Life’s One Certainty

When I was 28, my parents informed me in our family group chat that they had purchased their caskets and burial plots. They asked, would I like them to purchase a plot for me, too? The funny thing about this question wasn’t the morbidity of it. My concern at the time was the long-term commitment — even though they told me I could sell it, likely for a profit, if I didn’t want the plot later. My qualms at their question were about whether it was too early to spend this money. And most pressing to my then-28-year-old self: What if I got married or had a lifelong partner? Where would their earthly remains go?   

I’ve told this story to friends a few times and the reaction has been mixed. On the one hand, there is slight dismay that my parents could nonchalantly discuss funeral plans (they are nothing if not practical). But there’s also some envy that we could easily discuss death. Don’t get me wrong. While this story makes it seem like my parents have an open relationship with death, that is not the case. They are simply pragmatists. “Choi choi,” we say in Cantonese whenever someone jokes about being hit by a bus. It’s kind of like saying “touch wood” to ward off bad luck. Why tempt the fates?

It’s one thing to be comfortable talking about death when it is a little more abstract. But it’s something else entirely to allow other bereaved people’s emotions in and be comfortable with their discomfort. 

Loss is not a stranger to me. I was in the room when my grandmother died. I witnessed my parents lose their parents, siblings. One of my best friends died when we were 20. That was my first inkling that we aren’t infallible. That life is fleeting and we are mortal. That aging is a privilege. 

These were my early lessons in how to address the subject of death. And now, as we grow older, other friends are lost, we witness friends lose their parents and sometimes, most viscerally shocking, their children. Recently a friend shared that when her child died, her other friends were hesitant to bring it up in her company. They didn’t want to upset her, as if avoiding the subject could diminish her grief. But all she wanted was to hear her child’s name as much as she could. We talked about how she was inducted into the world of grief where her experience became taboo in conversation.

These twin topics of death and grief seem difficult for Western society to talk about openly — they’re uncomfortable and people actively avoid them. Some might even call it rude to bring them up in polite conversation. Yet none of us is exempt. So, what’s at the root of the resistance? Why don’t we have more transparent conversations about these experiences? I couldn’t help but wonder if it’s about generation, culture or personality. Perhaps it’s all three. I didn’t know the answer so I asked some experts.

How do you fit in?

To navigate this conversation, we need to ask the question “where do I fit into this experience?” says Cheryl Nekolaichuk, ’79 BSc(Pharm), ’90 MEd, ’95 PhD. She is a registered psychologist and professor emeritus in the Division of Palliative Care Medicine at the University of Alberta. In her recent clinical work as a counselling psychologist on a tertiary palliative care unit, she supported patients and families through end-of-life transitions. She says that talking about death is shaped by our own losses. 

“It takes some time to decide where you fit in within someone’s experience,” she says. “It starts with asking ‘where am I?’ in this whole process. ‘How have I experienced my own losses? How has that affected and impacted me and how does that help me reach out to others?’” 

Nekolaichuk says that there will never be the perfect way to approach the conversation because there are so many factors: ethnicity, culture, personality, needs, boundaries and limits on conversations people are comfortable with. Talking to a bereaved person assumes a risk, she explains. “The piece to consider is: ‘how important is this relationship to me that I take this risk?’ ” 

One way to approach the conversation, Nekolaichuk suggests, is to say in advance that you want to have a potentially difficult conversation. For example, “This might be awkward to talk about,” or “I’m feeling awkward asking, but I want to check how you’re doing.” She says, “If they tell you that it’s not a good time or it’s not appropriate, that’s OK.” 

This approach allows the person to decide if they want a deeper conversation. Sometimes your bereaved friend might break down. That’s OK. You’re not making them cry, Nekolaichuk says. Whatever you’ve said may have triggered something for them, evoking an emotional response. There’s an art to how we converse that is meaningful for us and for the person on the other end. “We can talk about certain stages of grief and studies that have been done. But there is that intangible piece of how we connect with other people — how we craft that in a way that is meaningful for us and for the other person on the other end.”

Should you share grief or distract from it? 

