Deathbed etiquette and related thoughts
I understand that life goes on, but must you eat crisps at your grandmother’s deathbed?
This is one of many questions I’ve had cause to ask myself over the last week or so. It would also make an excellent album title, I think, perhaps for a slightly alternative type band. The sort that pretends to never want fame or success because it would “ruin the art”, but really, they’re just scared of failure. The band members all wear large jumpers and skinny jeans. Let me know if that’s you, I’ll gladly help you to name your needlessly depressing songs too, maybe suggest the best run-down supermarket to take the album photo in front of.
The question was prompted by particular circumstances, circumstances which have given me good reason to neglect my hobby writing. More importantly, it’s caused me to neglect my son in order to look after other family members as best I can. I say neglected but really, I just mean that I’ve had to leave him and his father to their own devices. They’ve managed splendidly, but I’ve truly and utterly missed them both. Every time I’ve been able to come back to my little boy, it’s as though I’ve been at sea for months. I’ve had to restrain myself when I hug him, just so I don’t injure him. I want to bottle the softness of his perfectly rounded cheek against mine. I want to stop and just drink him in, but I’m as desperate to play and run around with him as he is to have me do so. Ridiculous to miss him so much after missing a few evenings and afternoons with him, but he’s missed me too; and the difficult part for me is that he is too young to understand why his mother has not been with him as much.
He is too young to know that the cost of life is death, and that the cost of love is grief. He has no idea yet of the most banal horror that comes with the passage of time. We age. We get ill. We fail. We die. And that is if we are lucky. I am well aware that my own sadness and discomfort pale into utter insignificance when compares to the horrors faced by so many others, not least the recent victims of Hamas’s brutal campaign against civilians, or those ordinary Palestinians caught up in Israel’s retaliatory strikes. I’m not going to write an essay on that. Better people than me have already applied themselves*. All I can do is pity everyone who suffers the torturous realities of war. Trite, pointless - I know, and I’m sorry.
Back home, my own family suffered the much more ordinary and expected, but still distressing, loss of someone we loved. I’d like to pay a happy tribute to that person at a later date, but for various reasons I had best not do it now. I will instead just share a few thoughts about the process, or at least, our experience of the process, firstly by jotting down some questions. If you have the answers, do send them in on a postcard.
1. Is it ever OK to eat crisps at somebody’s deathbed? If so, should there be any restrictions on the variety consumed? Is a McCoy acceptable when a Monster Munch would otherwise be unthinkable? (I apologise to my American readers here, I’m afraid I don’t know the US equivalent in Potato Chip rankings.)
2. How is it that some human beings, particularly ones who work in a Care Home, are so utterly callous and uncaring in the face of death and loss? Similarly, do you have to be high on weed to laugh at a grieving family’s question about post-death procedures, or does it just help?
3. Is it ever OK to sucker-punch a family member after several days of listening to his completely self-absorbed complaints? (Oh, your back hurts? You, an unemployed man by choice, are too busy to go bicycle riding? You have no money, but just bought a load of new fishing gear? Please tell me more, it’s absolutely fascinating, and it should help to finish our dying relative off nice and quickly, just through sheer bloody boredom if nothing else.)
I’ll end it there. The rest of the questions I have are much more serious and dull, and all relate to the seemingly impenetrable nature of pre- and post-death bureaucracy. For example, we still have no idea if our deceased loved one’s savings can be used to pay for the funeral, or whether the Local Authority will take everything to pay for the Care Home fees. It’s something we’ve never managed to get a straight answer about from the Powers That Be. It will likely be several phone calls, a few hours on hold, and possibly a blood sacrifice on the next full moon before we can be sure.
What I have taken away from this experience with any degree of certainty is that it is wise to consider death before it, or its hideous and lumpen cousin – degenerative disease – looms around the doorpost. Make a will. Assign a Power of Attorney, if appropriate. Get life insurance, or a pre-paid funeral plan. Tell your people what you want them to do with you and what remains of you, both before and after the final, anti-climactic moment should arrive. And apart from that, I hope you can enjoy your life and whatever health you have to the best of your ability.
Here’s to you, and to all of us, and to everybody we’ve bid farewell to already.
*I would like to recommend these pieces on the Palestine-Israel war if you haven’t already seen them: