This thing keeps happening in my life. I sit down with a friend, or I run into one at the elevators in the hospital or I cross paths with someone in the grocery store and we fall into some deep discussion about meaningful, interesting things. 

I am one of those people who doesn't want to talk about the weather. 

I'm always nice to people I see out in the community and depending on the circumstances a casual “Hey, how are you?” is sometimes exchanged. But I don't always stop for an in-depth check-in. And then, there are those people, ones I have a more intimate relationship with or I have an inside scoop to know they have experienced something deeply life altering. And to those folks if it feel appropriate, I might say, “Please, tell me, how is it being you today?” and then I wait. And when there is time, and they know that they are safe, those conversations are the ones that are meaningful and interesting to me. 

I know this is going to be a big surprise but those are almost always the ones that have something to do with death and dying. Or that thing that happens right after someone dies, but that really happens so much sooner than they die; and that, is Grief. 

Grief with a capitol G.

Grieving, in expected deaths, begins the moment you learn that someone or something you love is going to go away with nothing you can do to make it otherwise. We grieve in loss. Period. But, not simple. And the thing that is lost in the moment you first learn about an impending loss, is the relationship you have with that person or thing being altered.

If it is a marriage, the moment one or both of the partners in the marriage begins the conversation about disrupting the status quo, there is grief present in both lives. If there are children in the home, they too, know grief. They may only know it, as fear, depending on their age, but its really, Grief. Adult children will also experience a sense of grief if the family of origin is disrupted by divorce. It is as though we have just learned that someone we love is dying. There is an unspoken understanding that something is going to change.

When we learn that a person we love is dying, we begin grieving the loss of the life we've been living up until that moment, that moment when we learn, that very soon, living our lives will look different. I say “very soon” because in my experience, the news that someone truly is in their dying process isn't given clearly with enough time left to shift focus to necessarily allowing them to be able to do it well. And if a loss is sudden, sprung on us completely out of the blue, the wall we hit, at what feels like warp speed, is devastating.

The unique circumstances surrounding every loss always have something to do with how we grieve, how well we grieve and for how long we grieve. Snatch-away deaths, those sudden, unanticipated and often violent deaths, have a numbness usually associated with them that allow us a little time to kind of ease into the acuity of the pain, but all loss has grief and all grief has pain.

It takes time to befriend dying. And, when it's your own that you are looking at it takes time you may or may not have. Most of us die without ever having the chance to even try to befriend it. And its partly because as a culture, we seem to be so adverse to the inescapable truth that we will, all, one day, die.

In the medical world doctors are so worried about taking away someone's hope. And I believe some of that stems from physicians being harshly judged, when they have made an attempt to tell a patient that it is time to call hospice, being judged as giving up on their patient. They don't like to be seen as losers and when they have not been able to find any way to help a person continue living, maybe they also judge themselves harshly.

It is one of the reasons those of us working in the realm of death and dying must assume that most people fear death as the worst possible thing that can happen. And that, is sad. 

It is going to happen. To all of us. Wearing blinders to that reality, being unwilling to have conversations with friends and family about death and dying and what we believe and what we'd like ours to look like if we have the knowledge ahead of time to actually orchestrate our death and how we'd like to be remembered, being unwilling to talk about it, does not make it not happen any more than being willing to talk about it ,makes it happen. 

My standard response to the beleif that dying is the worst possible thing that happens is that it is not. But, unnecessary suffering is. And if you are the one with the diagnosis that has reminded you that you will not live forever, you can, under the right circumstances and with the right people alongside, come to see that diagnosis as a possible gift. I can't imagine anything lonelier or more difficult than to be the one who is dying when no one around you will admit it and the people you love don't want to talk about it anyway. 

It must feel so confusing to sense that things are not going well, to feel your body continuing to decay or betray you yet the ones who have been trying to buy you the “more time” that you may have begged and bargained for when first diagnosed are saying that there's another treatment coming soon, or a trial or something else to try and “don't give up hope”. 

