Death – why don’t we talk about it?

It’s more than just the obvious…

For all the books that I’ve read, the training that I’ve done and the experience I’ve got with working with bereavement, I wonder whether the biggest thing I can offer clients is the space to simply talk about death. It can often feel that when somebody dies, we can no longer talk about that person, that we somehow think that it’s catching and that if we talk about it, we might be next. Grievers sometimes feel therefore that they can’t talk about their loved one in any way, for fear that they’ll upset other people. In many cultures around the world, death is very much part of daily life – coffins are displayed prominently in the front funeral directors of Ecuador, for instance, almost like the fruit and veg would be displayed outside a greengrocers here – and funerals in many countries are an opportunity for celebration with dancing and singing and colour. Yet here in England, death seems to be hidden away and not spoken of, and there may be more reasons than you think…

Let’s start with the obvious…

I often describe grief as being like a rock - we can’t get rid of it, but we can learn how to carry it so that it’s less heavy @Jules Lowe Counselling (click on the picture to find out more!)

It’s painful. We don’t talk about death because when somebody we love dies, it hurts. Grief can so often be felt physically as well as emotionally – it literally hurts to grieve. We humans don’t like things that make us feel uncomfortable, and grief is one of the most uncomfortable emotions to experience. Sometimes I have clients saying that they don’t dare go there – they’re scared that if they lean into their grief they won’t ever get out again, that if they start crying they won’t be able to stop. You will stop. You may cry yourself to sleep some nights, but sleep will come eventually. You will most likely return, but grief comes in waves, and there is power and comfort in knowing that this too shall pass. At least to begin with, it may be that my counselling room is the place to lean into this grief, as I’m here to provide a safe container and ensure that it doesn’t feel too overwhelming. Many clients have said that once they’ve done this, they then feel more able to contain it themselves. But without wishing to sound too sinister, our grief will wait for us. If we ignore it, it won’t just disappear, it will stay just below the surface, ready to be dealt with when we’re ready.

Nobody talks about it…

We don’t like feeling uncomfortable or in pain, and we don’t like feeling like we’re making others feel uncomfortable or in pain. Sometimes we don’t like to even mention the person’s name because we’re scared it might remind the griever that that person died. Reader, they’re not going to have forgotten. But we don’t really know what to do with it as we can’t fix it, and we humans love to fix things… How we grieve may also depend on our upbringing. If as a family we’ve had it modelled to us that we don’t talk about it, we won’t talk about it. So if when Grandma died Mum looked as if she was coping and never mentions Grandma, we learn that we shouldn’t talk about her either. We don’t even talk about the fact that we don’t talk about her, and everything remains unspoken and almost secret, like it’s something we don’t dare utter.

The Victorians mourned publicly, modelled by Queen Victoria herself @Jules Lowe Counselling

Historically speaking…

The Victorians? They were all over it! From wearing black for up to two years to show the world that you were in mourning, stopping the clocks and drawing the curtains, to hanging up mourning cards and wearing lockets containing the dead person’s hair to act as constant reminders, the grief of the Victorians was out there and it was talked about. Then along came the First World War. At one point we as a nation were mourning so many people at once that we wouldn’t have ever been out of mourning. All of this talk of death didn’t help morale, so it became part of the national effort to not speak about death. This nicely coincided with Freud suggesting that we should be able to “get over it and move on already” (OK, he didn’t use quite those words!). With the top psychiatrist of his day suggesting that we needed to go back to “normal” as soon as possible, the idea of publicly mourning our loved ones or even talking about them went out of fashion quickly. Although interestingly, Caroline Lloyd suggests that even Freud himself struggled to completely detach from his loved ones when he experienced bereavement for himself…

We don’t see as much of it…

Part of the reason we don’t see as much death as we used to is that we’re generally living longer. According to the Office for National Statistics, life expectancy at birth has increased by nearly 3 years per decade over the last 100 years. So, for instance, if you were a female born in 1910-12, you could expect to live (on average) until you were 55 years old, whereas if you were born in 2010-12, you can expect to live (on average) until you’re 83 years old. We’re simply not as surrounded by death as we used to be, thanks to improvements in medicine from immunisation to heart disease treatment. And when we do die, it is now often in a hospital, rather than in the family home. Sometimes it can even feel like it’s hidden away, and seen as a failure if somebody dies, rather than a natural part of life. It’s no longer as part of our daily lives as it used to be – and so much easier to ignore – until it directly affects us, and then we can be left feeling somewhat stranded.

So where does this leave us?

Because we don’t talk about death, we don’t know what to expect when someone we love dies. We experience the pain (often bodily) and heartache and confusion and the inability to simply “move on” and we think it’s just us. We don’t realise how much of what we are experiencing is actually pretty common and human. What can we do about it? We can find a space to talk about it. This may be with friends and family, and you may be surprised about how much they were secretly wanting to talk about it too. And then, of course, there’s me. With me you can talk about all the details that you may not want to share with those around you for fear of upsetting them. There is great power in having your grief witnessed, in talking about it and feeling it until it feels a little less heavy, a little easier to carry. I can’t take your grief away (and I’d argue you don’t really want me to, or at least not completely), but I can help you feel a little lighter, through feeling truly seen and heard.

If you’d like to read more about why I believe it’s important for us to talk about death, take a look at this Substack article: You’re a grief counsellor? Isn’t it depressing to talk about death all day?

Lloyd, C. (2018). Grief Demystified. JKP.