Dying well
We’re all going to die, but how we acknowledge death and dying is a very personal experience. Award-winning journalist and author Tracey Spicer and anthropologist Dr Hannah Gould explore etiquette, rites and traditions to find out what makes a ‘good death’.
About the episode – brought to you by Australian Seniors.
Join James Valentine for the sixth season of Life’s Booming: Dying to Know, our most unflinching yet. We’ll have the conversations that are hardest to have, ask the questions that are easy to ignore, and hear stories that will make you think differently about the one thing we’re all guaranteed to experience: Death.
Featuring interviews with famous faces as well as experts in the space, we uncover what they know about what we can expect. There are hard truths, surprising discoveries, tears and even laughs. Nothing about death is off the table.
Tracey Spicer AM is a Walkley award-winning journalist, author and broadcaster. And she's an ambassador for Dying With Dignity. A vocal campaigner and advocate for voluntary assisted dying (VAD), Tracey penned a letter to her mother following her painful death in 1999.
Dr Hannah Gould is an anthropologist who works in the areas of death, religion and material culture. She recently appeared on SBS documentary: Ray Martin: The Last Goodbye. Hannah’s research spans new traditions and technologies of Buddhist death rites, the lifecycle of religious materials, and modern lifestyle movements.
If you have any thoughts or questions and want to share your story to Life’s Booming, send us a voice note – [email protected]
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For more information visit seniors.com.au/podcast
Produced by Medium Rare Content Agency, in conjunction with Ampel
Disclaimer: Please be advised that this episode contains discussions about death, which may be triggering or upsetting for some listeners. Listener discretion is advised.
If you are struggling with the loss of a loved one, please know that you are not alone and there are resources available. For additional support please contact Lifeline on 131 114 or Beyond Blue on 1300 224 636.
TRANSCRIPT:
James: We're all going to die. Happens to all of us. But how we acknowledge death and dying is of course a very personal experience. With our guest and our expert, we're going to explore the etiquette, the rites and traditions seen in Australia and around the world. Someone who knows a lot about the rites and traditions of death is Dr Hannah Gould, an anthropologist who works in the areas of death, religion and material culture.
We're also going to be joined by Tracey Spicer, she’s a Walkley award-winning author, journalist and broadcaster. And she's an ambassador for Dying With Dignity. Tracey and Hannah, welcome. Thank you so much.
Tracey: Hello.
James: Thank you for coming. Hannah Gould. Hello. Thank you for coming.
Hannah: Thank you.
James: Fantastic. Let's talk death!
Tracey: Why not? There'll be lots of fun.
James: Do you laugh in the face of death?
Hannah: What else can you do? I mean, look, you know. Lots of sadness, lots of joy, every single emotion is reasonable, surely. I mean, it's like the question, the ultimate question of philosophy, of history, of every discipline.
Every response is valid. Not always useful, or helpful.
James: Yeah. Yeah.
Hannah: But valid.
Tracey: Well, it's a universal topic of conversation and that's why I've always loved dark humour. Because you do have to laugh, otherwise what do you do?
James: I also think it's, it is the ultimate joke that we are all going to die, but we live like we're not going to.
We live every day as though it's just not going to happen at all.
Tracey: Especially in Western society, I think other cultures have got it right and we're in such deep denial about it. It's detrimental to all of us.
James: Yeah. Now this is your area of expertise really, is that do other cultures have it right?
Hannah: Everyone does it differently. Right or wrong is kind of a difficult thing to judge. I think certainly there's a big thing called, like, the denial of death thesis, right. And, and people like Ernest Becker, a lot of different philosophers and anthropologists and cultural, you know, analysis have looked at Western culture and gone, Oh my gosh, we are so invested in denying death, right. And whether that's through denying death by religions that say you're going to live forever, like, you know, don't worry, it's not the end. You'll pop off to heaven or whatever it is.
Or through, you know, great heroic myths. Yes, you'll die, but the nation will remember you forever. So, you know, you won't really die. You'll be a martyr.
Or contemporary, you know. Yes, you'll die, but have you seen how great the shopping is? You know, we can just ignore, we can deny death by being on Instagram and, you know, consuming, right, so, I think Western culture in particular, the way we've organised our society, allows us to not think about death.
