Death - A Celebration of Life (End of Life Series)

I attended a talk by a bereavement care company today. We were spared the sales talk because the organisers, a hospice centre had given them instructions not to use the talk as a sales event. The speaker, a 38 year old man shared that by pre-planning one's own funeral, one's  family will be spared from having to take care of funeral arrangements at a time when they are grieving.  As all related payments would have been made earlier, the children would also be spared of financial  pressure. It is worthwhile considering, just so that those left behind will have an easier time.

He said that he realised how very precious life is, after the unexpected loss of his father. He revealed that his father had died of a sudden heart attack leaving his mother to cope alone, as the children were overseas. He used himself as an example, sharing that he had planned everything, right down to the selection of his photograph, his parting song by Jacky Cheung as well as written his own eulogy.  He wanted his funeral to be a celebration of his life.

Dr Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, was a psychiatrist and the author of the groundbreaking book  "Death and Dying". At the hospital where she worked in New York, she was appalled by the standard treatment of dying patients. “They were shunned and abused, nobody was honest with them”, she said. Unlike her colleagues, she made it a point to sit with terminal patients, listening as they poured out their hearts to her. She began giving lectures featuring dying patients who talked about what they were going through. She also dramatically improved the understanding and practices in relation to bereavement and hospice care. Her ideas, notably the five stages of grief model (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance), are also transferable to personal change and emotional upset resulting from factors other than death and dying.

I remember my grandmother educating me on  the importance of crying and wailing at the funeral of a loved one. She said that if this is not done, the dead person would be treated badly when they reach hell. From this, I gathered that she wanted the same to be done at her funeral. However, though I was very broken hearted, I did not wail at her funeral. My mother did.

Venerable Ajahn Brahm, in one of his talks on grief said  there is an alternative to grief. Not that grief is wrong, Only that there is another possibility. Loss of a loved one can be viewed in a second way, a way that avoids the long days of aching grief. When his father died, it was as if a great concert had finally come to an end. Though he knew in his heart that he would probably not get to be with him again, he didn’t feel sad; nor did he cry. What he felt in his heart was, “What a magnificent father! What a powerful inspiration was his life. How lucky he was to have been there at the time. How fortunate he was to have been his son. ”I felt the very same exhilaration as I had often felt at the end of one of the great concerts in my life. I wouldn’t have missed that for the world." he said.

Grieving is very much a personal thing.  The way we grieve is very dependent on our personality type and the culture to which we have been exposed.. It does not mean that a person who wails feels more than a person who does not.  The late Jacqueline Kennedy was very much admired because she was regarded as being very dignified in the way she carried herself during the death of her husband, John F Kennedy. My grandmother would have disapproved of her behaviour, though.

There is nothing wrong with grieving just as there is nothing wrong with viewing it as a celebration of life. It is our choice to make. Just choose the route that is most loving and beneficial  to ourselves. I would like to share this poem which I found to be comforting when I was grieving.  Death maybe the end of that life but not the relationship. Death is also not the end of love and loving. I have not stopped loving my late grandmother and former pets. And I believe, neither have they stopped loving me.

I Am Not Gone

 

I am not gone
I remain here beside you
Just in a different form
Look for me in your heart
And there you will find me
in our love which forever lives on

In those moments when you feel alone
Look for me in your thoughts
And there you will find me
in sweet memories that burn strong

Every time a tear
Forms in your beautiful eyes
Look up to the heavens
And there you will see me
Smiling down from God's glorious skies

~By Injete Chesoni