Join the club, life keeps rolling on
Becky Aud-jennison is a US expat who has lived in the Whanga¯rei area for the past decade. After a lengthy career as a therapist working with those dying and grieving, she started The Death Dialogues Project in 2017 to help normalise conversations about death.
The Death Dialogues Project has since grown to incorporate two critically acclaimed productions based on oral histories, a workshop surrounding death planning, and is in the fourth year of a well received podcast. Now Becky has compiled the stories and wisdom gained into a new book.
Following is an extract from Death and its Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Beautiful Lessons. the crash: they. are. gone.
I can't count how many times people have expressed the shock over how, when they next saw the light of day after their person died, they couldn't believe the world was still moving along as it always had, as if nothing happened.
Busses are stopping at their stops. Children are on their way to school. People carrying their groceries.
The disbelief.
The outright horror.
Our knowledge that life will never be the same. The audacity that people can continue to walk in the world as if nothing happened.
Don't you know that my world has forever changed?
The space we inhabit just after witnessing or learning of someone's death is a surreal landscape. Rather than denial – the first stage Elizabeth Kubler-ross identified for people who have been diagnosed with a terminal illness – I think it looks more like disbelief and a gutwrenching longing for it not to be true.
Yes, an audacious disbelief that the rest of the world continues to tick on.
Of course, when you receive a terminal diagnosis it would be understandable to have lots of energy being put into: No, it can't be that bad, I'll be the outlier statistic; something went wrong with the testing; no! I refuse to accept this is happening.
Denial.
When you witness the last breath of your beloved or see their dead body, there's really no denying your loved one has died.
Initially, children may have some magical thinking, but even they will wake up to the permanence of the absence of their person. But the longing. The absolute gut-aching wish that this was not true is quite universal.
Those initial hours do frequently have a
common thread of disbelief.
How can someone be here one moment and gone the next?
Therein exists a variety of anguish that brings you to your knees. A visceral, physical emotion, a feeling that your heart is being wrung out. You look outside and see the world continuing to move. Maybe you get a mundane phone call from a telemarketer, or someone calls just to chat and you want to scream – Wait a minute, doesn't the world know my person died? Nothing else matters.
There are so many common threads between the birth and death transitions, beautiful and horrible.
My thoughts when I had my first baby were not just: Aw, isn't she beautiful? It was a euphoria, because we had both survived after being close to the veil. This may be similar to how one would feel reaching the summit of Everest intact.
And I recall that, while being wheeled out to go home, I had that feeling of awe and respect for every woman I saw, every woman in my life, every woman who had ever given birth: How can all of these women do that? Nothing could have prepared me for the intensity and challenge of it all. After experiencing intimate, deep loss for the first time, the feeling was similar. Suddenly a world opens up that had never really been understood.
You may think about all the people who've experienced gut-wrenching, tragic loss and wonder how they continue to put one foot in front of the other. And, although it's cold comfort at the time, as you think of them, you realise you are part of a new club and your life will never be the same.