Sarah Jane Barnett

The final call

My grandmother called me from England before she went into the hospice. Her voice sounded cheerful from across the world but also had the low gravelly quality it developed in her nineties. She told me that my Aunt Sally would be picking her up in a few hours.

We talked a little about the weather. The October days were lengthening as summer came on here in Wellington, New Zealand, where I live and write, whereas the English winter was starting to close in for her. She said that most of the plants in her small garden had been cut back. She hadn’t been able to do gardening work for the last few years because of her arthritis and the risk of a fall, so my Aunt Sally and Uncle John had done that for her. Maybe the new person moving into her unit will be a gardener, she mused. I asked how she felt about leaving her home, where she had lived for over twenty years, most of it by herself after my grandfather died. “Oh, I feel fine,” she said. “I’m ready to go.”

While talking to her I was trying to tidy up the lounge, holding the phone to my ear with one hand while I used the other to pick up books and toys off the floor. My two-year-old son played on the floor. Seeing my attention elsewhere, he started to fuss. I gave him a little wave. Slowly his fussing escalated to a cry.

“Go if you need to,” my grandmother said. I felt relieved and grateful. She’d had three children herself so she knew I needed to get back to my chores. “I’ll give you a call once I’m settled in,” she said, and we made our quick goodbyes. I hung up the phone and walked over and picked up my son, who immediately wrapped his tiny hands in my hair. My grandmother and I never talked again. She died a week later.

I have thought about that last conversation many times. Sometimes I feel overcome with shame that I ended the conversation quickly, that I wasn’t really paying attention. At other times I think it was the conversation my grandmother wanted; she said goodbye without either of us becoming sentimental. Many years earlier she gave me a pair of delicate silver earrings. As soon as I saw them I knew they were a special gift. Each earring is made up of four circles that intersect to make the petals of a flower. The inside of the petals are finely engraved with a pattern like rays from the sun. She handed me a sealed envelope as I left her house to catch the train to London. “Wait to open it until you’ve gone,” she said. As soon as I got on the train I opened the card. The earrings were sellotaped to the inside beside a note saying that my grandfather had given them to her after he’d returned from the war. I see our last conversation like that sealed envelope. She didn’t want me to open it in front of her, but love was inside.

/

My grandmother had been ready to die for some time. She had lost most of her eyesight and could no longer do the small but important activities that made her day worthwhile – a crossword or watching cricket on her television. Over the years her fingers had become so arthritic that she was no longer able to write letters. She had also started to refuse medical treatment for her different ailments. Her lower legs and ankles filled with fluid to the point that her ankles disappeared. Instead, it appeared as though two small tree trunks rose up from her slippered feet. The swollen skin was taut and bruised easily, and she had to wear special pressure stockings.

In 2010, a few months before my husband Jim and I got married, I flew to England to visit my grandmother and Sally and John who live close by. A few days before I arrived, my grandmother fell in her bathroom and broke her leg. Instead of my planned holiday activities, each day I navigated the unfamiliar English country lanes to the hospital where my grandmother was mending. Her mind stayed sharp until the end of her life and being stuck in the hospital was lonely and tedious. My job was to ease her boredom each day. After I arrived at the ward in the morning, she’d tell me about what she had for breakfast (cereal, yogurt, a glass of apple juice), and we’d talk about the other patients and the nurses. The ward’s long window looked out into a green courtyard, and birds flew down to ruffle their feathers in the dust. She told me stories about how she’d been a singer and actor as a child, travelling around the West Midlands to do stage shows. She pumped her arms a little and made jazz hands to give me an idea. All of this was news to me.

What I also didn’t know at the time was the fall which had broken her leg was one of other falls to come. And that increased falls in elderly people are a sign their systems are failing and that they are moving towards death. During one fall a few months later, my grandmother didn’t call Sally. She said she didn’t want to bother her. She simply lay on the floor until my mother called and then called Sally for help. I think she already felt she was done.

