which didnât. Iâve also talked to people in my own life about their losses and their fears of death, as a kind of challenge to myself to have conversations that I otherwise would have put off. They were helpful and elucidating, and also, unsatisfactory. I wanted to be able to feel better about loss, or impending loss, by acknowledging it. But this didnât work. Instead, I learned that skillful communication about death starts with the awareness that nothing you say is going to fix it or make it go away. The best way to talk about death is to make room for that unsolvable sadness to just be there, to offer comfort and dignity alongside it, and to say what you need to say while thereâs still time.
âItâs okay youâre not okay.â
After a death, we are left to find the right way to acknowledge itâand the gaping hole it leavesâwith those we love. At a time of so much pain, we often cause more by withdrawing or trying to resolve death with a neat turn of a phrase.
âThe glaring wrongness was just so stunning,â Megan Devine told me of her casual conversations after her partner Matt drowned in a river at the age of thirty-nine. âLargely, the people that I expected to have better skills actually had really shitty skills.â
Megan is a therapist and grief counselor who runs a wonderful website called Refuge in Grief. Its welcome page offers two buttonsââI am grievingâ and âSomeone I know is grievingââto demarcate those two distinct experiences. For both audiences, her siteâs welcoming message concludes, âSome things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.â She urges people who are grieving or who are trying to care for those in grief to push beyond the urge to offer soothing platitudes, and to instead witness the horror of loss. âPeople feel really helpless in the face of someone elseâs pain and they want to make that pain go away so they can stop feeling so helpless,â she told me when we talked. âIf we could just stop pretending that things are fine, things would be a lot better.â
Megan was a therapist before her partner Matt died, but it was that experience of loss, and the repetition of ham-handed condolences afterward, that made her reimagine her work âby shifting the focus from grief as a problem to be solved to an experience to be tended,â as she wrote in her 2017 book Itâs OK That Youâre Not OK.
Meganâs loss was sudden, unbelievable, shattering. She and Matt were hiking together in the woods outside Portland, Maine, in July 2009. After six weeks of rain, the river was higher than normal. Matt went in for a swim while Megan watched their dog Boris move in and out of the water. She was turned away from Matt briefly to watch the dog when she heard coughing and a call for help. She turned to see Matt clinging to a tree in the river, then letting go. Megan and the dog jumped in after Matt and they were swept about two miles downriver before they were able to climb out and call for help. Three hours later, rescue crews found Mattâs body.
Megan did not know what to do next and neither did anyone around her. A social worker arrived along with the first responders. As soon as Mattâs body was located, Megan told me, âThe young crisis worker walked over to me and handed me this packet and said, âNow that youâre a widow, youâll need these resources.â That was the absolute wrong thing to say in that moment!â
Then came the series of wildly ill-timed assurances from many corners that she would âfind someone else.â That started as soon as Matt died, including at his funeral. The intention, Megan knew, was to comfort her that she would not be alone forever. But to her it sounded like a callous denial of the relationship sheâd lost. âHow that landed for me was, he was not replaceable. You canât fix the pain that Iâm in right now by plugging another human into it,â she explained.
Often the misguided comments came from her therapist colleagues, âbecause they thought they knew what they were doing because they were therapists.â She remembered what felt like âunintentional condescension,â including, initially, assurances that it was okay to be sad. âLike, one, Iâm not stupid,â she told me. âIf you know me at all, I know itâs cool to be sad after having just watched my partner die.â
More than anything, she resented having her experience narrated to her by others, rather than just having someone stop, acknowledge, and listen. âPeople make an assumption about what youâre actually struggling with, and then they solve that struggle for you, never having checked out if thatâs even real or relevant,â she said. âI think thatâs a really common thing that happens for grieving people.â
Megan knew that people were grasping for the right thing to say that might unlock some healing, or at least a smile. Still, peopleâs clumsy attempts cut particularly deep because of the rawness of her grief. âWhen youâre grieving, when your life just exploded, youâve got nothing. You have no barriers, no stabilizers, no ability to roll with shit. You are stripped down. And everything is painful. So you notice stuff a lot more,â Megan explained. âYou are suddenly in a whole new world, but everybody around you thinks itâs the same world. And everything they say that doesnât help really illustrates that gap even more.â
For Megan, the conversations that felt the best were direct and honest. She remembers one short exchange with the owner of a local bookstore. They ran into each other at a cafĂ©, the place where Megan had met Matt, so she was already electric with emotion when she stepped inside. As she waited in line for coffee, the bookstore owner came to stand beside her. âHe said something along the lines of, âHe was a really great guy. I didnât know him very well, but I was very impressed with who he was,â â Megan remembered. âThen he said, âI just want to tell you this is going to take a lot longer than anybody will tell you before you start to feel normal in any way again.â â
Then he got his coffee and left. âIt was great to hear somebody tell me what I already knew to be true. It was a validation of reality,â Megan said. âAnd to me, that is the best thing that you can do.â
This instance was both nice and rare. Megan noticed how often people offered a cursory, âLet me know if you need anything,â as they exited conversations with he...