We literally had death at our back door a few weeks ago. One, lone, little bird hit our window so hard she fell to her death and lay at the bottom step, on the cold pavement. I noticed her when we stepped outside with the mundane task of compost dumping. Our daughter, as always, was with me. I didn’t hide her from the bird. In fact, I drew her attention to the lifeless creature and I told her that the bird was dead. “She’ll never fly or sing again,” I told her. Still too young to understand, our child looked for a bit, a few cranks turned in her head, but then she was off in a different direction.

Maybe it’s my personality or maybe it’s that my mom worked with hospice. It could also be that growing up I noticed my parents were older than all the other parents around me, I’m not sure, but I think about death a lot. 

It took a while for me to learn that other people don’t think about death as much and they don’t necessarily experience it in their lives. I was working with a non-profit in my early years when a young woman experienced a significant death in her family. Grateful for a work environment that gave space for communal support, I joined others to attend the funeral. Five of us went. Upon arrival, the four oldest workers waited in line to pass the casket and observe the body. The fifth co-worker, younger and still new to the group started pressing in towards me. “Oops,” I thought. “We’re excluding her from this semicircle.” I moved out to make room for her. The line moved forward and we did, too. Again, she stood close to me. Again, I made room for her. The group moved forward and again she stood so close. Finally it dawned on me! Turning to her I asked, “Have you ever been to a funeral before?” She hadn’t. This was her first time seeing a dead person.

That made an impression on me. I grew up in a church where you get to know the old people, they die and you go to the funeral. Death is a part of life. I don’t mean to be harsh towards this young woman. I don’t know how her life unfolded up until that point, but the idea of a young woman living so far removed from death that she hadn’t seen it until she was old enough to work in an office seemed strange to me.

I experienced another interesting experience with death years later when working as a transitional pastor for a small congregation. Early on in that role a local funeral director, desperate for pastors willing to take on the task of officiating funerals, held a breakfast for local church leaders. He asked for help in leading funerals for the increasing number of people living with no church leader. I offered my help and had the immense honor of officiating multiple funerals. Doing this work was, hands down, one of the highlights of that position.

I learned that as more individuals leave organized religion, people don’t have a spiritual guide to walk with them in grief when a loved one dies. He informed me that finding religious leaders to offer their services for people they don’t know is difficult. Also, those who do give their time to this task sometimes have a hard time making the service meaningful because they didn’t know the one who died and they aren’t familiar with the family or the family dynamics. Increasingly he sees people dying with no family member stepping up to organize any form of ritual to recognize the life and/or death of that person. It seems that we have a whole nation scattered with people walking around without working through their grief! 

Why are we doing this to ourselves? Death, like shit, happens and you have to deal with it. It happens to old people, but it also happens to young people. 

Last week I had two friends over for breakfast. Both are mothers with little girls and we gather occasionally to talk. Last week we talked death. One friend recently lost an older sister (her other half, her heart and soul) to an overdose. The other friend lost an infant shortly after giving birth. Excruciating. This past summer I had another friend walk with his mother while she made the difficult decision to stop fighting her disease and give in to death. Months after that his father also died. This Friday, when the whole world is bustling around and preparing for Christmas, or just doing life, our church will be holding a candlelight service for a young man who was shot in our church parking lot a few years ago – on Christmas Eve. 

The books I’m reading about parenting talk about food, discipline, sleeping, lack of sleeping, potty training, community, the importance of talking and reading to your child, the role of play, the role of playing outdoors, helicopter parenting, chores, encouragement, confidence, cooperation, emotions, manners, education style, technology, how to talk about sex, etc., but nobody addresses talking to children about death. Shouldn’t that strike us as kinda odd?  

My husband and I both consider funerals to be a priority. They acknowledge the life of the person who is gone, they remind us to live our lives now and they help us get true perspective. If the system has some degree of health, then they also draw people together and tighten a community. I am so grateful for the older people in my community who taught me about death. I am convinced that talking with our child about death, opening her eyes to acknowledge this cosmological truth helps prepare her for life.