Returning Sacredness to Dying, Part One

 

We are so conditioned to fear death and push it away that we disengage from our loved ones as they are dying. So many times I have witnessed a husband or wife, a son or a daughter, making heroic efforts to maintain a sense of normal everyday life around their dying spouse or parent. They don’t want to make their loved one depressed; they fear he or she will “give up” and they will lose them sooner. The dying person pretends too, so they can protect their family from emotional pain.

As a result of avoiding open discussion of dying, everyone is unprepared; patients often feel alone and suffer silently as their losses mount and their bodies decline. One of the worst effects of not speaking openly about death is the loss of sacredness in how we approach this momentous event. Instead, dying feels profane and empty.

Seismic Shifts in our Culture
The lack of sacredness in dying is also the result of other seismic shifts in our culture. Industrialization and globalization have dispersed families across the country and the world. This has weakened family structure and the cultural traditions that had been passed from one generation to the next. The rites and rituals that had helped us to understand death and give it context, mostly disappeared. With the scientific and technological advances that transformed our medical system, the focus shifted from the sacred to the physical aspects of treatment and symptom management.

But as the saying goes: “The times they are a changing.”
There is a growing interest in re-exploring death and dying, from death cafes to doctors learning to have the end of life discussion, to the emerging field of death doulas. The model of end-of-life care promoted by INELDA pays a lot of attention to the sacred aspects of death and dying, trying to return dying to its deeper truths.

Honest, Truthful Conversations
At the Art of Dying Conference in New York City this past April, I gave a plenary talk on how we return a sense of the sacred to dying. Before we can have a serious conversation with a dying person and their loved ones about sacredness, we have to be willing to engage in honest and truthful discussion about dying from the time of diagnosis right up to a person’s last days.

Through the trainings INELDA offers, we teach doulas that they must facilitate this kind of openness by listening deeply and actively, never turning away from raw emotion, and by working hard to avoid judging another’s truth or trying to change it.

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