James: And we've organised death to be somewhere else, usually now. To be in a hospital, to be in palliative care somewhere. And they may be good, but they're not, they're not in the cottage, are they? They're not next to, not in the bedroom.
Hannah: Not in the bedroom. So, we know that, say, 70% of Australians wish to die at home.
Only about 15% do. And that is a rate that is lower than all these other countries we like to compare ourselves. So Australians are more institutionalised in their death than places like Ireland, like New Zealand, the United States of America, even Canada. We tend, more than other countries, to die in institutions – aged care, hospitals, and hospices.
James: Yeah, right, right. The other way in which we deny death is, or the other way in which other cultures have a different attitude to death, will be that it'll either be more accepting – we are all going to die, will be part of their every day – or they may have a notion of reincarnation and coming back, which means that that's a very different attitude to death, really, than a, than a heaven and a hell.
Hannah: Yeah, it's not necessarily an end so much. I think that's kind of quite common in, say, you know, Buddhist or Hindu or other kind of dharmic religions, particularly Asian religions. And then, obviously, there's a lot of Asian religion that's part of Australian society, so that's also quite present in Australia.
But we can also have a kind of more secular idea about that. You know, a lot of these, a lot of my mum's generation in particular, have kind of a green environmental kind of reincarnation model where she will say, well, I don't particularly believe in heaven, but I do believe I'm going to become compost. Food for worms, you know, I'll come back as a tree or a flower or a tomato plant, you know, and that's, that's a kind of reincarnation of like reintegration into the natural environment, as it were.
So there are some kind of myths or stories we can tell ourselves that perhaps help us think about death more positively.
James: I've got a, a friend of mine who'd be into her 80s has said, oh, funeral? Just put me up the top paddock, let the crows have a go.
Tracey: Yeah. My dad wants to be buried in a cardboard box, and I think that's a wonderful idea.
James: We all say that, don't we? That's a really common one as well. I hear that a lot on the radio.
People will go, mate, just, I don't care, put me out with the, on the hard rubbish day.
Hannah: In the paddock, whatever it is…
James: …the paddock, that’s the same sort of thing I said. You know, like, do we really want that, do you think?
Hannah: Oh, do we really want that? I do think Aussies are pretty pragmatic about death. I do think we have a certain streak in us that's kind of like, you know what, it's all a bit much fuss, it's all too much.
You kind of even get these people who therefore say, don't have a funeral. You know, I really don't want to have a funeral. Please don't even, you know, no fuss. That can be kind of sad sometimes because I think it's some people kind of not acknowledging how many people love them and miss them.
James: Yeah.
Hannah: Um, but maybe it's also a bit of an Aussie humour, dry humour, that, that black humour again of kind of, you know, trying to laugh in the face of death. Why not?
Tracey: I would agree, but then we all get sucked in when we're in the funeral home, and they show you the cardboard box, and then they show you the glossy one that's 10 or 20 thousand dollars, and you think, did I really love that person that much, or should I do it? So it all feeds into what you were talking about before, that consumerism and overcommercialisation.
James: Well, I also think sometimes, I would think it's about weddings. Weddings and funerals, well, who's it actually for?
Tracey: Yeah, yeah. Well it's a punctuation mark, isn't it? I'm a lifelong atheist, but
Tracey: I do enjoy, it sounds terrible, going to those kind of ceremonies, whether it's a funeral or a wedding, because it's important to celebrate or commemorate these changes, these huge changes.
James: I love the sharing of stories at a funeral. People start talking.
Tracey: Well, you learn so much about someone's life that you may not have known. And also often they're rich for that dark humour.
I'll never forget my grandmother's funeral, who I was incredibly close to. And my father's new girlfriend loved my grandmother. She was so distraught she tried to throw herself into the hole in the ground on top when she was throwing the dirt in and I thought, well, that's intense.
James: That's good.
Tracey: That's, I've never seen that before. That's a first.
Hannah: Oh, I've seen that before.
Tracey: Have you?!
Hannah: I will say that, you know, when you attend enough funerals or attend enough cremations for professional reasons, um, as it were, you kind of see everything, every range of human emotions.
