Hold My Hand - Life & Death in New America
Middle class Americans are becoming more and more sheltered from those things that make us all human. Most everything is delivered in hermetically sealed packages, lest we be exposed to germs. Sports for children no longer have winners or losers - we wouldn't want to put such labels on our youngsters. And most notably, there is an alarming trend to shield our youth from those things that reveal our humanity. Despite the nightly news having an agenda of Lipitor sales and fear mongering, it shows us a reflection of ourselves. Crime, civil strife, natural disaster are all common themes. While I am not advocating that children need see the mayhem that is war or some of the more suggestive sexual topics that seem to show up at ratings time, I do believe that our children need to know and embrace those things that make us living beings. I mean death. Not Halloween-Freddy Krueger-Dracula-death, mind you, but death as a natural eventuality of life. Children in the inner cities know death all too well. It is a natural eventuality of living in a place of despair, poverty and civil unrest. At least weekly you see a report of gang violence or random bullets hitting some poor soul just trying to get by. These shootings are followed by the expected outpourings of grief, and in the crowd there are inevitably children witnessing the goings on. In fact, in many other parts of the world, death is such a familiar sight that children are often an integral part of such funerary preparations as washing the body of a recently departed family member. These children know the measure of one life, its value and its fragility. Which brings me back to suburban America. Experts in child blabbochology tell us that children's delicate psyche cannot process the meaning of death. Bull hockey. From my many years working with families facing the crisis that is serious illness and the natural eventuality of death, children, like adults, need to witness the natural course of life. My fear is that without an understanding, or worse with a homogenization of death and its singular beauty, whole generations of our society will view elders and those with dread illnesses as unworthy of their attention. While I am not suggesting that you bring your young child to the next funeral announced in The Boston Globe obituary, I do suggest that you bring your child to visit an infirm elder or a children's ward in a long term care facility such as the Shriner's Burn Center. But when the time comes in your family or neighborhood for a funeral, bring your child. Hold her hand tightly. Tell her it is right to be a little sad. Explain that the decedent has died and that death is our body's natural end. If you have beliefs about what happens next, by all means pass those on then and there. If you have no belief in anything beyond that coffin - share that belief. My father told me a story that will stay with me forever. He lived in Boston in an apartment with his extended family of his parents, grandfather and two uncles. In the mid 1920's one of his uncles went to Vermont to work in the quarries that were hiring strong Irish backs at the time. Within three days he lay crushed under a two ton block of marble, a victim of corporate America's disregard for the lives of their workers. In any event, his body was brought back to Boston to the front parlor of my father's apartment. My then young father, at about 5 years old, sat with his dear uncle and rest of his family for the requisite two days. My father always spoke fondly of this first experience with death and the beauty and intimacy that it provided him. While I'm not advocating "Take a Child to a Funeral Month", I ask parents to re-consider leaving their children out of the ritual that the human world has wrought for honoring and dispatching our dead. Do it for no other reason to assure yourself attendance at your own funeral.
