Creating trust

I am one of those fortunate people who didn't really have to deal with death until I was a teenager. My parents had, of course, lost various uncles, aunts and cousins before then, but my experience of death, funerals and cemeteries were at arms length for a good portion of my life.

 

My memory of my first trip to a grave yard, however, stands out in my mind clearer than crystal. We were visiting relatives in Saskatoon one summer, and my uncle decided that it was a fine day to visit his mother's grave, so he piled my sisters, cousins and I into the car, and we had an outing. If I had to guess, I was maybe eight years old, and had never been to a cemetery before.

I was the oldest of the bunch. Faced with a big beautiful green lawn, marble monuments and scattered trees, what do you think a bunch of little kids would do? We lit out across the lawn, laughing and chattering, only to be shushed by my uncle, who announced that we were in a place where we had to show respect for the DEAD. Scary! So we simmered down and walked quietly behind him until we reached his mother's grave. He stood at the foot of the grave, not speaking, but never having seen a gravestone before, I walked past him to have a closer look.

Wrong move. "You're standing on the grave!" he said, speaking loudly, as he always did. In a panic, I jumped backward and cowered behind him for a while, worried that his dead mother would be angry and make something bad happen, anxiously looking back toward the car, wishing we could leave. My sisters and cousins didn't look like they were having any more fun than I was.

That night we slept in my uncle's basement, and I had terrible nightmares about that grave -- hands coming up through the sod and grabbing my ankles, making me scream. For a long time after, I dreaded cemeteries and looked the other way, and lived in fear of my first funeral.

Fortunately, my parents were wise people. Perhaps they were aware that funerals and death are intimidating when you've never experienced them, so when I reached my early teens, they took their children to the funeral of a family member that we had never known so that we would be familiar with the process when someone close to us died. With a few more years of maturity under my belt, I found it to be a calming experience. Death was a part of life, not as scary as my uncle had inadvertently made it seem when I was little. My years of cemetery nightmares abated, and I have since found funerals, while very sad, to be moments of gratitude and peace -- gratitude for having known the individual who died, and peace in knowing that they've gone somewhere better than here.

Because of my experience as an eight-year-old, I vowed that I would never put my kids through the same thing. They have attended funerals with us from infancy, and we talk about life and death and illness and heaven often enough that I think they're at ease with those ideas. This week we said goodbye to our ninety-year-old neighbour, and the girls insisted on coming along. When Bob's wife passed away in 2006, we spent an hour walking through the cemetery by the funeral home on a beautiful, warm summer day so that cemeteries wouldn't be a frightening experience for them.

There are a lot of things in life that we can't control. But talking about death, accidents, pain or sexuality can demystify them for our kids, and that's definitely worth doing. The less fear we have to live with and the more we can trust that life is good in spite of its difficulties, the more whole we can be, and the more joyful our lives.