That idea of 'more time' always makes me curious about what the person intends to do with the 'more time' and how will they know when they have gotten it and what would they be willing to sacrifice in order to have it. It can actually be very helpful to a treatment team if they know what the answers to those questions are. Because they do know what the cost of 'more time' can look like. If you were to say to your oncologist for example, I'd like to try this first line of defense against whatever the particular disease is that's been discovered because I'd like to attend my daughters wedding 15 months from now. And I am willing to feel like shit 14 of those 15 months to get to do it if you think it's possible.” That's very specific information. 

We can almost always buy a person some time; keep someone alive maybe longer than they might otherwise live without the chemicals and surgeries and radiations. I have been privy to discussions with patients of very serious cancers where the patient has been told, “Look. We know what this treatment does to you during the months we will be treating you. We know (and I wish they would be this graphic) it will make you want to curl up in a ball under your bed and beg to die. BUT, if you can just get through it, we can cure your cancer.” In those situations it seems to me that a very serious conversation needs to have happened around why someone is choosing to walk through what we are planning to do. What is it they will do with their 'more time'? 

There is another way to look at all of this; another way to see that none of us will ever out live our mortality and that it could be such a gift to someone if we were to be able to say to them, “Look, this disease that you have is most likely going to be what you die from and maybe it's time to shift our focus to helping you make friends with the truth of that, and in doing that, help those you love that you will be leaving to also feel some kinship with it; the fact that you will die.

It isn't easy and it isn't without the pain of sorrow. It is Grief in it's most tangible form when we grab hold of our own dying and look it in the eye. 

I honestly think that it's what happened in my mom's life. When she got close to her dying and the truth of it was her constant companion, that's what allowed her to bring an awareness of it into the lives of all of us who loved her in a way that made it less frightening. 

No less painful, but definitely less frightening. And she would not have been able to do it, if she had followed the protocol for her disease. She would have been too sick and too weak. Until it was too late. She would have been waiting for the 'more time' and expecting that it was going to look different than the fact that she was living the more time every minute and that what she had was as good as it was going to get. 

She was smart. She was a wise woman who's only regret was in not living 100 years. She knew she had some unfinished business and she also knew that if she went into the treatment regimen that was being suggested, she not only would never finish what she needed to finish, but she would suffer unnecessarily in the interim. So she chose, against her doctors advice, to get down to the business of living her dying. And in doing so, as I said in the two podcasts where I talk about that time in my life, she brought me to this work. I have never doubted that it was the plan all along.

There are so many layers in a discussion around this topic and I certainly do not hold myself up as an expert on any of it. Except for the fact that we all die, I have no reason to believe my own death is imminent. That being said, I have no reason to believe it isn't. What I know with absolute certainty is that every day I wake up alive, I am one day closer to the day I don't.

I think if we were to be having truly honest conversations about dying, which I so hope we one day are doing all the time, we could probably ease so much of the fear around the process of dying and then the idea of being dead. 

To die in a place and time that refuses to make room for death makes dying traumatic. It's almost that simple. It is the defiance and the refusal to accept that death is standing at the door that makes dying seem like such an emergency. We have so many ways to get in the way of death. So many ways to stand in the face of dying and say “Oh no. Not on this day buster. Not on my watch.” 

But in all conversations about end of life, we must understand that when we speak of death, Grief is really what we are talking about. The very thought of someone we love dying, is painful. And if it is our dying, the thought of the pain it will cause in the ones we love that we will leave behind is awful. That is Grief. 

That is what we really need to work on doing better. Grieving. Honoring the Grief. To the point that we know when it shows up and we know that the only way to move through is to invite it in and Honor it. Allow it to rip through us, shred us, shatter us and ultimately, to heal us.

We're not done. I hope I am never done until the moment I am fully done. Because these are the conversations that will bring us a healthier world, a stronger world, a more empathetic world. 

If you are new to these podcasts you can visit the website at seanjeung.com and find all 40 of the previous episodes as well as the way to subscribe for free to receive an email each time a new one publishes.Until then, this is SJ. 

Thank You for being here and I hope you will join me again Where the Veil Grows Thin.   Love, Sean