The choice between burial and cremation is a difficult and a deeply personal one. Getting your affairs in order can all be very overwhelming. I get why it can be so scary to speak of death
Nine-year-old me watched as my mum struggled to hold back her tears and call her first born child as they lowered her to the ground.
That image is still etched in the back of my mind till this day. The grief that follows after is unimaginable but I guess as the saying goes time heals all wounds. Because as time went by it got easier to speak about love lost with little resentment.
Maybe Sean O’Connor, the host of SA podcast How to Die and founder of one of the country’s first death cafes, located in Cape Town, said: “Death is seen as something that happens at the end of life, separate from life, and that is a fallacy.” He might be on to something the way we think about death can affect how we think and act in our daily lives.
Although I still can’t openly chat about death over a cup of coffee, perhaps intricately understanding that “Death is part of life” and having open conversations about it can help us fear it a little less.
Listen: The Cremationist
I will admit that I am one of the many who thinks that dying is something that happens after you have lived and considers it unfair if someone passes away before they actually get to live.
Dr Atul Gawande, author of another seminal book, Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End wrote “People with serious illnesses have priorities besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys find that their top concerns include avoiding suffering, strengthening relationships with family and friends, being mentally aware, not being a burden on others and achieving a sense that their life is complete”.
As the case may be, the realisation that their death is unavoidable allows them more time to process the concept of death and dying, and as a result, they may be more accepting of death’s inevitability.
Dr Liz Gwyther, professor of palliative medicine at UCT says that “If a patient has the courage to ask if they are going to die, we should have the courage to answer”.
The How to die podcastor believes that when you break the taboo about speaking about death, “there’s a mischievous element at play, it becomes light-hearted, the very opposite of morbid”.
I hope the show helps people not just with thinking about how they hope to die, but how they want to live as well, discloses O’Connor.
“I found that talking about death always turns to talking about life quickly. Accepting my own mortality has helped me appreciate the undefined amount of time I have left. Knowing that, I think it helps us be kinder to ourselves and one another.”