"Don't hide me away"

“Don't hide me away”, he said. “Death is part of living, not a secret to be hidden behind closed doors.”

So we didn't. When my husband died, he stayed home with me for two or three days and I continued to tend to his body as I had done for so long. In my way, I also continued to tend to his soul too. I meditated beside him, sang, played my harp, talked to him and read him Winnie the Pooh. On the morning he died, his daughter and I bathed him as we had the day before while he was alive. Over those two days a few people came to the house to see him and say goodbye and then, because of the hot weather, the funeral directors came to collect him and put him in their fridge. They brought him back the day before his funeral and we put him on trestles in the shed he'd build from scratch with a broken leg. In the evening, we opened the double doors, lit a fire and close friends gathered to remember, tell stories, sing, drink hot chocolate and eat cake.

The next day, 6 strong men (ranging in height from 6'4” to 5'4” - God bless the one who was 6'4” ) carried him through the village to the community centre. We followed on foot, friends, neighbours, family, grandchildren, the procession led by his friend on a motorbike. Villagers stood still in respect, old men doffed their caps, the traffic stopped for us. Drummers drummed him into the hall and we laid his motorbike helmet, interfaith minister's stole and drum on top of his wicker coffin.

My husband wasn't a showy man, quite the reverse, but he was a wise one.

“If you don't see the coffin”, he'd said, “ it's hard to understand the person has actually gone. We need that reality.”

Afterwards we had cream tea in the room next door and one by one people trickled back to his coffin to touch it, whisper their messages to him, cry with him. When it was time, we carried him out to the car and the waiting fridge.

The next day dawned bright and beautiful.

“Well then”, said the kind and gentle interfaith minister who was holding the services as he came through my back door, “what are we going to do today for his committal?”

At my husband's request and based on John O'Donohue's writings, I had written the closing words. Over the next 10 minutes  we put together the rest of it – poetry, prayer, silence and song. At the crematorium, the few of us assembled sat on chairs close to the coffin and finally let that beloved body go.

Waking

I have just read a book: “My Father's Wake – how the Irish teach us to love, live and die”, by Kevin Toolis. The Irish way, which was surely our way for countless generations, was (and still is to some extent I believe) that the community comes together and first vigils the dying person and then 'wakes' the deceased,  gathering around the open coffin, lamenting in song, weeping, telling stories, drinking tea – or whiskey – eating sandwiches, even playing games. The deceased person was never alone. The bereaved were supported. The community cared and the children came.

“Sorry for your trouble” spoken to the family, touch the corpse and pray.

Six strong men carried the coffin to the church where the deceased person would rest overnight before the funeral the following day.

I am proud of my husband and of us. Intuitively we, in our own way, followed the old ways. And hugely grateful too, to the funeral directors who facilitated what we wanted.

Kevin Toolis writes:

“His fathers and mothers…had trained him all his life to die by giving a voice, a place, in their daily lives for the dying and the dead”

And

“To be human is to be mortal and to be mortal is to live, love and die amidst everyone around you”

Completing

Dying is hidden away in our society, mostly in hospitals, sometimes in hospices, only occasionally, despite most people's stated wishes, does death happen at home. Death has, for the last few generations, been seen as a medical failure. Keeping the corpse at home is often frowned upon. Although this is beginning to change, children have been kept away from the dying and from funerals – supposedly to 'protect' them. From what? The inevitability of death? What does this do for us as a society? It makes us frightened, isolated, in our caring, our dying and our grieving. Nowadays you can send your dead beloved off to Andover and get a box back with their ashes. Clean and tidy. No fuss and no dread of a funeral to get through. And cheap- relatively. (Gosh funerals are expensive.) I understand. But I also understand how difficult it may become, in time, for those who grieve. Did we honour their life? Did we say goodbye? Did we hear what they meant to others than us? Do we feel complete? Now they are gone and their absence cuts more deeply, we realise, perhaps, how deeply we loved them, how much we appreciate them now they are gone, or maybe how much we needed to forgive them. And now, weeks, months or even years on, is it too late?

Caught between the pace and routine of what Kevin Toolis calls the Western Death Machine and the shock and numbness of the death of our beloved, it may be difficult to find our way without a meaningful heritage to support us.

There are – I experienced some of them – wonderful funeral directors who care deeply, are willing and able to guide us kindly, who listen to our needs and do their utmost to meet them. I also think that in some quarters, there is a growing awareness of the need to bring death back from exile, to bring it home to our hearths and hearts.

Bringing death home

“Ugh! How could you sleep alongside a dead body!?” someone said to me the other day. But it was 'my dead' and my loved one's dead body, my responsibility to tend to it, to keep on loving through the veil of death.

Monday morning, 48 hours after his death, I woke up, looked at my husband and said,

“Oh, you've gone”.

Had it taken him 48 hours to 'leave' or had it taken me 48 hours to accept his deadness? I can't answer that question. I only know that I was transitioning from wife to widow and that I was understanding that henceforth my relationship with him would be an internal one. I didn't (don't) like it but the reality of it was clear. Those two days were the liminal space I needed to make that passage.

And so I work with those who are dying and those who are grieving. The social enterprise I set up, has the vision to “alleviate [their] isolation and fear”. I write, I work one to one, I run groups, offer pastoral care at a hospice and run a singing group who sing for the dying. It is a drop in the ocean. But an ocean is made up of drops and if I have brought solace and ease to one dying person or one grieving family, then it is worth doing what I do.

Thank you to all of you who are reading this, all of you who write to me and let me know that my words land somewhere and all of you who, like me, do not want death to be hidden away like a frightening bogeyman, but rather brought in from the cold and respected as what makes our lives precious and poignantly beautiful.

The final words go to Kevin Toolis:

“If you never know sorrow then you will never know love and if you never know death then you will never know life.”

With my love

Nickie

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