We need to talk more about death

And we need to talk more before death arrives

Before I knew I was going to have to write my Dad’s eulogy, I stumbled across Kathy Burke’s fabulous podcast Where There’s A Will, There’s A Wake.

I found it because Michael Sheen was a guest and David Tennant was reading his eulogy. This is a nice kickback to my last Substack post, which I wrote about 8 months ago, which featured those two actors talking about things that keep us going.

I’ve needed things that keep me going over the past 8 months, as you have probably guessed from this intro. I didn’t mean to stop blogging but I didn’t have enough spoons.

Anyway, Where There’s A Will, There’s A Wake is based on the premise of ‘why wait until you’re dead?’

https://instagram.com/p/C7BLz4boiGq/

And that question is one that keeps coming back to me.

Why don’t we talk more about death? We’re protected from death in the UK. Removed from it. It’s a topic we talk about in hushed tones while desensitised to it on TV.

I had no idea what watching someone die would be like. After several hospital stays where I told my Dad he wasn’t dying and it would be ok, suddenly, we were having *that* conversation.

And I realised that all the time I thought we had was no longer there.

You can’t go back and fill in the blanks. You can’t ask who was related to who or how that bit of family folklore went again. You can’t ask, ‘what was it like?’

As my Dad lay dying, my brother and I read through some memories he had put together about his childhood. At one point he wrote he wished he could see a photo of his brother’s 350cc BSA Gold Star after the modifications they made for him to race it. Oh, we said. We could have tried to do that if we’d known.

What do you want people to know about you?

What do you wish you had said to someone before it was too late?

I was grateful for the nurse who talked us through the physical changes that would happen so we knew what to expect. We were only allowed to see Mum for a few minutes when she was dying due to Covid restrictions. We sat with Dad for 5 days.

We still ended up Googling what we were seeing to try to figure out what was going on. Was this it? Did we have another day?

As we kept Dad company, after a particularly difficult experience, my brother and I talked about how we had heard people say that sitting with someone as they died was a privilege but it didn’t feel like it. By the end, I kind of understood what people meant. Though it was unbelievably hard to watch Dad die, I am glad I was able to be with him.

And as we navigate the next stage, I realise that we are bad at keeping up with people’s contact details. Please let someone know who your friends are. Who do you want to know about your death?

What do you want your funeral to be like? I’m not sure Michael Sheen will get to be flown in strapped to an eagle, though who knows what might be possible several decades down the line with eagle training and genetic developments. But what music do you want? Is there something that you would like to be read? Where do you finally want to be?

Write it down, give it to someone you trust in good time, or put it somewhere obvious for them to find.

I haven’t done this yet either but I’m setting myself a deadline and hoping I don’t get hit by a car before I do.