Like, we, we kind of think, you know, all funerals are all happy families. A lot of unhappy families, a lot of punch ups at funerals, lots of, uh, mistresses coming out of the woodwork at funerals, conversions, religious, you know, more and more people have recorded messages from beyond the grave that they play at their funeral, or, uh, they've decided that we're having a dance party, or we're having some sort of festivity or an event. I mean, you can do anything these days with a funeral.
James: Do you go to a lot, just to observe?
Hannah: Yeah, I do my research. So I, I research in death and dying and I, I work at a crematorium and I attend funerals and I hang around with other people in the death care sector.
James: Yeah.
Hannah: And you do see everything.
James: Why do you want to…
Tracey: …What got you interested in this? It's your job and I'm just fascinated by it…
James: …We'll, we'll, we'll, we'll both do it. I think you've done this sort of thing! So, yeah. Well then, then, why do you want to be around death?
Hannah: Oh. I mean, personal and professional. Professional, I'm an anthropologist, and anthropologists want to know what brings us together, what makes us all human, but then also why we do it so differently.
And there is nothing else. It is the question, right, it is the one thing we all experience, and yet we've all decided to do it in completely different ways, and completely different ways throughout history.
And then, personally, my dad died, and I thought, gosh, what on earth is going on? I suddenly was given the catalogue, of funeral, of coffins, right.
James: And you were young.
Hannah: I was 22, 23 when my dad died. An age that was perfectly old and mature at the time, I thought. But looking back, obviously, it was incredibly young. But yeah, I suddenly got handed this catalogue of, of kind of coffins, and they all had these really naff names, like, you know, these rich mahoganies, and like, it was like paint colours.
Someone had, someone somewhere had decided, these were the options, right, that you were, that this is what was going to represent my dad. And I just felt this massive disconnect and I thought, ‘Hang on, I've got to work out what's going on there.’ So now I spend my life in death, as it were.
James: Yeah. I suppose, most of us would think being around death would be a very gloomy kind of thing to be, or way to spend your day.
Hannah: It can be very gloomy. But oh my gosh, the gallows humour that those boys in the crem – the crematorium – tell, uh, you know.
James: Is there a joke you can share?
Hannah: Ooh. Um. Not a lot of them are safe for work or anywhere.
James: Tracey, you were going to jump in and ask something there before. What were you going to ask? You know, fellow professional interviewer.
Tracey: I really see a connection with you being 22 when your father died and I was 32 when my mother died.
Hannah: Mm.
Tracey: Even at 32 I felt like I wasn't ready for it.
James: Right, no.
Tracey: And especially because it happened so quickly. Mum was the linchpin for the family, you know, smart and funny and she could do anything. She was one of those early super women kind of role models.
And then all of a sudden at the age of 51 she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer with seven months to live and she lived seven months almost to the day. And it was blood and guts and gore. She was in agonising pain. My sister and I were injecting her with medication every day.
We wanted her to die in the home.
Tracey: But it got to the stage where we had to bring her to palliative care, and that's when we started having the conversations about voluntary assisted dying, because, um, Mum and Dad had always said, put me down like a dog.
And again, it's one of those things that you think it's going to be easy at the time, but it's not. We talked to the doctor. The doctor said, I don't want to end up in jail.
And my sister sat there with the morphine button. She pressed it so often she had a bruise on her thumb.
James: Hmm, right
Tracey: …we said, surely you can just increase the morphine, because Mum was having breakthrough pain. So everything was fine until she'd scream once an hour, and there was no way they could cap that.
So it's cruel, right? It's cruel. I, I don't think there's any way they would have done it. We tried to have those conversations.
James: …Yeah…
Tracey: Which is why one night, because we were sleeping in a chair next to her overnight just to hold her hand when she was in pain, I picked up the pillow and I did try to put it over her face because I thought, what kind of daughter am I, to let her suffer? And then I stopped at the last minute and then I felt really ashamed of, you know, what a coward I am.
Hannah: No, I was going to say the opposite. What an incredibly brave act to, to have so much love and compassion for this person and so much respect, what you knew her wishes would be, that you were willing to do that, you know, for, not – for her, not to her, for her, right?
That's extraordinary.
Tracey: It's lovely of you to say.
James: Did she know what you were doing?
Tracey: Oh no, she was out of it for about the previous two weeks, actually. In and out of it. And then she died in the next 24 hours anyway. So she was very, very close.
