Death and Children
I’ve
recently become a contributor to the RadInfinitum weblog, where this piece originally
appeared. Next week will be on a cheerier topic. Fairies. Honest.
Notes
from Niflheim: Death and Children
Last weekend I picked up Caitlin
Doughty’s Smoke
Gets In Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory from the local
library. Ms. Doughty is the host of the “Ask a Mortician” web series and the
founder of “The Order of the Good Death” over on Facebook. Her backstory is
pretty straightforward: innocent, eight-year-old girl is deeply traumatized by
seeing another young girl plummet to her gristly demise, and now as a millennial
young adult seeks to change the unhealthy denial of real death (as opposed to
the glorification of fictional carnage) rampant in American culture.
Her book is nothing earth-shattering,
but it’s a quick read and worth the time. I stumbled upon Ms. Doughty’s work in
my followings of Caleb Wilde’s similarly themed blog, “Confessions of a Funeral
Director.” Like Ms. Doughty, Mr. Wilde seeks a revolution in the ways that we
deal with death, or rather our refusal to do so. Both seem to have a healthy
following, though both have also been accused of being a bit too Generation
Overshare.
Theirs seems a decent quest. As
someone who’s worked in both churches and trauma bays over the years, I can
attest to our culture’s general befuddlement when it comes to the grave. Then
again, mine is not a particularly normal perspective on such matters. I honestly
can’t remember when I saw my first dead body. Nor do I have any idea as to how
many people I’ve buried, scattered, or otherwise memorialized. What I can tell
you is that my record in the hospital was six violent deaths in six hours, from
midnight to morning.
Death has been a reality in my life
for as long as I can recall. Raised religious, I was always taught that a good
death at the end of a long life was an accomplishment for which to prepare, and
that untimely or tragic death never has the final say. “Teach me to live that I
might dread / the grave as little as my bed,” indeed. As a young child, I
remember family walks through the graveyard behind my grandparents’ house. I
found it neither macabre nor morbid, but peaceful. Here rested so many people
who had walked this same path before me. Here I was full of questions, and
these silent stones reminded me that those here interred had found answers.
Death may be scary, but the alternative—life without an ultimate aim in
mind—seems unthinkable.
Nor have I ever viewed age as a bad
thing. In truth, it’s been nothing but kind to me so far. Aging has let me
outgrow childish neuroses and embarrassing inexperience. It’s made me stronger,
calmer, wiser, and most importantly given me a family. I feel sort of sorry for
folks who pine for their twenties, or worse yet their teens. Sure, I had fun
back then, but I’m glad it’s over now. The older we get, the more real life
becomes. Who would want to go back? I have a feeling that 35-year-old me
wouldn’t have terribly much patience for my 25- and 15-year-old iterations.
Of course everything changes when we
become parents. Growing up I lost grandparents, aunts, uncles, family friends,
high school friends, my Dad. These losses always kept death in mind, but in
such a way that it made me appreciate life. I didn’t go Goth or anything like
that. But then kids come along—and suddenly there’s something in life so much
more terrifying than your own death. Before parenthood, everyone has a
different set of fears. After parenthood, there is only one fear, to the
exclusion of all others. It is a hard bargain.
My wife and I were given a rather
dramatic introduction to Every Parent’s Nightmare when our son, our first
child, was born blue. Here we were all ready to take him home to the nursery,
to start a new life as a family, and before we could hold him he was intubated,
thrown on a plane, and flown to the opposite end of the state for $300,000 worth
of heart surgery. All I got to see was his one little half-open eye staring
uncomprehendingly at me before he left.
Don’t worry. He’s fine today. In
fact, he doesn’t remember a thing. Even that massive scar has faded almost to
invisibility. But his mother and I will never forget, and that jolt of terror
never fully goes away. Even when the next two were born perfectly healthy and
happy, I found myself sneaking into their rooms at night to place my hand on
their chests, to feel them breathe. I still do that. We have friends who have
lost children. They humble me.
(It’s funny, but I’d always assumed
that Shakespeare’s Sonnets were all romantic poems. Then I started reading
them, and found that they sing of how children stave off any bitterness
associated with aging and death. Clever man, that. We should read him more.)
I work with undertakers all the time.
They tend to have great senses of humor, deep compassion for the grieving, and
incredibly healthy and grounded worldviews. In fact, my affection for undertakers
is what led me first to the works of Mr. Wilde, then to those of Ms. Doughty. Working
routinely with funeral directors, caring for bodies, and walking with families
as they perform the last great duty that any of us can perform for a loved one,
you start to think that death really has lost its sting. Easter arises
triumphant.
But when I look to my children,
happily turning our lives to chaos, so full of life that we haven’t slept
through the night in half a decade, I still feel that spasm of fear. I don’t
fear dying, and I never have; but the thought of them going before me is
absolutely terrifying. At such times the casual, even cocksure attitude of the
preacher is laid bare, and we are revealed as vulnerable to the Reaper as
everyone else.
And so I cling ever more tightly to
the Cross, to the God Who is a family, to the God Who lost a Son. Sometimes I
am less amazed at the promise of life arising from death than I am at the idea
that God continued to love us even when we killed His Child. That’ll bring me
to my knees every time.
RDGStout was born and raised
amongst the Pennsylvania Deutsch but has spent the last decade as a country
preacher in the windswept wilds of Niflheim, a.k.a. rural Minnesota. He lives
in a mead hall with his Viking wife, three kids, and a bizarre assortment of
stories.
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