I have very little commentary to add. I’m just going to share a few paragraphs from Megan McArdle’s open letter to those caring for a dying parent, and urge you to read the whole thing.
American society often downplays the obvious when it comes to death. In movies and fiction it is sensationalized, or sentimentalized, but when it comes to the actual thing, it is often simply ignored, tucked away in hospital rooms and nursing homes so we won’t have to look at it. Movies stick healthy actors in hospital beds, where they gently pass away from Terminal Paleness right after imparting some touching final wisdom. Essayists, protecting the dignity of their elders, focus on the easier, lucid moments, not the brutality and indignity that often surround them.
This left me unready to face death in its true form: the choking breaths that used to be called the “death rattle,” the mottled skin and shrunken bodies, and the horror of watching my father’s color change and knowing I’d seen the moment when his heart finally stopped beating. I didn’t realize I would have flashbacks for months. And I was furious at how badly our culture had prepared me for the hardest thing I ever had to do.
I want you to know the reality so you will not be caught unprepared, as I was, for the fact that there is nothing picturesque or peaceful about dying. But I also want you to know how glad I am that I kept vigil with my parents at the end. Do the same if you possibly can — sleep in their room if the hospital will let you. It is the final thing you can do for them, and it is an unutterable comfort to know that you did your utmost to the last. No matter how unbearable it seems at points, remember that millions upon millions have done it before you and survived. You will, too…
Now I am going to say something that will probably strike you as strange, and which you will almost certainly not understand until you are on the other side of the storm. But I hope you will remember it: Death is not the end of your relationship with your parents. As you help them die, their frailty and your helpless pity will force you to see them as full human beings for the first time, and you will love them better and more deeply than you did before.
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I think it’s both common and extraordinarily cruel for many people’s first vigil at a deathbed to the one they keep with a parent. There’s no apprenticeship.
In the last five years, I have been to the funerals of my father, my husband’s yiayia, and that of a college friend, just a few years younger than me. Only at that last was his body present, carried step by step by his friends, who would have been strong enough to easily carry any weight but this.
I’m curious about your own experiences.
I was never brought to funerals as a child. (And bringing two kids while pregnant with a third to one memorial, I understand why people lean that way. I spent more of the memorial in the hall, where the funeral home considerately installed an excellent sound system, so I heard every tribute). For me, it seems a lot easier to bring slightly hard to corral kids to a funeral Mass rather than a memorial.
In my monastic community, we take turns keeping vigil with a brother as he approaches death. We sign up for a time so that he has someone around the clock. The first time I was in the room though, was for the death of my own (biological) father. I can sympathize with the author of the piece, but fortunately I did have someone who could prepare me. A brother of my community had also lost his father in a way similar to me, and he gave me good counsel, including some practical advice. And for the week my father was on hospice, he and other brothers were available via a phone call. And of course there were continual assurance of prayers. I have noticed since my experience with my father, an unnatural (supernatural?) confidence heading into the rooms of dying brothers. And I have even had a couple opportunities to listen to my younger brothers process their own experiences of being with the dying. And other times the flashbacks make it harder for me to be there, and I get to depend on my brothers to pick up where I cannot go. It’s different because we’re all adults, but it’s similar in that we are treating being with the dying as part of our common life that we are formed to live. Check out the scene of Benedict’s death in Gregory’s Dialogues for where we draw inspiration from for our monastic practice of vigil.
I was brought to my great grandma's funeral as a small child, and still remember it. My dad gave a beautiful tribute, and it was lovely to be brought into her celebration of life and also to witness the grief in that space.
When my son was barely 3 we brought him to see his great grandfather in hospice many many times. He and my grandfather both loved the cuddles and the joy. It was not a sad space but a beautiful one overlooking farm fields, bright and sunny with old hymns playing on a loop. He also spent most of the funeral in the children's playspace at the church, but it was a mostly joyful space.
I also was with both my mother's parents during their final hours (though not the moment of death).
I forget where I read this, and I'm sure many people have written variations, but the idea of death as a struggle like birth is a struggle is very compelling to me. Both are difficult transitions, physical and messy and wrenching and hard.