Dance with Death

Today, on the Day of the Dead, during All Souls’ tide, I want to share a friend’s story and a few thoughts for any man seeking to face mortality.

My friend, we’ll call him Joseph, became a mortician as atonement for past sins and, he says, as a calling from God to a minister to the dead and their grieving families. The experience broke his mind, and now, as he rebuilds his psyche, he has much wisdom to share.

He witnessed the raw permanence of death, the way American culture tries to deny it, smooth it over, and avoid it.

I asked him two questions:
How does a fear of death define American culture?
What is one thing we can do to make our own relationship with death healthier?

The rest of this essay is drawn from what he told me.

Joseph began with a bit of a thesis.

“I think we see a lack of understanding and a lack of acceptance of death in American culture … almost an allergic reaction to it because it’s inconvenient, painful, and permanent. We’re a culture of movement. We don’t like to think about something coming to an end permanently, where a life can actually be judged.

Modern culture is all about convenience. If you think about what we’ve done to streamline our European forebears’ way of life, everything’s about convenience. But death is supremely inconvenient. It interrupts your life in the worst way. And it’s painful. Since we’re a culture of hedonism, to us, there’s really no point in suffering. Suffering for the sake of salvation is nonsense to even most American Christians.”

He went on to tell me three haunting stories to demonstrate these points, after each of which he leaves us with a lesson in the dance macabre.

To illustrate his assertion that death is the supreme inconvenience to our culture, Joseph told me of how once he received a call from a hospice nurse to come pick up a man who had passed. He gathered his team and made the two-hour drive to Aspen. When they arrived, the nurse answered the door and told them to leave.

Confused, Joseph asked whether the family had changed funeral homes, which is a common occurrence. But the answer left him speechless:

“No, the guy hasn’t drank his Kool-Aid yet.”

It turns out, the man hadn’t died…he was scheduled to die through physician-assisted suicide. The nurse had preemptively scheduled the mortician before the man had even taken the lethal dose. And yet:

“He was having second thoughts. And the fact that he was deliberating over his own death caused inconvenience to the nursing staff, and they were visibly flustered that he hadn’t killed himself yet.”

The man was wavering, and the professionals around him were frustrated that he was late to his appointment with death.

“So that’s what I mean by death is inconvenient… it’s the ultimate interruption, it wrecks all of your best layed plans, and that’s something that our culture simply cannot abide by.”

Managerialism is a cult of convenience: we want death to be sterile, planned, clean, and timely.

But death is coming. Ignoring it doesn’t make it go away. This attitude leaves families completely unprepared and forces them to deal with an endless list of details under extreme duress.

Joseph had a somewhat unconventional recommendation for a mortician. Yes, get your assets into a trust and make a will, he said, but more than anything, become familiar with death so it doesn’t feel like such a crisis when it happens.

Instead of letting death interrupt you, seek it out, he advised. Make yourself familiar with death so that when it comes, you can respond well.

“Visit hospice care. Put yourself into a situation where you’re going to encounter people who are dying and seek out wisdom from them and their situation.”

Joseph’s second assertion was that in modern hedonistic culture, we have no framework for making death meaningful. It is the meaning that makes the pain of death bearable, so for us, the pain is too great. This led to psychosis in a number of people whose loved ones passed while Joseph worked in the mortuary. The worst case came from the mother of a woman who committed suicide by gunshot. A brutal way to go. The wound was too severe to reconstruct her face, so he left her body covered, exposing only her right hand, which bore a tattoo her mother would recognize.

“So the mother could see the identifier and maybe hold her hand and come to grips with the fact that her daughter didn’t want to be a part of this world anymore.”

But that partial viewing wasn’t enough. The mother’s grief took a dark turn.

“She fell into such a deep state of denial that she attempted a lawsuit against the funeral home for not allowing her to view. When she the judge threw it out, it only got worse. Eventually, she came to believe that her daughter had been kidnapped and invented a whole story about it. It felt like something out of a beautiful mind.

I think that if she’d been able to see her daughter’s face, she would have been able to come to closure.”

To him, that shows the importance of traditional viewing. People are choosing to do ashes and urns rather than formal viewings more and more because:

“If you deny yourself the closure, then you can allow yourself to live in this fantasy land where it’s not real.”

His takeaway:

“Modern people don’t accept death, don’t want to face it, so one of the best things you can do is to face it head-on. Acknowledge death, bring it in as a part of your life. Get over the fear of it. Go to a graveyard with a toothbrush and clean a headstone. Go to a wake where the body is exposed. If there are ashes, touch them.”

The third story explores our resistance to the permanence of death and the judgment of life that flows from this permanence.

Joseph talked about how death is the end. It is the point at which a person’s life is seen in total. There are no do-overs. There are no more chances. Some people live well and live long. This is obvious from the people who attend and the stories they tell. Other people live short lives punctuated by violence, destruction, and sin. This is also obvious based on the people who attend and the stories they tell.

Yet the modern mind flies from this idea of judgment and the attendant solemnity that is a natural outflowing of this truth.

Joseph told me a story to illustrate the point about how “celebration of life” is another way to ignore death’s permanence.

“I had a celebration of life for a guy … had five ex-wives, had been to prison for money laundering and drug peddling and all sorts of crazy things.”

The man’s son was in prison, so he needed to be granted a special dispensation to attend the funeral.

“And you know, we’re celebrating this guy, but by all accounts, he lived a deeply deprived life and died without contrition. This should not have been a celebration.”

This man had lived badly and yet, in death, his story was reframed with a sterile, generic hope. His funeral was conducted with a language of hollow optimism, disconnected from the truth of the pain he’d caused everyone who knew him.

“We’re celebrating, and it’s like… It’s really disgusting. Everyone knew it was a lie.”

This, my friend said, is the spiritual danger of avoiding death’s sharp edges: we flatten everything, sentimentalize wickedness, and make a mockery of judgment.

A funeral ought to be a moment of reckoning and a time for prayers for mercy. Instead, we throw a fake party. In place of mourning and intercession, we blow up balloons and play energetic music to break the silence.

“There’s this weird occurrence going on that like… yeah, everyone goes to heaven. Everyone’s in this happy place. But no one who has ever seen the death face of an evil man really believes that.”

According to Joseph, this attitude does a deep disservice to all involved. His solution:

“What we can do is have traditional funerals. We can acknowledge death.”

Christ was right. “Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” John 12:25

We shouldn’t resist the solemnity, the sobriety of traditional funerals

November 2nd has always been the day Catholics remembered the dead.The Church knew that to remember death is to remember who we are and what truly matters.

In America, the day has been subsumed into Halloween and reduced to costume parties. Día de los Muertos retains flickers of its Catholic soul, but even there it’s increasingly cartoonish —club music with a bad Mexican DJ and makeup.

Yet beneath both, the memory lingers: this is a day we need. We need to remember death, and in remembering, to learn wisdom.

“Teach us to number our days,” the Psalmist prays, “that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”

Our ancestors knew this. They cleaned graves, lit candles, and told stories of their dead. They wept, and prayed, and offered Masses. They taught their children that death was a horror, but one that could be danced with.

We need to recover these ancient practices. Don’t let this day pass like any other. Make it holy. Start here:

• Put up pictures of your dead and light candles.

• Visit a grave today.

• Turn off your phone.

• Pray Night Prayer with the Church’s words: “Give us a restful night and a peaceful death.”

• Listen to a Requiem Mass.

• Offer your suffering for the souls in purgatory.

“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” – Good Friday Liturgy