And she'd had that kind of burst, you know, had that almost honeymoon period a couple of days beforehand where you think, Well, she seems like she's getting better and we've read about that, so we expected she was close.
Hannah: …Yep, the final, the final burst…
Tracey: Yeah. Is there a name for that?
Hannah: You know, I don't know what it's called, but you know, that is when usually the palliative care doctors, the hospice workers will call up the family and say, guess what? They're up and about, they're talking, they're eating all of a sudden, and that's genuinely usually a sign that it's not going to be long.
James: Wow, isn't that interesting.
Hannah: It's the final burst of energy.
One of the interesting things about the rise of voluntary assisted dying, of euthanasia, to speak more broadly in Australia, is it reflects this kind of cultural shift that we have about the importance of choice and control towards the end of our lives and how increasingly like that is becoming an important part of what we think about as a good death, right.
Like I want to be able to control where I die and who I die with and when and the pain and suffering, right? And that hasn't always been the case, right, you know throughout history there's been periods of that. There's been periods of, ‘Leave it to God.’ Or there's also been periods of, ‘Yes, I must prepare. I have to write my final last note or poetry’, or whatever it is.
But that's increasingly becoming important particularly for, we see within the baby boomer generation that they really want to, you know, have some sort of choice, and emphasis on choice.
James: Well, I mean, I wonder whether a lot of it is a reaction to, um, the, the medical control over the end of our lives is so extreme that we can be kept alive for so long.
And so, it's, it's, it's a reaction to that medical control, isn't it? To want to say, well, surely I can, we can, we can have both, can't we? You can either keep me alive or I don't want to be kept alive. Could you let me go?
Hannah: It's one of the great paradoxes, they talk about this paradox of contemporary death and contemporary medicine, is that all of our interventions have increased, right.
The medicalisation of death has meant that not only do we have pain control, but we can keep people alive for longer. You know, we have better medicines, drugs, palliative medicine is massively advanced. And yet, if we ask people, the quality of death and dying has not increased.
James: Right…
Hannah: …And if we look globally, more access to medicine doesn't necessarily correlate with a higher quality of death and dying. There's some correlation, like, do you actually have the drugs? Can you access, access them? But when it gets to kind of over a certain hurdle, just because you're dying in Australia versus dying in a country with no resources doesn't mean you're going to die better.
James: What do you, what's a quality of death? How are we measuring that? What do you mean by that?
Hannah: There's lots of things you can do to measure it and people try. So one of them is, you know, to ask, ask the family, to ask the dying person, to also ask the physician, did you think this was a good death? You know, how do we assess it?
Because it's not just up to the dying person as well. Of course, it's also up to the family, right – How did you experience that death, that dying? It's a difficult thing to measure, right, because for some people death is never gonna be… You know, the words good death, bad death are kind of controversial now because it's like, oh my God, I have to try at everything else, do I also have to live up to a good death?
Like, we can't make it good. Can we make it better?
James: Yeah. What is a good death, Tracey?
Tracey: I think this really intersects with, uh, competition. Everything's become a competition. And also quality of ageing.
Hannah: Yes, yes…
Tracey: …Because my darling dad, who's 84 and still hanging on after smoking and drinking himself almost to death when he was in his 50s – it's a miracle he's still alive. He has very close to zero quality of life. He's a lovely man, we love spending time with him, but he can barely walk. You know, where's the quality of life? So I've just written a book about artificial intelligence recently, so it worries me, that medtech space, that we're getting people to live longer, but there's no quality of life and also no quality of death.
Hannah: There's this phenomenon we actually call, in scholarship, we call it prolonged dwindling.
Tracey: Oh, which is so true, I love that.
Hannah: What a term! But it's, it's…
James: …Sounds like the worst Enya album ever…
Tracey: …And it never ends…
Hannah: …But yeah, it's, it's, there's exactly this thing, right. So it used to be, if you look at like the kind of time, it used to be that you'd either have a sudden illness, fall off a horse, through a sword, war, back in the day, and you, and then you would die, or you would have a, you know, a serious major illness, like a cancer or a heart attack, and then pretty soon after, you'd die, right?
