by Sue Black
I reasoned that in a small place like Inverness, where Willie was known to everyone, as were my parents, it was very unlikely that this was ever going to be a question of mistaken identity, still less of someone switching the body in the coffin or doing something illegal to the corpse. He had been born here, grown up here, married here and had now died here. The funeral director was a relative of Willie’s, for goodness’ sake – he wasn’t going to get it wrong. Of course this was Willie. But even though the rational part of my brain knew that, the disconnection between how he’d looked in life and how he looked in death was very perplexing.
After my initial hesitation had passed, I became aware that there was a sense of peace in the room. The silence around the dead has a different quality from the silence that is just an absence or cessation of noise. There was a calmness to it, and the fear that I was going to find myself afraid began to dissipate. Once I realised that the Uncle Willie I had known had truly gone I was comfortable with what was left of him, though I understood that my relationship with him now needed to be different from the one I had with the cadavers in my dissecting room. Those I knew only on one level, in their present state as dead bodies, whereas Willie existed for me on two planes: in the present as the physical form in front of me in the coffin and in my memory as a living person. The two manifestations of him did not match and there was no reason for them to do so as they were not the same. The man I remembered was Willie. The other was just his dead body.
My duty should have entailed nothing more than a quick glance into the coffin to verify that the man lying there was indeed my great-uncle and that he was suitably dressed and looking smart, as he would have wanted, before being laid to rest. However, in my youthful enthusiasm to do things properly, I went overboard. I slipped into a pompous analytical mode worthy of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. No dead parrot in this sketch, though – only poor old dead Uncle Willie.
Had any of the funeral staff walked into the room they would have questioned my sanity and possibly even have had me escorted from the building for disturbing the peace of the dead. Certainly no other corpse in the history of that highly respected Highland funeral home can ever have left the premises with such a rigorous MOT.
First I made sure that he was dead. Yes, really. I felt for a radial pulse at his wrist and the carotid one at his neck. Then I placed the back of my hand on his forehead to check his temperature. How on earth I could imagine he might show any signs of life or warmth after being in the funeral home fridge for three days, I don’t know. I noted that there was no bloating of his face, no skin discolouration and no advanced odour of decomposition. I examined the colour of his fingers to ensure that the light embalming fluid had fully taken, and his toes, too (OK, I admit it – I took off one of his shoes). I gently prised open an eyelid at the corner to check that his corneas had not been removed illegally and opened a button of his shirt to rule out any evidence of an improper postmortem incision. I knew one should never overlook the possibility of the theft of body parts. Honestly? In Inverness? Not exactly the epicentre of the international black market in stolen organs. Then, perhaps worst of all, I checked his mouth to establish that his false teeth were in place. Who would have wanted to steal Willie’s wallies? One careful owner, free to a good home …
Noticing that his watch had stopped, I instinctively wound it up and placed his hands across his large tummy. Did I seriously think he was going to want to know what time it was when he was in the ground at Tomnahurich Cemetery, and perhaps ponder on how long he had been lying there waiting? For what? In the unlikely event that he woke up, he wouldn’t have been able to see his watch without a torch anyway and I hadn’t thought to bring one of those, had I? I moved an errant lock of Brylcreemed hair that had strayed across his face and patted him gently on the shoulder. I thanked him silently for being who he had been and, with a crystal-clear conscience, returned to my father and reported that all was well with Uncle Willie. He was certified fit to bury.
I crossed many boundaries that day, and without much logical justification. Although I look back on my actions with incredulity, of course I understand now that death and grief do strange things to a mind. It had been a first experience for me and I had handled it in the only way I felt I could. And it was an important milestone. It confirmed that I could compartmentalise: as well as bringing compassion to my dealings with the bodies of strangers, I could manage the emotions and memories involved in viewing the mortal remains of a person I had known and loved while accessing the detachment required to inspect him professionally and impartially without falling apart.
In no way did this diminish my grief but it showed me that such a compartmentalisation of emotions was not only possible but permissible. For that lesson, I have Uncle Willie to thank and also my father, who simply assumed that this was a service I was equipped to perform and did not doubt for a moment my ability to do it. And I am glad that I did.
My reward from Father was a curt nod of the head that told me he accepted my word. From that moment on, I have experienced no fear of death.
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Fear of death is often a justifiable fear of the unknown; of circumstances beyond our personal control which we cannot know and for which we cannot prepare. ‘Pompa mortis magis terret, quam mors ipsa,’ the philosopher Francis Bacon wrote over 400 years ago, quoting the Roman Stoic Seneca. ‘It is the accompaniments of death that are frightful rather than death itself.’ Yet the control that we like to think we have over our lives is often an illusion. Our greatest conflicts and barriers exist in our minds and in the way we deal with our fears. It is pointless even to try to control that which cannot be controlled. What we can manage is how we approach and respond to our uncertainties.
To understand the roots of the fear of death, we may need to unpack it into three stages: dying, death and being dead. Being dead is probably the least bothersome as most of us accept that this is not something from which you recover and that worrying about the inevitable is somewhat futile.
