During the past eleven months, I have been the distance learning “coordinator” for my family. Each day, my 7- and 11-year-old grandchildren have bent over their Chrome Books as they navigated their school year in my office and at my dining room table. So, it was not surprising when I wondered aloud about the topic for my next blog that it was suggested that I write about distance learning.
When this began in March of 2020 the kids asked, “What exactly is Distance Learning?” Kids are very concrete at this stage; did it mean the school had moved? Disappeared? How could you do school on a computer when you did not know how to type? It was not only school which became distant and abstract, we were all social distancing and feeling detached. Because of the pandemic, people even had to die distanced from their loved ones.
This applied to my work as a death doula as well. As I toted my folding chair to the window in the back of an assisted living facility, did Zoom meetings and phone calls and once, in person with a face mask and shield and gown because we thought my patient was dying, I have done my own distance learning. Death is intimate and the work is ideally done up close. It has been difficult to offer my best under the circumstances. It has caused me to observe the importance of planning for death even when it seems to be in the far distance.
I am reading a fascinating book by L. S. Dugdale, MD called The Lost Art of Dying. When yet another plague was upon humankind, the bubonic one, there were manuals developed to help people cope with dying. A sort of “how to” approach which was replicated in woodcuts for people who could not read. Dr. Dugdale says that for us to learn again how to die well, to move away from the medicalization of death, which is the current predominant practice, we must “acknowledge the possibility of death while we are still healthy.” For most of us, death seems extremely far away. We do not talk about it much. It might seem in the distant future but as my dying mother said at age 75 as she contemplated her life, “But it went so fast…”
What if death was framed as a dynamic phase of life? What if we saw it as a developmental process in which we reflected on what we wanted and needed NOW and if we embraced it as a part of life instead of a foreign event that happens TO us? Just as we prepared for adolescence, college, career, childbirth, parenting and retirement, what would happen if we embraced the stage of dying as a process which begins long before we get sick or are on our death bed?
Here are some things which could happen: if death becomes an integral part of our living, we will not be able to avoid living to the richest, most present ways possible. It will hone our love of our beings and therefore will help assure that we embrace each day for the unique experience it is. We would have a sense of legacy; what is important in our life? What do we want to leave behind as a remembrance of who we were? We would have a sense of what medical interventions were acceptable in giving us the quality of dying we want. Do we want to be awake and alert–but perhaps in more pain–or asleep under the influence of pain medication? What music do we want to hear as we leave this life?
And the most important question: who do we want in the room? Dr. Dugdale argues that the best death is when we are in community. Friends and loved ones gathered around, perhaps telling stories, perhaps meditating, singing, washing the body, holding each other. This is most likely to happen in relationships we have built throughout our lives; people with whom we have shared the intimacy of love and friendship and adventure and talk of important things like death.
We do not know yet what the implications of the pandemic are for how we move on in our lives, including how we plan to die. Most of us have learned that distancing–social or not–is not the best for us to live or die in.
The opportunity now is to figure out how to change that distance and bring death home here and not in the distance.