Sitting at her bedside in the hospital, somehow it didn’t occur to me that she would die soon, even though she was ninety-two. I was still a young woman in my early thirties. I was travelling through Europe before returning home to get married. My grandmother had been there my whole life, a steady presence. A few years earlier her hair had turned bone white. But her face was still rosy. Her eyes were still bright blue. Talking to my mother for this essay, I realise that the worst of my grandmother’s health issues were not visible to me. That was my privilege as her grandchild, but it also meant I wasn’t ready for her death. I wasn’t thinking about death at all.

/

Soon after my grandmother went into hospice she lost consciousness. The hospice nurses called Sally and told her it was time. Sally called my mother and father, who took the first flight they could from New Zealand to England. When they arrived, jet lagged and worried they would be too late, they took the two-hour train to Birmingham and then a connecting train to Stourbridge. It’s a journey that everyone in my family has made over the years.

John met my parents at the station. It was a cold November afternoon, and mist hung heavily over the railway station and down the long grey canal. John drove them to the hospice and they walked through the quiet corridors to my grandmother’s room. She lay in a bed, the covers over her tiny frame. She breathed slowly and her eyes were closed. There were no monitoring machines, so the room was quiet and still. The four of them sat with her for a little while. My mother held her mother’s hand. Eventually, John drove everyone back to their cottage for some sleep. Late that evening the call came – Sheila had slipped away.

It’s a funny term that, slipped away. Where do we slip to? It is one of the many phrases we use to avoid stating directly that someone has died. Someone has passed on or lost their battle. What exactly are we fighting? My family’s favourite: they had a good innings.

These sayings try to soften the fact that a person we love was here, and now they are not. They have gone from their body, but we do not know to where. These little sayings allow us to sidestep our grief and terror, especially in public, but they also risk us not feeling it in private.

In Western Attitudes Toward Death from the Middle Ages to the Present, French historian Philippe Ariès traces the way attitudes to death have changed over the centuries to culminate in our modern avoidance of death. Until the Middle Ages, people lacked a “modern sense of individualism” so death was seen as a matter of destiny and “a perfectly natural everyday occurrence.”[1] Death was prepared for and accepted through public rituals, and the rituals surrounding the moment of death were as important as the funeral rites.

From the late Middle Ages, the individual took on a new importance, especially in terms of heavenly judgement. Death became a personal moment of accounting where “everything was weighed, counted”[2] and a life’s failure or success was determined. From the sixteenth century, beliefs about death changed again with the formation of the modern family. During this time, the view of death was sentimental and heightened, with “ostentatious displays of elaborate funeral ritual and lengthy mourning and memorializing of the deceased.”[3]

What all of these periods have in common is the way people saw death as familiar, natural and every day – a quality lacking from our modern view. From the early twentieth century, funeral and grieving rituals all but disappeared as death came to be seen as “ugly and unreal.”[4] People began to avoid talking about death – at first in order to spare the dying person the burden of their own death, but then as a way to avoid “the overly strong and unbearable emotion caused by the ugliness of dying.”[5] Instead, the focus moved to maintaining the appearance of a happy life. I am reminded of the time a therapist told me that I cried so quietly that she could hardly tell that I was crying at all. As Ariès writes, 

“One does not have the right to become emotional other than in private, that is to say, secretly.”[6] Death becomes shameful, embarrassing and forbidden.

One of the reasons for our unfamiliarity with death, and therefore our discomfort, is that we no longer die at home surrounded by family. Most of us will die in a hospital bed, alone. One 2013 study which performed a cross-national comparison of place of death in forty-five populations – the largest number of populations studied at the time – found more than half of deaths occurred in a hospital. For those who die of cancer, which is Aotearoa New Zealand’s leading cause of death,[7] only a quarter died at home.[8]Ariès describes the way our interaction with the moment of death has changed:

Death in the hospital is no longer the occasion of a ritual ceremony, over which the dying person presides amidst his assembled relatives and friends. Death is a technical phenomenon obtained by cessation of care … Indeed, in the majority of cases the dying person as already lost consciousness.[9]

      The result is that old age and death has gone from being a shared,   

      multi-generational experience, to “something experienced largely  

      alone or with the aid of doctors and institutions.”[10] We shield 

      ourselves from death and pass our shame down the generations.

