i miss talking about death.
i miss talking about death. partially because it is scientifically and spiritually fascinating to me of course - and it being a special interest of mine obviously helps - but i miss talking about death because it helped me connect with and understand the living in ways i have never been able to as a neurodivergent person.
western society is so afraid of death. we parade selfishly and arrogantly around like we’re immortal and when death touches our lives somehow we shake and crumble and pray and lose our minds and wonder how could this ever happen to me despite death being the one thing we know to be inevitable about being alive.
working with widows and estranged children and the parents of suicidal children or children who never saw life to begin with sounds miserable to many but working with the fake smiles and shiny new faces of people who pretend death will never touch them is so much worse for me. leaving death care behind broke my heart. being a funeral director gave me purpose and it gave me the opportunity to care for those who needed my hand to pull them back down to the realities of death while giving them a safe space to grieve and cry and be angry and share stories with someone who just wanted to listen. sometimes i was the first person in decades who just wanted to listen.
but, like most things, capitalism took my heart and my empathy and forced them to be tools for the mega corporation who employed me. working 70 hour weeks (as an intern by the way!) and crying on my way to work because i needed to call five new families who lost their loved ones over the weekend and listen to their stories while checking in on the other fifteen families i already had made it impossible for me to be the best version of myself with any of them.
i miss talking about death and i miss talking to the dead and caring for them without expecting anything in return. i miss brushing the hair out of their faces and telling them how happy their family is going to be seeing them all dressed up. i miss watching volunteers perform religious rituals and dressings and final blessings selflessly so that the deceased is honored in the way they would have wanted despite their inability to thank them. i miss being the person in the room who understands the twenty year old who died by suicide better than even their parents, and holding their hand and telling them that their family has shown up for them in ways they would have never imagined.
when i tell people i left death care they assume it’s for my mental health. that talking about death and grieving for people for a living tore me apart. but the reality is that the same thing happened to me that has always happened to good people in death care. capitalism and corporate greed outweighed my empathy and human connection and it burned me out until i could not take it anymore. i took leave and spent months in an outpatient program and when i returned i didn’t get so much as a “how are you feeling?”
so i miss talking about death. it breaks my heart to hear an old widow at the counter explain to a teller that her husband died and she doesn’t have a death certificate yet and she needs to close his accounts and oh god how could this have happened to me? how could i have ever prepared for this to happen? capitalism doesn’t want you to plan ahead. it doesn’t want you to be at peace and prepared for death because it gains more when you have to pay premiums and taxes and fees and you don’t understand certain processes so you can be overcharged without questioning it. it doesn’t want me telling you that you could plan ahead and spend less and make sure you and your loved one get exactly what they would have wanted.
i miss talking about death because it was the only thing that helped me connect with the living.