My youngest grandchildren just went to their first funeral, and I suspect they’re all the better for the experience. They are 6 and 4. (I hear intake of breath from readers.) They had been separated from their mother for a long week as she attended the decline and death of her own mother hundreds of miles distant, and now she wanted the family together. As might be imagined, extensive discussions surrounded all aspects of this: family members told their father Oh, You Can’t Possibly Take Them!; friends said, “Heavens, you’ll scar them forever;” casual acquaintances had expert advice. I don’t know any of this for a fact; I’m on another coast and only offered my own opinion when asked. but my own opinion is this: death is a part of the human experience, a perfectly natural thing to happen even if (and often when) we’d prefer it didn’t, and children are good at facing reality if adults around them will refrain from freaking out. My grandchildren were counselled by their parents and their questions, I’m told, leaned mostly toward “OK if we go play with the cousins now?” There are some touching examples of children handling their own or others’ deaths in my book Dying Unafraid, which you’re invited to read about or buy through the links lurking around this blog, but I will mention just one: an early patient of my hospice volunteer work who was a beloved grandmother of many. Children ages two and up clambered constantly atop her bed, talked to her as she lay comatose and dying, and discussed at the wake how she “looked prettier than when she was so sick.” Years later it remained clear that what they remembered was how lovingly everyone saw Grandmother through her final days; there were no spooky memories of an unmentionable event. I am neither a professional nor an expert in this (or any other) area. I’m just a writer who took to hospice work and later work with AIDS support groups and other end-of-life causes. But I do know that for centuries millions of people died with their loved ones (and often unloved ones who were just hanging around for other reasons) in the immediate vicinity, and humankind seems to have survived. My brilliant psychologist friend Marilyn gladdened my heart by agreeing with the advice I’d given pre-funeral about the grandchildren in the case above. I had simply said, “Why not just do exactly what their mother wants? She’s had a hard time. They can handle it.” It is seldom the single jarring episode that scars a child, Marilyn says, but the thing that happens over and over. Better, she says, to visit a visitation room once or twice than to listen to your parents arguing every day. I say, death happens and we live with it. If we talk about it openly and lovingly, those who are just beginning the journey might be equipped to see that journey fearlessly to its completion.
On living, dying and grandchildren
Welcome to my blog.
I picked the topic while walking in the gorgeous San Francisco sunshine with my gorgeous friend Mary Trigiani one day, talking about what ties together the erratic strands of my life. Celebrating, we said. Celebrating the beauty of this place (and other places), celebrating life and occasionally death, celebrating friends and families and faith. “You really need to start a blog,” said Mary, and thus it was born.
It was the celebration of living and dying that led me to become a hospice volunteer, later to work with AIDS patients, and eventually to put those stories together with similar stories of hope and courage to create the book Dying Unafraid. Researching Dying Unafraid led me to meet some remarkable people with Compassion and Choices , an organization I work with still (often 40 hours a week.)
It is the celebration of friends that leads me to joy.
It was the celebration of family that led to the little biographical memoir of my father Earl Moreland, Never in Doubt and leads to the serious joy — can joy be serious? Why not — of living with The Great Encourager (that’s Bud, my final husband) and keeping in touch with my flawless children and grandchildren. (Sandy is the only one with a Web site right now, unless I get into Facebooks of grandkids and I’d better not go there as yet.)
It was the celebration of faith that led me to my particular church home here in San Francisco and helped open my eyes and heart to the multitude of other truly remarkable faith communities that come together in the San Francisco Interfaith Council (new Web site under construction), the other nonprofit that currently occupies my days.
So today, with Easter approaching and the celebrations of other faith communities all around in the springtime, it seemed a good time to send this initial blog into cyberspace. I hope you’ll enjoy it, whoever and wherever you are, and perhaps post a note. (What do bloggers do, I wonder, if no one ever blogs back?)
There are plenty of other things to celebrate, despite the troubles of our battered world: books and art and music and sometimes even politics. I’ll welcome your thoughts, but I won’t promise many profound thoughts of my own (and surely not every day or even every few days! Where in the world can blog time be found?) We’ll see. And we’ll celebrate.