Final Preparations

Every year at this time we come face to face with the season of dying. Every year it seems to come as a surprise, as if we never experienced it before. Those of us who are not fond of winter look out of our windows with disgust and loathing on our faces. 

What is that white stuff coming at us all of a sudden? It's not even Halloween yet! We didn't have a long enough season to prepare ourselves for this onslaught! Why is it suddenly so cold? Where did we put our winter boots last spring? I only have one winter glove, the other one fell out of the car last spring and we've forgotten all about it.

Those who love winter just smile and open their arms to it. Their Christmas lights were put up well ahead of time when the weather was still bearable. Their winter boots are nicely arranged at the side entrance, and their gloves and toques are placed in a basket in the closet ready for the winter adventures.  

Some of us are in the autumn season of our lives. Even though we have watched our parents and other loved ones live through their final days, most of us don't accept the fact that some day we will experience this as well. How do we prepare for that "some day" as it approaches?

Our family spent many years in the (Belgian) Congo. There we had ample opportunity to become familiar with death in all its raw forms. I was pregnant when we arrived in January 1969. We lost our baby son that May (see blog posting of June 2014).
http://ens-intransit.blogspot.ca/2014/06/remembering-is-way-of-meeting.html

This personal experience prepared me more than anything else for some of the cultural responses to death. I saw that my Western co-workers were not good at it. Some avoided me altogether. Others prepared a birthday cake for me (it happened close to my 26th birthday) and acted cheerful. Others told me it was probably best, because he might have been born with defects (he wasn't).

I shared two experiences of how the Congolese deal with death in Doris Janzen Longacre's book Living More With Less (1980, pp.193-194). 

One who comforted me most was an African cleaning woman who came into my hospital room. This is what I wrote:

While I was alone in the hospital room trying to come to grips with what had happened, a middle-aged African cleaning woman came quietly into the room. As she began cleaning she turned to me and said a few words in a language I didn't understand. I shrugged my shoulders to indicate that I didn't know what she was saying. She reverted to sign language and now I knew she was asking about my baby. How was I to tell her that he had died? I tried, then just shook my head. Overcome with grief, I burst into tears. Her eyes told me that she understood. She was a complete stranger and yet she began to weep with me. As she went about her work she mourned softly. Her caring comforted me.

I also described another experience I had sometime later:

As I sat on my veranda overlooking the street below, I suddenly heard a wailing that gripped my heart and stopped my breath. A woman, stripped to the waist, with ashes falling from her disheveled hair, stumbled down the street. Other women were supporting her but her anguish seemed too deep to share. As they moved toward the river, the wailing increased. I recalled that the day before a teenage boy had drowned in that river. The men were still searching for his body, This was his mother. 

In the article I share that this woman was a Christian and that later at the church funeral she was calm and serene, but on this day she expressed her grief in her own way. 

After living in Congo for a longer time, I learned that the culture requires people to wail and grieve loudly so that they will not be accused of having caused the death.

In Africa, death is a fact and treated as such. There is no hiding behind soft music and heavily perfumed flowers. There is usually an all-night wake where singing and wailing take place.

A book review in the Winnipeg Free Press by Jura Koncius (Oct. 16, 2017) informs us that the Swedes are practical when it comes to death preparations. Entitled Leaving One Less Burden, the reviewer recommends that we "take a lesson from the Swedes and toss unnecessary trash before you die." The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning (love that title!), written by the 80-ish artist Margareta Magnusson, will be published in North America in January.

Koncius writes: The main message from this mother of five is: take responsibility for your items and don't leave them as a burden for family and friends. It's not fair. . . . The concept of decluttering before you die, a process called "dostadning," is part of Swedish culture. (It comes from the Swedish words for death and cleaning.) . . . Magnusson suggests that 65 is a good time to start death cleaning, but the process is freeing at any age.

I take some comfort in the fact that I was 65 when we moved from Ontario to Manitoba and really cleaned up a lot of clutter that had accumulated over twenty-four years of family life. At that time I was not familiar with the term death cleaning, I just knew that we couldn't possibly take all that stuff along! However, accumulation is well on its way again. I must begin my dostadning soon (a.k.a decluttering or The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (see blog posting of July 2015):
http://ens-intransit.blogspot.ca/2015/07/life-changing-magic.html

Most of the Congolese people I remember would not relate to this Western concept of decluttering, since they live simply from day to day. However, we certainly can learn something about how they deal with death; they experience it more frequently than we do.

Can you relate some of your experiences in which you have observed how people prepare or refuse to prepare for their final moments?

A message of comfort and hope:

Just remember in the winter 

Far beneath the bitter snows

Lies the seed that with the sun's love

In the spring becomes the rose.