Another reason we’ve become strangers with death is that, if we can outsource the final moments we can also outsource our death rituals. If you don’t want to deal with the dead body or the emotions that come with a loved one’s death, you don’t have to: the entire dying and funeral process can be managed by someone else. Funerals and cremations have become a service to be purchased, just like everything else. This also means death must be made marketable. “It is not easy to sell something which has no value because it is too familiar and common, or something which is frightening, horrible or painful. In order to sell death, it had to be made friendly,” writes Ariès.[11] The popularity of cremation over burial – now the dominant funerary rite in England and New Zealand[12]– has also made death more abstract. The person we love becomes a pile of grit in a small urn. The scattering ashes can also mean there is no grave site where we can grieve.

When I last went to England, I asked Sally about my grandmother’s ashes. I hadn’t been able to go to the funeral. Did she have a grave I could visit? I wanted to sit and talk with her for a while. “They’re in the garden shed next to granddad,” Sally says. As our family lives on opposite sides of the world, there hadn’t yet been a time when we were all together to scatter the ashes. We walk out the back door and across the lawn to the garden shed. It’s early morning and the grass is wet with dew. Sally pulls open the shed door and points into the darkness. “Where?” I ask. I step into the small space. It smells like earth and grass clippings. “There,” she says, and points to a small ledge. And there they were – two urns. One slightly larger than the other, tucked in the corner behind a shovel and the mower.

/

I had a friend who killed herself by jumping off a parking building in Wellington. Her funeral was held in a small room of the funeral home, my friend’s coffin up on a platform, draped in white silk. When it came time for the eulogy, her mother stood beside the coffin, but instead of talking about my friend she gave a distraught speech about how her ex-husband was her soulmate and her new husband was her soulmate. Both men got onto the platform with her and held her hands. It was strange and unsettling. It was though her grief for her dead child was unspeakable, so she spoke about something else. At the end of that funeral my friend was wheeled out the back, then everyone left.

The funerals that I have been to have been touching but brief and discrete events. I am given an order of service when I arrive: the mourning schedule. Mourners are moved from one vaulted room to another with precision, so we can mourn as quickly and efficiently as possible. People dab their eyes but no one openly weeps. The eulogies at these funerals list the social, work and academic achievements of the person I love, as though it’s essential to recite their curriculum vitae for them to make it through the veil. Afterwards we have a cup of tea and a triangle sandwich.

My parents stayed in England for two weeks after my grandmother died, which was long enough to go to her funeral. My grandmother had already emptied most of her retirement flat, not wanting to leave the job for her children. But there were still a few necessary items for living that needed to be cleared away. It seemed as though at the end of her life she had taken on the attitude of someone going camping or on a short holiday – you won’t be here for long, so you need as little as possible.

Mum called me on the way to the flat to ask if she could bring me anything of Grandma’s. I asked for something personal and everyday. I didn’t mind what it was. She came home with my grandmother’s wallet – worn and red and with “London leather goods” stamped on the front. On the inside my grandmother had stuck a PostIt note with Sally's phone numbers and a sticker with her own address. In the pockets were her Sainsbury’s card, her B&Q Over Sixties Club Diamond Card, an identity card in a plastic cover, a card for the Dudley Hospitals rheumatology helpline, and her Centro concession bus pass. The bus pass had a small photo of my grandmother – white hair, polar fleece jacket, firm eyes.