Such fears we may have of being dead will depend on our concept of what happens to us afterwards: believers in versions of heaven, hell or some form of survival of the soul may have a different perspective from those who anticipate oblivion. Death is a genuinely unexplored destination for which, as far as we know, there is no return ticket. Certainly nobody has ever come back with credible scientific and verifiable evidence that they have actually been there. Of course, very occasionally someone believed to be dead does start breathing again, but given that over 153,000 people die every day on this planet, I suspect that the sample size of those who have ‘come back’ doesn’t reach statistical significance, and no further real scientific understanding has been gained from such cases.
We have all heard stories of near-death experiences, portrayed as mystical events involving floating, out-of-body sensations, bright lights and tunnels, visions of previous episodes in the person’s life and a feeling of calm. They tease us with the possibility that we can know what death will be like; perhaps even that we can defy it. Science has alternative explanations. All of the phenomena reported can occur normally if the right biochemical conditions or neurological stimuli exist to impact on brain activity. Stimulation of the temporo-parietal junction on the right side of the brain will generate a sense of floating and out-of-body levitation. Vivid imagery, false memories and the replaying of real scenes from the past can be induced by fluctuating levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which interacts with the hypothalamus, amygdala and hippocampus. Depletion of oxygen and increased levels of carbon dioxide can cause the visual hallucination of bright light and tunnel vision, as well as a feeling of euphoria and peace.
Stimulation of the fronto-temporo-parietal circuitry of the brain can convince us that we are dead – even that we are drained of blood, devoid of internal organs and decomposing, in the case of sufferers of the rare psychiatric disorder Cotard’s syndrome.
It is human nature to prefer a mystical or supernatural ex
planation rather than trust the logic of biology and chemistry. Indeed, this is the premise on which all bogus mystics and prognosticators rely when promoting their smoke-and-mirrors act to a vulnerable client.
The greatest fear tends to be focused on the manner of death – the dying bit. The precarious and painful period, be it moments or months, between the point when we know death is upon us and when it actually occurs. Will we live out our final days with illness, be snuffed out suddenly through accident or an act of violence, or simply fade away? In short, will we suffer? As the writer and scientist Isaac Asimov put it: ‘Life is pleasant, death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.’
Would that we could all be as lucky as Uncle Willie and meet the end of a long, happy, healthy life in a sudden, pain-free collision with a bowl of warm tomato soup, surrounded by our family. He had no fear of dying as he did not know it was coming. For me, this is the perfect death, the kind I would wish for anyone I loved. In the short term it is a shock for the bereaved. My mother had no time to prepare for the sudden removal of the man who was effectively her father, no time to gear up for her own grieving process. The dying ritual she had expected had been denied her and the being dead part had come without warning. In the long term, though, those left behind are invariably comforted to know that the person doing the dying did so in the least physically and psychologically distressing way possible.
A jovial uncle who loved his food collapsing during lunch; a gardener struck by a heart attack landing face-first in manure … death and black humour are old companions. Even if the capriciousness and frivolity of death are rarely funny at the time, they can provide those left behind with a much-needed coping mechanism. Cold irony can be more cruel: the proud, independent man who always feared incapacity spending his last years locked inside his body in an impersonal care home; the liver pathologist killed by hepatic cancer; the solitary death in a hospital bed of a woman scared of dying alone … These are all fates that have befallen some of my own friends and relatives.
My beloved grandmother, who was a teuchter – a Gaelic-speaking Highlander – believed completely in the second sight. She told many tales about her own grandmother who, she said, could predict when somebody from their small west-coast community was walking towards their caochladh (end of life) because she would dream about their funeral. Great-Great-Grandmother knew whose death she was foreseeing because she would recognise the chief mourner in her dream.
One of these stories concerned ‘Katie up the Glen’, a distant relative of my grandmother’s, whose approaching demise the old lady foretold after seeing Katie’s funeral cortege, led by her husband Alec, in one of these dreams. This was a bit of a shock to all and sundry as Katie was not old and extremely hale and hearty. But as spring turned to summer my great-great-grandmother was adamant, even warning that Katie’s end would not be long in coming: in her dream she had seen the peats being cut, which meant summer was on its way. Every day poor Katie was monitored closely and every day she went about her business without complaint or ailment. When the peat-cutting began Katie was out there with everyone else, hauling the slabs up on to the bank and leaving them there to dry before they were transported back to the croft by a cow and cart. The black swarms of midges would have been merciless and the work back-breaking.
Whatever startled the heilan coo that day nobody could say, but poor ‘Katie up the Glen’ got caught between the beast and a dry-stone wall and was crushed to death. As predicted, Alec did indeed walk behind her coffin to the graveyard that summer. My grandmother was always mischievous and I wouldn’t put it past her to have made up the whole story. If she didn’t, it seems highly probable that some of the women in our family would have been burned as witches in the past – especially the ones with red hair. Superstitions like this form part of the untameable root system of the many misconceptions surrounding death. But they do make great spine-chilling stories for scaring the children on cold winter’s nights around a peat fire.