What we have now, what we tend to have now, is these kind of timelines towards the end of life of, you know, multiple hospitalisations, in and out of hospital, or you have something like Alzheimer's, right, where you have a very, very, very slow and long cognitive decline, potentially with very high care needs, so you're in hospital, you're in care for 20, 30 years, right? Which is unheard of previously, that you would need this level. So how we die is changing, and it's a completely different timeline.
James: Yeah. Does… Tracey, let's just return to this moment when you started to perhaps really think about death. You know, you're confronting your mother's suffering, and you think about, you know, taking control of that, about doing something.
Was that an impulse? Was it something that grew over time?
Tracey: It was knowing my mother's character as being very forthright, and she was always in control, to speak to control. She would have liked me to try to control the situation. It was also, obviously, that you never want to see a loved one in suffering.
But it taught all of us in the family a couple of important lessons. Dad’s now got an advance care directive that’s 28 pages long, so we know exactly what's going to happen. My husband and I still haven't done that, but we do talk to our kids who are aged 18 and 20 about this kind of stuff. I think part of that is my husband's a camera operator, I've been a long-time journalist, so in newsrooms, a very dark sense of humour, similar to the crematoriums, so we talk about death and dying an awful lot at home, but I think it's important to have those conversations and to prepare for a good enough death as much as you can.
Tracey: I mean, what does a good enough death mean to you? Have you thought about that yourself?
James: Yeah, well I have. I've had some, you know, health issues, had a cancer last year, and so that sort of thing, you know, you do start to confront it and think about it.
I'm the fall asleep in the bed, you know, go to bed one night, don't wake up.
Tracey: The classic.
James: That's the classic. Give me the classic. I'm happy with the classic.
Hannah: …Hopefully after you've just finished penning your magnum opus, surrounded by friends and family.
James: The end, you know. For me to be onstage, I've just finished a searing saxophone solo, and everyone's just ‘Amazing! Unbelievable!’ Down you go. Something like I mean, sudden, seems to be, just immediate. Immediate and sudden, no suffering.
Hannah: Well, that's the thing.
Hannah: People always ask me, you know, do you fear death, are you afraid of death? And frankly, after studying it for this long, no, not at all. And I think in an odd way, there is some kind of horrific privilege of having at least one of your parents die young because all of a sudden, you do start thinking about all these things and you learn to live with death, even if you don't like it a lot of the time.
I don't fear death, I do fear the prolonged dwindling. Right, like that, the kind of ageing poorly without support in a way that I can't make the controls, and and you know, can't make decisions. That's much more scary to me than death. Death is kind of a great mystery.
James: Your interaction with your mother, Tracey, led you to looking at voluntary assisted dying.
What did people say about it? What was the general, when you first started to talk about it, when you first started to campaign for it, what would people say?
Tracey: What I noticed was a disconnect, that people in the community overwhelmingly supported this because they’d seen loved ones die. But in our parliaments, I saw there a lot of people, a higher percentage than the normal population, are quite religious in our parliaments.
Hannah: …Completely unrepresentative...
Tracey: …Unrepresentative. And so a lot of organised religions are pushing back against it and therefore there wasn't an appetite for change because of that.
I think it took these wonderful lobby groups to get the politicians to listen and for them to realise that there was a groundswell of support. And also, of course, with the examples in the Netherlands and Oregon and Canada who have quite different laws to us. But very successful laws. You rarely see people, I think it's 99.9% successful – only a tiny amount of people who are abusing the legislation, tiny, tiny – but the rest of it, everyone overwhelmingly aligns with it. So it's done in a very ethical and proper kind of way.
James: So do you feel as though when you first started talking about it, really, most people were on board? It wasn't something, it wasn't one of those things where we're really trying to, we had to convince people.
Tracey: No, that's right, except for people who were particularly religious. Because, let's face it, everyone, pretty much, unless you're quite young, has had a loved one die, so this is something that affected everyone.
James: Yeah. I suppose I was wondering. Like someone, some friend, the other day, you know, how have you been, blah, blah, blah. And he went, ‘oh, I had a weird thing yesterday, like, my uncle died’. And I went, ‘oh, that's sad’. And he said, ‘no, no, it was voluntary, he did the voluntary assisted death. He died yesterday afternoon at two o'clock’, you know.