I am glad to have her wallet. In memory it always sits on the small wooden table beside her recliner so she could easily pay the woman who did her hair or the person who cleaned her flat. She would often reach into the wallet and hand me a ten-pound note, long after I needed the help. “Take it,” she’d say and pat my hand. The oil from her skin has stained the wallet’s magnetic clasp almost black. The leather smells a little of lanolin and hand cream. It’s practical and unsentimental, like her.

I keep her wallet in my middle desk drawer. It’s got a place in the back corner, out of the way of the scissors, the hole punch, and the gift-wrapping paraphernalia. Every now and then when the drawer is open my son will see the wallet and try to take it out. He wants to flip through the pockets. “Put it back,” I say and close the drawer. In these moments, my grief is tight in my throat. When my grandmother died I couldn’t afford to fly to England. I didn’t get to see her in the days before she died or to go to her funeral. But I don’t want to cry in front of my son. To sob and rock and hold my chest for her. I put the wallet away.

/

In his book Being Mortal, surgeon Atul Gawande writes eloquently about the modern experience of mortality. He argues that we have become detached from the reality of death because modern medicine helps us believe that death can be fixed. Gawande tells stories of how doctors fail the dying and their families by focusing almost exclusively on extending life. If death is seen as a medical problem to be fixed, then patients and doctors choose interventions and treatment that often result in unbearable side-effects and a compromised final few months, rather than focusing on quality of life and helping people prepare for a good death. “This is the consequence of a society that faces the final phase of the human life cycle by trying not to think about it,” Gawande writes.[13]

Gawande tells the story of his patient Joseph Lazaroff who was dying of terminal cancer. Instead of accepting his terminal diagnosis and preparing for the end of his life, he chose to undergo a long and dangerous surgery to remove pressure on his spine. “It wouldn’t cure him, or reverse his paralysis, or get him back to the life he had led,” Gawande writes. “No matter what we did he had at most a few months to live.”[14] At the time Gawande believed Lazaroff was making the wrong decision.

While the eight-hour operation was a “technical success,”[15]Lazaroff went into respiratory failure and became unconscious. Fourteen days later, Lazaroff’s son asked the doctors to stop treatment and to let his father die. Gawande was the one who removed his breathing tube. He writes, “[W]hat strikes me most is not how bad his decision was but how much we all avoiding talking honestly about the choice before him … We could never bring ourselves to discuss the larger truth about his condition or the ultimate limits of our capabilities, let alone what might matter most to him as he neared the end of his life. If he was pursuing a delusion, so were we.”[16]

In his Metro essay “In the End,”[17]novelist and health writer Carl Shuker looks at whether my home, Aotearoa New Zealand, also medicalises death by focusing on life extension rather than quality of end of life. Shuker argues that while Aotearoa New Zealand’s healthcare spending is similar to the US – here, too, a quarter of healthcare spending goes to the final year of life and that the majority of dying people do end up in hospital – “less than five per cent” of the care dying New Zealanders “receive is treatment designed to cure. Less than a week each. It seems what they are largely receiving is ‘good death’ supportive care” and not “invasive medicalised end-of-life care.”[18] Still, Shuker acknowledges that doctors still have to learn on the job how to have conversations with dying patients about their mortality. “Don’t we too have that American impulse, with our Granny, our Dad, our sister, to say, ‘No, don’t you give up; don’t ever give up; give us every chance we’ve got’?”[19] he asks. “Dying used to be accompanied by a prescribed set of customs. Guides to ars moriendi, the art of dying, were extraordinarily popular,”[20] writes Gawande. But as our modern aversion of death wipes away “centuries of experience, tradition, and language about our mortality”[21] it impacts those who are left behind as much as those who are dying.

In her last years, my grandmother developed a blood condition, probably brought on by the radiotherapy treatment she’d received for Hodgkin’s disease in the 1980s. The condition meant that every few weeks she needed to go to hospital for a blood transfusion. It was a time consuming and painful process. A few months before she died, she began to refuse treatment. I guess she had some inner sense that she was going to die, and that she’d rather spend the time left on other things than traipsing down to Dudley Hospital every fortnight.

