Death avoidance is not an individual failing; it’s a cultural one. Facing death is not for the faint-hearted. It is far too challenging to expect that each citizen will do so on his or her own. Death acceptance is the responsibility of all death professionals—funeral directors, cemetery managers, hospital workers. It is the responsibility of those who have been tasked with creating physical and emotional environments where safe, open interaction with death and dead bodies is possible.
Nine years ago, when I began working with the dead, I heard other practitioners speak about holding the space for the dying person and their family. With my secular bias, “holding the space” sounded like saccharine hippie lingo.
This judgment was wrong. Holding the space is crucial, and exactly what we are missing. To hold the space is to create a ring of safety around the family and friends of the dead, providing a place where they can grieve openly and honestly, without fear of being judged.
Everywhere I traveled I saw this death space in action, and I felt what it means to be held. At Ruriden columbarium in Japan, I was held by a sphere of Buddhas glowing soft blue and purple. At the cemetery in Mexico, I was held by a single wrought-iron fence in the light of tens of thousands of flickering amber candles. At the open-air pyre in Colorado, I was held within the elegant bamboo walls, which kept mourners safe as the flames shot high. There was magic to each of these places. There was grief, unimaginable grief. But in that grief there was no shame. These were places to meet despair face to face and say, “I see you waiting there. And I feel you, strongly. But you do not demean me.”
In our Western culture, where are we held in our grief? Perhaps religious spaces, churches, temples—for those who have faith. But for everyone else, the most vulnerable time in our lives is a gauntlet of awkward obstacles.
First come our hospitals, which are often perceived as cold, antiseptic horror shows. At a recent meeting, a longtime acquaintance of mine apologized for having been so hard to reach, but her mother had just died in a Los Angeles hospital. There had been an extended illness, and her mother spent her final weeks lying on a special inflatable mattress, designed to prevent the bedsores that can develop from long periods of immobility. After her death, the sympathetic nurses told my acquaintance that she could take the time she needed to sit with her mother’s body. After a few minutes, a doctor strode into the room. The family had never met this doctor before, and he did not choose to introduce himself. He walked over to her mother’s chart, read it briefly, and then leaned down and pulled the plug on the inflatable mattress. Her mother’s lifeless body sprang upward, jolting from side to side “like a zombie” as the air left the mattress. The doctor walked out, having not said a word. The family was far from held. As soon as their mother took her last breath, they were spat out.
Second, there are our funeral homes. An executive of Service Corporation International, the country’s largest funeral and cemetery company, admitted recently that “the industry was really built around selling a casket.” As fewer and fewer of us see value in placing Mom’s made-up body in a $7,000 casket and turn to simple cremations instead, the industry must find a new way to survive financially, by selling not a “funeral service” but a “gathering” in a “multisensory experience room.”
As a recent Wall Street Journal article explained: “Using audio and video equipment, the experience rooms can create the atmosphere of a golf course, complete with the scent of newly mowed grass, to salute the life of a golfing fanatic. Or it can conjure up a beach, mountain or football stadium.”
Perhaps paying several thousand dollars to hold a funeral in a faux “multisensory” golf course will make families feel held in their grief, but I have my doubts.
My mother recently turned seventy. One afternoon, as an exercise, I envisioned taking my mother’s mummified body out of the grave, as they do in Tana Toraja in Indonesia. Pulling her remains toward me, standing her up, looking her in the eyes years after her death—the thought no longer alarmed me. Not only could I handle such a task, I believe I would find solace in the ritual.
Holding the space doesn’t mean swaddling the family immobile in their grief. It also means giving them meaningful tasks. Using chopsticks to methodically clutch bone after bone and place them in an urn, building an altar to invite a spirit to visit once a year, even taking a body from the grave to clean and redress it: these activities give the mourner a sense of purpose. A sense of purpose helps the mourner grieve. Grieving helps the mourner begin to heal.
We won’t get our ritual back if we don’t show up. Show up first, and the ritual will come. Insist on going to the cremation, insist on going to the burial. Insist on being involved, even if it is just brushing your mother’s hair as she lies in her casket. Insist on applying her favorite shade of lipstick, the one she wouldn’t dream of going to the grave without. Insist on cutting a small lock of her hair to place in a locket or a ring. Do not be afraid. These are human acts, acts of bravery and love in the face of death and loss.
I would be comfortable with my mother’s dead body precisely because I would be held. The ritual doesn’t involve sneaking into a cemetery in the dead of night to peek in on a mummy. The ritual involves pulling someone I loved, and thus my grief, out into the light of day. Greeting my mother, alongside my neighbors and family—my community standing next to me in support. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, they say. No matter what it takes, the hard work begins for the West to haul our fear, shame, and grief surrounding death out into the disinfecting light of the sun.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Trust me, I didn’t drag myself around the world without some serious help.
This book was darkness on the face of the deep. It was given form in the void by mother-agent Anna Sproul-Latimer and father-editor Tom Mayer. “Let there be book!” they said. And there was book.
All the other incredible folk on Team Caitlin at W. W. Norton, with special thanks to Steve Colca, Erin Sinesky Lovett, Sarah Bolling, Allegra Huston, Elizabeth Kerr, and Mary Kate Skehan.
The savage eyes who ripped apart early drafts of this book: Will C. White, Louise Hung, David Forrest, Mara Zehler, Will Slocombe, and Alex Frankel.
Paul Koudounaris . . . just for being you.
Sarah Chavez, for being my right-hand woman in all things and trusting me with your story.
My poor funeral director Amber Carvaly, left to raise the funeral home by herself while I was an absentee owner.
Bianca Daalder-van Iersel and Conner Habib, for tossing me over the finish line kicking and screaming.
On my travels: all the inspiring members of the Crestone End of Life Project in Colorado, Agus Lamba and Katie Innamorato in Indonesia, Claudia Tapia and Mayra Cisneros in Mexico, Eriko Takeuchi and Ayako Sato in Japan, Katrina Spade and Cheryl Johnston in North Carolina, Jordi Nadal in Spain, and Andres Bedoya in Bolivia.
Finally Landis Blair, who was an all-right boyfriend but is now a killer collaborator.