Dead is a Four Letter Word

We do not like the word dead. We do not speak of being dead except in the vaguest of terms, “She passed on,” “He has gone to be with God”… . It is not an explicit social rule like we have for other four letter words were not supposed to say, the bad “f***” word or the “s***” word (you know, the one that also means a bodily function). But most of us learn not to talk about death sometime before we reach adulthood. It just makes people uncomfortable.

Two weeks ago our family cat died. She had been sick for days, slowly getting worse until one morning she just stopped breathing. While she was dying, my seven year old son started asking me all kinds of uncomfortable questions. These were the same types of questions that I remembered asking in my own childhood experiences with death. “Are we going to bury her in the backyard”? And “Why is she dying”? I did not want to answer him. I wanted to shelter him, to distract him with sugary treats and spare him this pain. In short, I caught myself indoctrinating my son into our cultural avoidance of anything related to death. It just seemed wrong that I felt completely unequipped to talk to my son about death. So I tried to answer his questions as honestly as I could. “I don’t know yet if we are going to bury her in the backyard or have animal control come and pick up her body.” “I don’t know why she is dying…”which was as far as I got without sliding into the old canned phrases-“God must want a kitty for company… .” I was thoroughly frustrated with my inability to simply say what needed to be said about death.

A couple of days after our cat died, we snuggled up on the couch for Friday movie night. Our feature film - “Snowmen” – was about three young boys that decided to try to set a world record for building snowmen. What the synopsis for the film did not say was the reason the boys attempted this feat. The boys had been playing in ice tunnels in a front yard when a snowplow came and chased them out churning up the snow and uncovering a dead body in the process. I started to squirm in my seat. But the film broke up the intensity with a good deal of humor and classic school yard issues like dealing with the mean bully so we continued to watch. The boys became fixated on the dead body dubbing him the “snowman.” They visited his grave and became incensed that he did not even have a proper gravestone, believing that he would just be forgotten forever. Meanwhile we discovered that one of the boys had cancer and wanted to do something so he would be remembered forever (it later turned out that his cancer was gone). Hence the snowman building marathon that followed. The world record attempt failed and the distraught boys returned to the snowman’s grave pondering what they might try next. An old grave digger then enters the scene and imparts words of wisdom for the boys, “It is not what you did with your life that matters, but how you did it.” Toward the end of the movie, the boy that had cancer tried to apply the “how you did it” wisdom by attempting to make peace with the town bully. But the ice he was standing on broke and he plunged into the frozen lake. We saw the whole experience narrated by the boy’s thoughts as he was drowning. Under water fighting for his life, the boy reflected on the words of the old grave digger earlier in the film. ‘It is not what you did in your life, but how you did it that matters.” He got it. But it was too late. He died… but was brought back in the hospital 53 minutes later (which was good because I was about to get really upset that a family movie would let a child die).

But what really mattered was that my son “got it.” He understood that death was just a part of life. That what matters is not the dying part but appreciating the life we have; it matters that we treasure the time we have with the people and the pets that share our lives. 

And to be honest, I needed to “get it” too.