Will I have the same wisdom? What will I say to my dying parents? Will I try to get them to continue the transfusions or to have the operation? I can understand the desire not to talk about death, either my own or others. My own life feels so bright and immediate that it’s hard to imagine one day it will be gone. But more so, I have little practise talking about death. At a funeral recently, I found myself fumbling my words and feeling unsure at the reception. A foggy confusion came over me when I tried to offer my condolences.

Maybe this is because I am still getting to know death. In her most famous poem, Emily Dickinson describes death as civil presence that makes us “put away” our striving and lets us appreciate the “Children,” “the Fields of Gazing Grain” and “the Setting Sun” – in other words, life.[22] In a series of poems about death, the poet Robert Hass writes about how we experience death at different ages. In “Those Who Die In Their Twenties” he writes of a suicide, “Then I thought that his death had a certain glamour, / even though its glamour was despair, which he’d have liked / and probably imagined, and that he shouldn’t have.”[23] In “Harvest: Those Who Die Early in the Middle Years” he writes of his dead friends, “All of them suddenly become the work / they managed to get done.”[24] The words I come back to most often about death are the ones Albus Dumbledore says to Harry Potter: “After all, to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.”[25] Death, I am finding, is not one thing.

I think my grandmother had the death she wanted. She stayed in her own home until a few weeks before she died, supported by Sally and John and community services. She had put aside enough money for her funeral and a bit left over for each family member. All of her affairs were in order, as they say. She was the one who decided to go into the hospice. As with the rest of her life, she ended her story on her own terms.

But the situation of her death made it hard for me to make sense of the loss. This is not to criticise my grandmother or my family, but to deeply feel the ways I couldn’t grieve. I wish I could have been there when she died. I wish I could have gone with my aunt and mother to clear out my grandmother’s flat. Maybe this is how every death feels – we wish for a little more time with the person we lost. Without these shared experiences, though, the grief feels like a living thing inside me.

On the first anniversary of my grandmother’s death, I planted a flowering daisy in the garden. It’s a bit rangy and lopsided but I can see it from the kitchen window. Every anniversary since I’ve taken out her letters and read them. Often, when I am alone in my study, I take her wallet out of the drawer. I feel the soft leather and put it to my cheek. I pull out the different cards and look at her handwriting which is curly and formal. I smile at the slightly fed-up expression she has in the photo on her bus card. I open up all of the flaps and the pockets, as though I might find her inside. And in a way I do. “It’s nice to be able to talk about her,” my mother says as we speak on the phone for this essay. It is.

/

“Endings matter,” writes Gawande. But the middle matters too. The beliefs we hold about middle age are the children of our beliefs about mortality. If we are embarrassed, uncomfortable and overwhelmed by death, we turn away from its signs. And what greater sign of our own mortality is there than aging? What are Western beauty standards if not a way to avoid admitting that fact? And modern medicine perpetuates this fantasy that we can be ageless.[26] Ariès writes, “Technically, we admit that we might die … But really, at heart we feel we are non-mortals.”[27]

Perhaps, but some days I am overwhelmed by grief at my own death. I wake in the middle of the night with fists of panic in my chest. I get out of bed, go into the dark bathroom, run cold water over my hands and wrists, and take slow deeps breaths. If the panic is intense I put my thoughts elsewhere by doing addition in lots of thirteen. Thirteen. Twenty-six. Thirty-nine. I go into my son’s room, kneel by his bed and stroke his long hair off his face. The night is quiet and calm. After a time watching him sleep my finite existence seems okay. Then I go back to bed.

Since entering my forties death has changed from a vague, gauzy idea to an embodied reality. I remember how it was to feel and look younger, yet now I am not that person. In five years I will be different again. The present moment moves swiftly by and in one direction. To try and grasp it would be as futile as grasping moving water.

