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By
Published: Feb 1, 2012
Category: Self Help [4]
My mother, bless her, is 94 and going strong.
It’s my friends who are starting to die.
And when I’m not with the 9-year-old at one of our local haunts, she is sometimes asked, “Hey, how’s your grandfather?”
So you may understand why I have a certain interest in books about death and grieving.
The death and dying category is covered. Intimate Death: How the Dying Teach Us How to Live [5] is the book, and if you’ve read it, you know what I mean --- Marie de Hennezel goes as far down the path to death without taking that trip herself.
But grieving --- that’s a cottage industry. And maybe it’s just me, but I seem to attract books from writers who have airy New Age voices. Or are written from Beyond.
“In Lieu of Flowers: A Conversation for the Living” stands apart from the they-go-into-the-light-so-don’t-feel bad books. Because Nancy Cobb has been there. First, her father, who, in 1982, took a short walk off a high place. Her mother, vibrant and funny and her best friend, drew the Alzheimer’s card and died in 1996. Nancy is an only child. She still wears her mother’s engagement ring.
The thesis of her book, therefore, is about styles of grief. Namely, what do you do to make this damn thing end? And the answer is: it doesn’t end. You think the first year’s bad? The second can be worse; the world’s moved on, people think you’re healing, or, in that dreadful word, finding “closure.” And there you are, alone with heartache.
But “In Lieu of Flowers” isn’t a bummer. On the contrary. It’s a chronicle of smart strategies. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here [3]. For the Kindle edition, click here [6].]
First, second and third: Get it out. Say everything that needs to be said, both to the dying and the mourners. “There is no solace in what might have been said,” she writes. “I’ve learned that if I’m feeling it, I ought to be saying it.”
“Saying it” doesn’t mean telling the mourner it will get better. When you’re grieving, you’ve got to live with what you’ve got, which is, some days more than others, the knife blade of grief. That’s not as terrible as it sounds; there’s one consolation. As Cobb says, "When a person dies, a relationship does not end --- it changes and continues, just as the living do." How do you continue that relationship? "If we take the time to stop and talk about it, to bring the dead to life, even momentarily... the shared memories will remain. Like the dead, we will carry them with us for the rest of our lives."
“In Lieu of Flowers” is rich in anecdotes about doing just that. As she goes through her days, Nancy Cobb reaches out to people --- even, when instinct rules, to strangers. Are they freaked out? Not at all. They too have their stories of loss and grieving. And they too need to get those stories out --- to keep their dead alive.
Lots of stories here. Peter Yarrow (yes, of Peter, Paul and Mary) singing to the patients and staff of the hospice where his mother died --- you can’t see the end of this story coming. Nancy going to the Rectory of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. A bank teller who was thatclose to her grandmother. And, of course, stories about the author’s parents.
Cobb suggests that "the essence of a person" perseveres in infirmity; indeed, her dying mother remained her crusty self despite her Alzheimer's. And her mother’s whispered last words are a kind of victory speech: "I am so happy." So, for Cobb, "Grief activates empathy."
And then she goes further. "I believe the dead linger,” she writes, and tells stories that are very convincing about post-death materializations and communications. I’ve had none, but my experience of the dead is small --- I can neither mock nor confirm.
But Nancy Cobb does, I think, have a line you can’t argue with: “The dying offer the living a final chance to be the best that they can be.”
And her book might just be the best chance we’ll get to prepare for the opportunity to be magnificent.