Gravestones of the Qigham family at Quaker Meeting House, Coanwood Photo: Akuppa / flickr CC
Are we afraid to die?
Jill Allum considers our reaction to death
We sat around a candle, eight of us, in a Friend’s home. I had been asked to run a ‘dying workshop’ by another Meeting. A special couple in my Meeting had just lost their very disabled fifty-year-old daughter. Real words of comfort were needed. We let our thoughts go into the candle flame and then each drew the pictures or wrote the words that had come to us. It was a very special sharing.
I was present at the deaths of both my parents and I asked the nurses if I could help lay them out. I had been doing everything for the last ten days and did not want to chicken out at the end. I felt I needed to do this last thing for them, even though I was half afraid of what death would look like. I am glad I did it, although I was scared of the black stuff coming out of my mother’s mouth.
Death is so often seen as a failure. Some in my Meeting are very close to it. I have known the hospital doctors say: ‘Your cancer is gone. Now get better.’ But the poor, distressed person, ill from three months of chemotherapy, followed by six weeks of daily radiotherapy, has hardly a chance of even wanting to get better. My best friend was told this and died within eight months. We were just applying for an MBE for her, for building a Peace School in Congo. At sixty, she was the wrong person to go!
Is dying seen as a failure? Do the doctors have to pretend they have healed? Can’t we see death also as a sort of healing?
My daughter, forty, happily married and living in Australia, had a horrific riding accident eighteen months ago. The night I had the phone call, as she lay not expected to live, I said, ‘I’d rather she’d die than be very disabled.’ Did I mean it? I’m not sure. I’m glad she survived, although she is brain-damaged.
Fortunately she is not vegetative. What would I do if she was? There are five thousand people in this state in the UK. How much do we know? How much do we care? I shall soon go to hospital to have my five-year old acrylic eye polished. My wonderful eye-maker has a nephew who has been vegetative for nine years. His parents long for him to die but each time he gets ill he is resuscitated. What does the law say?
My great uncle was the only GP prepared to go on television and say how he had helped someone to die. I thought I believed in euthanasia but, when my Meeting had a discussion on it recently, I heard the words ‘suicide’ and ‘murder’ – I knew I would have to think again. It is a minefield.
I do not know about an afterlife. My Meeting will be discussing this soon. I could almost believe in guardian spirits. I do believe in ghosts, from experience, and I do believe in miracles.
Are we afraid of dying? Are we able to discuss this and all its implications in our Meetings? Are we able to help those who are dying now?
