A Good Death
I was listening to a talk last weekend and the facilitator posed this question: What is a good death?
There were some great answers to the question, but it was also interesting to notice the internal reaction we have to the question itself. So much can be learned and discerned with the question alone.
What is our relationship to the idea of death? Is there something good about it? If there is a good death, then does that mean there is a bad death? What distinguishes the way we die from death itself?
As summer draws to a close in the coming few weeks, I am often reminded of our (society) and my relationship with endings. It’s usually not the best. There is grief even in this, time and seasons passing. The ending is the acknowledgement of what is over but also the opening for what will be. And yet we hold on tight to what we know in our addiction to certainty and the familiar.
I did a Google search of “a good death” and one of the first entries is a research article: Defining a Good Death (2016). They “identified 11 core themes of good death: preferences for a specific dying process, pain-free status, religiosity/spiritualty, emotional well-being, life completion, treatment preferences, dignity, family, quality of life, relationship with HCP, and other.”
In the years that I hosted Death Cafes, we would talk often about how we wanted to die and our fears around it. Often pain would come up and ultimately a conversation around pain vs suffering. Ultimately we talked about the longing to feel like we mattered, that we would be remembered, and that we were scared of what was going to happen next.
In those years, I realized that when we can truly examine death and come up with our idea of what might be “good”, we can also start to create more urgency in our life. The urgency to do the things that light us up, to love more openly, to be more authentically and unapologetically alive.
When I moved to Saskatchewan in September 2018, I consciously took a break from death work. I needed to process my grief that was weighing heavy on my heart. Over the last few years, I have dabbled in it again. Most recently, I have been working on a new project: “Grief Love Notes”. It will be launching on Fall Equinox (Sept 22nd). It is a workspace to process, digest, discuss, and support our relationship to death, loss and grief. A portal for education, support, and creative exploration.