Middles are important because the changes women experience at midlife give us the chance to befriend our mortality. As writer Darcey Steinke says of menopause: “…each flash reminds me of my corporeality, my mortality … This is terrifying. It’s also a rare opportunity, if faced directly, to come to terms with the limitations of the self.”[28] Middle age is often referred to as the “sandwich years” to indicate a time when people are caring for both children and elderly parents. Not everyone is a parent, but everyone has parents. Seeing a parent, a person who was once our entire world, be unable to take care of themselves or to face serious illness wakes us up to our own mortality. If they will die, we think, then anyone can. But if we turn away from them in their decline, we are also turning away from ourselves.

Recently, my mother has started to consider her possessions and think about which items could be better elsewhere. When she visits me, she brings me her books – so far, her collection of Janet Frame and most of her feminist texts have ended up on my bookshelf, handed to me a book at a time. A few months ago she turned up with a wool blanket from my childhood. Each time she gives me something, I remind myself of why. Just like my grandmother did, she knows that clearing out excess possessions is an act of love – both the gift of the item, and the gift of her children not having to worry about them after she’s gone. She’s slowly preparing to be an elderly woman, which means that I have to prepare for that as well.

Once a week I visit Daphne, an older woman who lives in my neighbourhood. A friend had put us in touch as they thought that we’d get on. She’s in her eighties and because she’s had ministrokes she doesn’t leave her house. Being stuck inside makes for a lonely existence. When I visit we usually play Gin rummy, a card game where you build up sets or runs of cards. Even though she sometimes forgets the rules, she usually wins. When she was a young woman, Daphne worked as an accountant and was also a competitive hockey player. One day, after losing another game, I say, “You must have been formidable when you were younger.” Daphne, not one for sentimentality, looks out the window. “I was,” she says.

About eight months after I started visiting Daphne, she begins to lose what she’d come to call our “friendly matches.” I was winning games, but I wasn’t getting better: Daphne was getting worse. Her memory was failing. She had started to have frequent falls and could no longer push her walker around the house. I would arrive on a Thursday to find she had been in hospital the day before. She now had carers throughout the day and night because she couldn’t get around by herself. One leg was heavily bandaged due to the skin splitting after a fall. I felt terrible for her. On one visit I carried the card table and games into her sitting room, because she couldn’t get out of her chair. “We can just talk instead of playing a game,” I said. “No,” she replied, “these things keep me going.”

There are moments when Daphne reminds me of my grandmother. She has the same quick mind and sense of humour. She has the same fortitude and dignity. But unlike the time I spent with my grandmother, I am no longer a young woman who avoids old age and death. During one visit Daphne keeps having to wipe saliva from her mouth. I can tell she is frustrated. “That must be annoying,” I say in a weak attempt at comfort. “Humiliating,” she corrects. I pause for a moment. The afternoon light from her lounge window flickers over us. It’s important to be with what is. To call things what they are. “Yes,” I say, “it must be.”

/

Aging is a privilege that can be appreciated only when it is not feared. And fear is most easily quietened by what we fear becoming familiar. When talking to a friend about how my visits with Daphne have helped me, she almost flinches. “I’m not sure I need that sort of thing in my life,” she says. I understand the desire to turn away, but it doesn’t make us any happier.

Gawande writes at length about the work of Laura Carstensen, psychology professor and the Director of the Stanford Center on Longevity. Carstensen’s research found that as people age they report more positive emotions and less depression, anxiety and anger. She believes this is because aging changes our perspective of how much time we have left in the world, and this in turn focuses us in on what matters the most – the people and relationships in our lives. Carstensen went on to find that the same focusing in effect can be seen in people who’ve had near-death experiences, such as during the SARS epidemic or after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. When life starts to feel fragile and finite “your focus shifts to the here and now, to everyday pleasures and the people closest to you,”[29] writes Gawande. In this way, coming to terms with our mortality can be a gift. Gawande continues:

