Hard to Avoid Dealing with Death

I have noticed that when someone dies, most people talk about the person "having passed" or they talk about having "lost" someone.  Saying that someone "died" is not that common.  In our society, confronting death in a straightforward manner is something that we all seem to avoid.  In my seminar, I find that I have to force myself to use the word "death" because it seems like such a harsh reality to raise with the group.

However, as somone who is now over 60, I find that having to deal with this reality of life is more and more difficult to avoid.  Friends are "losing" their parents; see even I do it.  One friend has recently lost her younger brother.  He was in his fifties.  Women friends are becoming widows, and at a pretty young age.

These events force us to confront our own mortality.  For me, they also provide an opportunity to learn about grief.  What I have noticed is that everyone seems to deal with it differently.  Some individuals seem to opt for the very British "stiff upper lip" approach, getting back to "normal" life as quickly as they can.  At a dinner with high school friends last night, one of the women who became a widow in her forties, said that she sought relief from her grief in work.  I have another friend who found that her interest in work simply disappeared.  One friend needed therapy once a week for a year in trying to deal with the death of her much older husband. Some people hang onto as many momentos as possible.  I did this when my parents died four months apart.  In clearing out their house, I found that I wanted to keep all sorts of weird things, like my Dad's aftershave.  It's been almost ten years now since they died, and it is only now that I am trying to weed out what I've kept.

Dying is part of the journey of life (I'm sure I'm not the first person to state it this way.) and it is wise to learn to confront the reality and then to decide how to best cope with its inevitability.