The idea of an open conversation about death isn’t exactly trendy these days, not that it ever really was. Emily Dickinson once said, “Death is a dialogue between the spirit and the dust.” The famous American novelist William Somerset Maugham said, “Death doesn’t affect the living because it hasn’t happened yet.”
But maybe they were wrong. Maybe a conversation with one’s mortality, and with the people who will experience it alongside the dying, is exactly what people need to lessen the fear and the complicated burdens on those who are left behind.
Michael Barham, associate priest at St. Clement Episcopal Church, feels that death needs to be talked about openly. He and his colleagues believe that when a person doesn’t prepare for the inevitable, the experience becomes clinical and impersonal, leaving no room to grieve.
Read it all.
In Hawaii, an End of Life Conference brings death out of the closet
The idea of an open conversation about death isn’t exactly trendy these days, not that it ever really was. Emily Dickinson once said, “Death is a dialogue between the spirit and the dust.” The famous American novelist William Somerset Maugham said, “Death doesn’t affect the living because it hasn’t happened yet.”
But maybe they were wrong. Maybe a conversation with one’s mortality, and with the people who will experience it alongside the dying, is exactly what people need to lessen the fear and the complicated burdens on those who are left behind.
Michael Barham, associate priest at St. Clement Episcopal Church, feels that death needs to be talked about openly. He and his colleagues believe that when a person doesn’t prepare for the inevitable, the experience becomes clinical and impersonal, leaving no room to grieve.
Read it all.