      If we shift as we age towards appreciating everyday pleasures and 

      relationships rather than toward achieving, having, and getting, and if 

      we find this more fulfilling, then why do we take so long to do it? Why 

      do we wait until we’re old? The common view was that these lessons 

      are hard to learn. Living is a kind of skill. The calm and wisdom of old 

      age are achieved over time … What if the change in needs and 

      desires has nothing to do with age per se? Suppose it merely has to 

      do with perspective––your personal sense of how finite your time is 

      in this world.[30]

To befriend our mortality is to cultivate a calm acceptance around death. I can only assume that achieving something so threatening, uncomfortable and against cultural norms requires regular practice. Anthropologist Anita Hannig, who studies death and dying from a cross-cultural perspective and teaches at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, created a course to help her students interact with death firsthand. Students study bereavement cards, obituaries, kinship death charts, end of life wishes, and coffins, and a range of cultural death practises.[31] “In order to break through the silence and avoidance that shape … attitudes toward death, we must teach young people different ways to engage with the end of life,” she writes.[32]

Some Buddhists practice maraṇa-sati or death awareness meditation to overcome their fear of death. The practice gives practitioners insight into our own impermanence and the reality “that everything that arises passes away,”[33] with the idea that we then make wiser choices. Practitioners visualise themselves growing old and dying, or those they love dying, and sit with the emotions that arise. “In Buddhism it is our practice to make ourselves go through the fear of dying now, when many of us are quite young, so that later on it isn’t a problem,”[34]writes teacher Larry Rosenberg. “[W]hen marana-sati (death awareness practice) is done properly, it’s quite astonishing how much stability and peace come out of it,” he says.[35] Maybe death awareness is what I am practising when I take my grandmother’s wallet out of the drawer. When I take a book from my mother’s hand. When I look at my face full in the mirror with its new lines and creases, and when I stroke my son’s face in the middle of the night.

/

On my son’s ninth birthday my husband and I give him a cell phone. He is the first of his friends to get one, and he has agreed to pay for half of the phone and its running costs out of his pocket money. I was reluctant to get him a phone so young. I didn’t want him to be on social media and none of his friends had phones, so why did he need one? Couldn’t he play games on his iPad?

A few weeks before his birthday, we are sitting on our couch talking about the phone. “I’ll be able to call you when I’m at a sleepover,” my son says. I nod. He makes a good point. The last time he went for a sleepover at his best friend’s house I’d gotten a call from his friend’s father. My son couldn’t sleep, so could I pick him up? Maybe if he’d been able to text me he would have felt more secure. A memory comes back to me of lying on the floor in my friend Holly’s bedroom when I was seven years old, unable to sleep, but also too afraid to ask her parents to call my own. “Okay,” I say, “but you could also just message me from your iPad, wouldn’t that work?” My son scoots closer to me, and loops one of his arms through mine. “If I had a phone I could also message you when I get to school,” he says. We live in a hilly Wellington suburb and the route to school involves crossing a number of roads. He’s never walked the whole way by himself, and I am nervous for him to try. I look at his open, hopeful face. I make a small humph sound. My son smiles the smile of victory. “Then you’d know I was safe,” he says.

The first day he walks to school by himself I drop him just past the first busy road. I get out of the car and give him a hug. “Text me when you’re at school,” I say. I lean against the car and watch him run down the road, his legs wheeling outwards and his long hair flopping against his bag. He turns and swings one hand into the air. “Bye!” he yells. It’s early spring. The sky that morning is clear blue above the hill line. I am reminded of something Robert Pogue Harrison said about aging:

      The sky I see today is more or less the same blue spectacle it always 

      was, yet it’s not the same sky of old. When I was seven it was my 

      body’s covenant with the cosmos; by twenty it became the face of an 

      abstraction; today it’s the dome of a house I know I will not inhabit for 

      too much longer; shortly it will be the answer to what today still 

      remains a question.[36]

I do not know how long I will live under this domed sky. One day quite soon I will be holding some everyday object of my mother’s. I will place it in the drawer beside the red wallet. Soon after, relatively speaking, my son will hold something of my own. It is hard to be present to someone else’s death, but it’s harder to be with our own slow dying. It’s important to be with what is. He’s almost gone – a flash of school backpack around the corner. I turn towards home.

