I have been thinking about grief. It occurred to me that Western society makes a big taboo out of death. We sugarcoat death to children. When someone passes away, we will say they went to heaven or they are with the angels. Usually, that’s pretty much it. It’s common that a child won’t attend a funeral because people are afraid it can disturb the child’s development. Even if the parents aren’t religious, most people don’t know what to tell a child when someone close dies and will use some myth or fantasy story.
I don’t think the parents are to blame. They were brought up the same way. Our society doesn’t know how to grieve. Death is seen as negative, something bad that happens, but what if dying isn’t bad?
How can we be a society that celebrates birth and not death? Aren’t those two the same coin, just different sides? Doesn’t everything you know as matter get born and then die? It reminds me of a poem from William Blake:
Little Fly, Thy summer’s play My thoughtless hand Has brushed away.
Am not I A fly like thee? Or art not thou A man like me?
For I dance And drink, and sing, Till some blind hand Shall brush my wing.
If thought is life And strength and breath And the want Of thought is death;
Then am I A happy fly, If I live, Or if I die.
This poem has always fascinated me. When I first read it, I felt almost like a eureka moment. I am just like a fly. We both live and we both die. Maybe death just needs to be perceived differently than what it is.
I think we are failing to educate children about death. Such questions shouldn’t be answered with storytelling of myths or fantasies. The same goes for the question of how babies are born. Why is it easier to tell the story of a stork than to explain what happens in an intimate relationship?
I remember in one of the therapy sessions we talked about my mother’s death. I told my therapist that after she died, I didn’t process it in the best way. I didn’t talk about it to anyone for years. I made a whole new friend circle that didn’t know about it, so I didn’t have to talk about it. It took me years before I opened up about it. My therapist said that it wasn’t on me. There was no space for me to open up after her death. Everybody just moved on and tried hard not to talk about it and not to cry. You gotta move on. This idea that being strong is not crying and moving on was very present in my family indeed. My therapist said something I will never forget: „no one asked you how you were doing, no one was crying in front of you, no one talked about it, not even with each other.“ But it’s not their fault either, they just didn’t know better.