My grandmother – my father’s mother – being of a generation who often died at a much younger age than we do today, was the only one of my grandparents I ever knew and the most important person in my life. She was my teacher, friend and confidante. She believed in me and understood me when nobody else did, and whenever I needed the advice, conversation or reassurance of a grown-up one step removed from my parents, she was there for me. Even when I was a child, she talked to me honestly about life, death and being dead. She had absolutely no fear of it. I often wonder whether she saw her own death coming. I recall, during one of our more memorable dark talks, experiencing a moment of clarity when it struck me that she would not always be there with me, and it made me very sad and very scared. I didn’t want ever to lose her.
My grandmother looked at me sternly with her deep black eyes and told me that I was being faoin (silly). She was never going to leave me, even when she went ‘beyond’, as she used to call it. She vowed that she would always be sitting on my left shoulder and that if I ever needed her for anything, all I would have to do was turn my ear to her and listen. I never doubted her, and I never forgot her promise. Indeed, I have lived with it, and by it, every day of my life. I still automatically tilt my head to the left when I am thinking, and I can still hear her voice giving me advice when I need it. I am not sure even now whether it was a kindness to a frightened little girl or a curse, because I could have had so much more fun growing up if it hadn’t been for my dead grandmother. There are many times when she has stopped me from doing something I’ve wanted to do but knew I shouldn’t. Some might call it conscience, but there is no doubt that my own little Jiminy Cricket speaks in my grandmother’s lilting, Highland voice.
In that same conversation, she made me promise that I would look after my father, her only child, when his time came. Nobody, she said, should have to step through death’s door on their own. She would be there waiting for him on the other side but I must be the one to walk him to the threshold. I never questioned such an odd request – I was only ten. I never asked, either, why my mother would not be there for him. And as it turned out, she wasn’t. Did my grandmother, long gone by then, somehow foresee that my father would be the last of his generation to die, with only the next generation there to look after him on his way?
Dying is a path we don’t have to walk unaccompanied, but when we reach that door we cross the threshold alone. Our myths, fables and culture instil in us notions of how death will be and what we should expect, but where is the evidence of how it will be for me, or for you? It is an incredibly intimate and personal transition – the end of everything we know, are and understand, and no textbook or documentary can prepare us. If we cannot influence it, perhaps we shouldn’t waste precious time worrying about it. When it comes, we just need to experience it.
My grandmother died in an impersonal hospital bed. A heavy smoker, she’d had investigative surgery for chest pains and when they opened her up they found lung cancer so rife that there was nothing to be done and just closed her up again, very quickly. I knew it was not the death she would have wanted but at that time, with such an illness, there was little alternative to a clinical, medicalised death in hospital. There was no opportunity for her to be at home, no comfort and quiet. As children, we were not encouraged to visit her in hospital and so I never saw her again. It is a deep regret that has stayed with me all my life. I wish I had been able to talk to her even one last time, to hear what she had to tell me about her dying and death and to learn from her wisdom.
And so my first real experience of death, at the age of fifteen, was the loss of the person who meant most to me in the world. My father, mindful of how special our relationship had been, asked me if I wanted to see my grandmother in her coffin. Hurting badly and scared to look at her lifeless body, I declined – to the relief of my mother, who had not been happy about it in the first place. I bitterly regret that, too. It is a source of great sadness that I did not have my last moment with my grandmother, just the two of
us, either when she was dying or following her death. Perhaps that accounts for the overcompensation with Uncle Willie.
What we could do was celebrate her life – and boy, did we. My mother cooked until there was nothing left in the cupboards, the whisky and sherry flowed and the windows of our sitting room were flung open to let her soul fly. The last image I remember from that day is the sight of our minister doing an eightsome reel in the front garden with the music blaring out from our stereo. Yes, it was some party we had, and she would have loved it. I wonder if she felt she was going to meet her maker. We were not an overly religious family, although we did attend church and held strongly to Christian values. I remember my grandmother having some fierce philosophical debates with the local minister when they were playing cards. While he was deep in thought, she would be switching the cards right under his nose.
She was such a staunch believer in a life after death that I almost wished she would come back and tell me what it was like. Sadly, she never has.
CHAPTER 4
Death up close and personal
‘Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory’
Theodor Seuss Geisel
writer, cartoonist and animator (1904–91)
My mother and father, Isobel and Alasdair Gunn, on their wedding day in 1955.
ALMOST ALL OF us will encounter death at close quarters long before facing her ourselves, and those experiences can have a profound influence on our fears, attitudes and on what we perceive as a ‘good’ way to die. For many of us, the first of those most intimate vicarious encounters to really hit home is likely to come with the death of our parents.
As adults, we accept that it is our responsibility to manage the dying and death of those who brought us into the world, as it has been for the second generation since time immemorial. It is in the natural order of things that children bury their parents and not the other way around. Today, with people living longer, and sometimes in more complex families, it is of course more commonplace for multiple generations to be living simultaneously. When ‘children’ might be in their seventies, the responsibility for managing the deaths of both grandparents and parents may fall to the third generation. Whatever the circumstances, as well as obliging us to get to grips with the realities of death, and often to introduce our own children to her, the loss of our parents is a reminder that we are ourselves growing older and that can bring with it a sharp focus on our own mortality.