[1] David E. Stannard, “Philippe Ariès. Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present. Translated by Patricia M. Ranum. (The Johns Hopkins Symposia in Comparative History.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1974. Pp. xi, 111. $6.50 and Dickran and Ann Tashjian. Memorials for Children of Change: The Art of Early New England Stonecarving. Middle town, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press. 1974. Pp. xv, 309. $20.00,” The American Historical Review 80, no. 5 (December 1975), 1297. https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/80.5.1297.

[2] Phillipe Ariès, Western Attitudes Toward Death from the Middle Ages to the Present. (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 105.

[3] Stannard, “Philippe Ariès”, 1297.

[4] Stannard, “Philippe Ariès”, 1297.

[5] Ariès, Western attitudes, 87.

[6] Ariès, Western attitudes, 89.

[7] “Cancer is New Zealand's biggest killer,” Stuff, May 8, 2018. https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/103546111/cancer-is-new-zealands-biggest-killer. Accessed 30 April 2021.

[8] J Cohen et al. “International study of the place of death of people with cancer: a population-level comparison of 14 countries across 4 continents using death certificate data.” British Journal of Cancer 113, 9 (2015): 1397-404. doi:10.1038/bjc.2015.312

[9] Ariès, Western attitudes, 88.

[10] Atul Gawande. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. (London: Profile Books, 2014), 17.

[11] Ariès, Western attitudes, 99.

[12] “How Cremation Works,” Auckland City Council website. Accessed 30 April 2021. https://www.aucklandcouncil.govt.nz/cemeteries/cremation/Pages/how-cremation-works.aspx

[13] Gawande, Being Mortal, 76-77.

[14] Gawande, Being Mortal, 4.

[15] Gawande, Being Mortal, 5.

[16] Gawande, Being Mortal, 5-6.

[17] Carl Shuker. “In the End,” Metro, May 2015, 94-97.

[18] Shuker, “In the End,” 96.

[19] Shuker, “In the End,” 97

[20] Gawande, Being Mortal, 156.

[21] Gawande, Being Mortal, 158.

[22] Emily Dickinson. “Because I could not stop for Death – (479),” The Poetry Foundation. Accessed 30 April 2021. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47652/because-i-could-not-stop-for-death-479

[23] Robert Hass. Summer Snow. (United States: Ecco Press, 2020), 18.

[24] Hass, Summer Snow, 21.

[25] J.K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Illustrated by Jim Kay. (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015), 237.

[26] Gawande, Being Mortal, 46.

[27] Ariès, Western attitudes, 106.

[28] Darcey Steinke. Flash Count Diary: A New Story About the Menopause. (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2019), 9.

[29] Gawande, Being Mortal, 97.

[30] Gawande, Being Mortal, 95.

[31] Anita Hannig. “Talking About Death in America: An Anthropologist’s View,” Undark, October 19, 2017.

https://undark.org/2017/10/19/death-dying-america-anthropologist. Accessed 10 April 2021.

[32] Hannig, “Talking About Death,” para. 4.

[33] Larry Rosenberg. “Death Awareness,” Tricycle Magazine 7, no. 1, Fall 1997, para. 1. https://tricycle.org/magazine/death-awareness. Accessed 10 January 2021.

[34] Rosenberg, “Death Awareness,” para. 4.

[35] Rosenberg, “Death Awareness,” para. 2.

[36] Robert Pogue Harrison. Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago

Press, 2014), 4.