In 2014, my friend Mariana Paredes-Olea, ’09 MA, received news that her father had died in his home in Mexico City.  She told me about the haze of logistics, details and plans that come with death. But what she didn’t anticipate was the uncharted territory of personal grief and mourning — and also deafening silence. 

Paredes-Olea mentions rituals in Mexican culture to mourn the dead, such as Dia de Los Muertos, in which people remember and honour dead friends and family. Paredes-Olea and I talk about traditions in other countries in the world and religions that follow rituals to celebrate and to mourn their dead. For her, being in Edmonton when her father died was a tangle of grief and culture shock. She tells me about a visit from a friend a few weeks after her father died. Paredes-Olea remarked that the moment she became emotional over her father, her friend changed the subject and shifted the focus away from her grief. Her friend, she hypothesized, was there to help distract her from her emotions. But for Paredes-Olea, she was searching for connection and looking for space to process her loss. “If someone expresses emotion to you, I think it’s actually healthy,” she says. “To me, it's a connection. You’re giving them space to process.” 

Nekolaichuk explains that there's a lot of discomfort with emotional expression. “You're afraid you're going to make someone cry, or you're afraid you're going to make them sad,” she says. She encourages us to think about all emotions as valid and needing to be acknowledged.

“We're not comfortable with what some people characterize as negative emotions. But we all experience emotions, and they're not good or bad. They just are.” Sometimes allowing people to express themselves emotionally is awkward. 

“We need to be comfortable with people’s emotions,” Paredes-Olea says. “If you go to a friend’s house and they’re processing their grief and they cry, it’s OK.”  

Grief changes, but never leaves

Our hesitance to talk about death is based partly on our own experiences, as well as our lack of language to express our sorrow. Nekolaichuk says that we live in a “death-denying” society. We are less inclined to use the words like “dying,” “death” or “died,” opting instead for euphemisms like “fading away” or “passed away.”  

“But I think the more we use euphemisms to describe what happened, the less clear we are about what exactly happened.”

Maïté Snauwaert, associate professor of arts and humanities at Campus Saint-Jean studies the way people write about death in memoirs of grief and mourning. Snauwaert’s research is not about the experts on grief work. Instead, it is about individuals who are experts on their own grief. The writers are creating a community with each other, and the text itself creates a rhythm of grief for readers to witness. 

“It's a powerful invitation to respect your own rhythm of grief, as opposed to a scripted timeline and preconceptions of steps and stages,” Snauwaert says. She explains that while we hear a lot about the stages of grief they’re not altogether accurate. 

When she started her research, she was critical of terms like “grief work” and the concept of the stages of grief. However she discovered why these phrases catch our attention: because there is a need for them. Snauwaert explains that the Western canon and the Western imagination with rituals around death and grief have lapsed over the last century. 

“Those catchphrases have come to embody a very deep need for any sort of vocabulary,” she says. This is why the contribution of literary writers is so essential. But no matter how much we examine the idea of death, no one is ready to face it. “I find that no matter what the manner of death, no matter the religion, whether you lose a parent, child or spouse, the bereaved are never prepared.” She quotes the writer Meghan O’Rourke, who (in her memoir The Long Goodbye) said that nothing readied her for the loss of her mother, not even the knowledge that her mother was terminally ill. 

Snauwaert says the mourning memoirs reveal that grief is lifelong. After the initial raw loss, grief becomes something to integrate into your life, and your relationship with the person who died will continue to evolve. 

“And that’s why these memoirs are such an amazing resource,” she explains. “We feel deprived of rituals, deprived of community. We’re deprived of even conversation, when no one would utter a sentence, acknowledging the loss.”  

Some people don’t have the stamina for it. Snauwaert says there is still a mentality almost of refusing loss, particularly in a Western world that prioritizes and focuses so much on winning that we don’t actually know how to process loss. 

“If we could just consent to not being able to figure it out,” she says. “COVID-19 has helped bring awareness. We see a lot more nonfiction pieces published about grief. Writers force us to face it, literature is a way to have a conversation in silence.” And maybe that’s just the start of the conversation.