Welcome back to the series, My First Encounters with Death.
Here I’ll make connections between our earliest death experiences, our relationship with mortality, and how we grieve. If you would like to be interviewed for My First Encounters with Death, please message me.
In part one of this series, I told the story of my grandmother’s death, and how my four-year-old self internalized the way in which I was included in this event, normalizing the emotion, language, and facts of death.
Part II recalled the sudden passing of my young uncle, and how by the age of 10, I had already learned from society to link tears, grief, and shame.
Today, we move forward four years to my 14-year-old self.
My best friend’s dad had cancer, and it was very much not a big deal. Mr. Baker now wore a baseball cap more often than before, but he was still his active, lively self. Then one day it was a big deal. And the day after that, Mr. Baker was dead.
I had known Mr. Baker since I was six-years-old. I spent a lot of time with his family, and in his home. But this encounter with death was less about grieving a person I loved and more of a, “drinking from a fire hose” lesson in supporting a friend in grief.
It was a warm Friday afternoon in April, and I had just arrived home from school. The phone rang in the kitchen. It was my best friend, Christina. She calmly told me her dad’s cancer was back with a vengeance, and he had been given 24 hours to live.
She asked if her mom could pick me up on their way to the hospital, conveniently located a few blocks from my house. I hung up the phone and announced, “That was Christina, her dad’s going to die tomorrow,” as though we had just scheduled a sleepover for the following day. It wasn’t that I was callous towards Mr. Baker’s impending passing, it was that I knew my role, and my role was to be there for my friend in her time of grief.
This was a very tall order for a girl who had just recently memorized all the state capitols and was still 2 years away from her drivers license, and nothing quite prepared me for it.
While I had already attended several funerals by the time I entered high school, was familiar with viewings and graveside services, this was not that. It was my first experience waiting for someone to die, my first time watching someone as they died, and the first time I was called upon to provide support to someone in crisis.
A few minutes later, Christina’s mom’s beige Chevy Tahoe pulled up in our driveway. My mom said, “I’m going out there and JoAnn’s going to tell me it’s not true!” So we walked out to the car, my mom looked JoAnn in the eyes, and said, “Tell me it’s not true.” JoAnn rested her head on the steering wheel, and began to weep.
My mom’s response wasn’t denial, it was logic. Logically, a middle-aged man in relatively good health (you know, besides the cancer), should not be on his way to remission one week, and on the cusp of death the next. We had run into JoAnn and Christina at Foot Locker in the mall the week before, and nobody was planning a funeral. Far from it. My preposterous statement after hanging up the phone ten minutes earlier warranted disbelief. My mind, however, wasn’t analyzing facts, it was solely focused on my friend, and I was going to rise to the occasion. I climbed into their SUV, and we drove down the street to the hospital.
I hold so many sharp, distinct memories from the 24 hours that followed, it’s hard to believe they all occurred in the course of a single day and night. The tension of knowing there were hours left for Mr. Baker, but not knowing exactly how many, stretched out time and made everything we did seem at once poignant and trivial.
We sat in the hospital cafeteria eating snacks from the vending machine, the setting sun cascading through the skylights.
We laid on our backs on the sidewalk at the hospital entrance, staring at the night sky.
We stood beside Mr. Baker’s bed, and I watched Christina press a cool washcloth against her dad’s hot forehead. He didn’t look like Mr. Baker anymore.
And finally, late at night the following day, we sat on the floor outside his hospital room door. Christina on one side, I on the other. Mr. and Mrs. Baker inside.
Mrs. Baker emerged from the room, and said, “He’s gone.”
We; Christina, myself, and myriad family members, rushed into the room. We packed ourselves in, surrounding Mr. Baker’s body.
I felt so strange, staring at a dead body. It wasn’t at all like a funeral. He looked alien to me; bald and sweaty and wrecked by sickness. But also, why did we all rush the room to stare at his dead body? I was at a loss as to what to do. Mrs. Baker didn’t love this either, and screamed at everyone to get out.
It’s so hard to know what to do in times of death, and what not to do. Being yelled at to leave my station by Christina’s side, it seemed I was doing right and wrong simultaneously. As I exited the hospital room, I stepped out of my role of strong best friend, and became a child again. That’s when the strain, the shock, and the trauma of the weekend hit me.
I called my house on the hospital phone for a ride home, but was unable to speak, tears choking my words. “Laura?” my mom intuited, “I’m coming.”
I went to church the next morning. My parents didn’t make me, but that’s what we did on Sunday mornings, and I didn’t think this Sunday should be any different. It was also an opportunity to pull myself out of the previous days, and know that I was okay.
She was in the room when he died, my youngest sister wrote on a church bulletin, passing the note to her friend.
We all used to be in the room when a person died. Before we moved death into hospitals, we died in our homes and welcomed the community in for our passing, children included.1 But in 2001, the presence of a child at a man’s deathbed was disturbing.
The distance we now place between humans and death relocated my experience from the category of the everyday, to that of trauma. I know parents today who would never have let their child get into that Tahoe that afternoon. But the more distance we place between humans and death, the more we distance ourselves from the experience of being human. I’m grateful my parents had the confidence in me as a human, to support my friend in death. They knew what the current literature overwhelming shows: people are resilient.
Christina is getting married next summer and I’m her maid of honor. 25 years later, she still tells me often how much my presence meant to her the night her dad died. I was years away from having multiple degrees and a string of letters after my name, but what I did have at 14 and still have now, is a willingness to be present with others in their grief, and the courage to feel all the pain, the sadness, and the inevitable end of this mortal life.
As French historian Phillipe Aries notes in Western Attitudes Towards Death
That was a lot for you to deal with in supporting your friend. But you did it and learned from it. That’s true friendship, Laura.