I went, ‘oh, wow, you know, you're there?’ ‘Yeah, we're all there, and, you know, it was great, we had a lovely morning with him. We had dinner the night before, and then it just all took place.’ I said, wow, how amazing. And what I was really struck by was what a normal conversation this was. It was a bit like saying, ‘we went to holiday in Queensland’.
You know, like it was sort of, he wasn't describing some outlandish thing, you know, it was suddenly this thing, suddenly voluntary assisted dying was just part of the fabric of our, of our lives. You know, do you feel that that's happened in Australia?
Tracey: I do feel it's become more normalised, to your point, over the last 20 years.
But there's still a lot of academic debate about at what, at what point should you be able to do it. At the moment in Australia, it's overwhelmingly someone with a terminal illness. And it's done by themselves or their doctor, their practitioner. But there are people who want to bring it in for people who are elderly and, and suffering and don't want to live any longer, to support them there.
So we're seeing, I guess, a fragmentation of the discussion and the arguments. And I'll be interested to see which way that goes down the track. There's a lot of debate about people, to your point earlier with Alzheimer's, people who have dementia.
Hannah: Sensory pleasures. Like, people being able to taste and smell and touch and hug become really important at the end of life.
Tracey: Oh, that reminds me of someone I know who did have a good death, who was my grandfather, Mum's father. He lived until 94, and I cared for him towards the end of his life. Our kids were little then, they were probably 7 and 8. And he had that burst, and they said, come on in, he'll die in the next couple of days.
We brought in oysters, we brought in red wine. I brought in the kids because I think it was important for them to see that, and he had a good death within the next 24 hours. So it is possible. I think it's rare, but it's possible.
James: Yeah, if you know what's happening. A lot of your speciality, Hannah, is in Buddhism. What do Buddhists make of voluntary assisted dying?
Hannah: Well, I will say that Buddhism is a religion with over 500 million people in it. So it's kind of like asking, what are the Christians?
James: …Right. Right.
Hannah: …or what are the Western people think about voluntary assisted dying? So, a range of views.
James: Range of views.
Hannah: Really huge range of views.
James: I suppose I was just wondering whether there was anything in the Buddhist canon as such or the Buddhist, you know, view that just went, no, let life take its course. That, you know, you must experience suffering, so therefore you must experience all life.
Hannah: Well, suffering is pretty important to Buddhism, right? And suffering well, and learning to suffer well, is really important. So there are some Buddhists who would oppose voluntary assisted dying because there's a prohibition against killing, right? But most people in Buddhism will, say, weigh that prohibition against killing against, kind of, the experience of suffering, right, and lessening people's suffering.
So certainly there are some Buddhists who would say, no, you know, we need to experience suffering and learn how to experience the suffering at the end of life. And that can be quite instructive. It's also why some Buddhists may, uh, deny pain medication and even, you know, deny anything that kind of clogs their mind, because they want to be conscious at the end of life. They want to experience it all, you know, see where their consciousness goes to the next reincarnation.
But there's also a, you know, a massive Buddhist movement that has always kind of seen humanity on quite a similar level to animals, right, that we are all beings of this world, and therefore in the same way that we would, you know, have compassion for the suffering of a pet and, you know, euthanase a pet that's going through unavoidable suffering, with many Buddhists who would therefore support the euthanasia of a human being that's going through suffering, right, in the same way. Because humans are not particularly special, right, we're just another being in this world and we'd want to show the same compassion for both of those.
James: Yeah, yeah.
Hannah: Huge range of views.
James: Yeah. Tracey, you said, you said you're an atheist. Does that mean, you know, once the final curtain falls, that's it?
Tracey: Well, I'm one of those very open-minded atheists, James, who, if I am diagnosed with something, I fully am open to the opportunity of religion if I end up needing it at that time.
And I imagine a lot of people do that. And if, if I do decide to do that, I would choose Buddhism.
Hannah: There's actually a fascinating piece of research that just came out, Professor Manning, a religious studies scholar, and she looked at older atheists and what they think about the end of life. Because we tend to think, well, religious people have beliefs, but we don't really study atheists’ beliefs, right, we just think they all think nothing.
But she actually found that there was kind of three different kind of world views or narratives that came out, that can be summarised as: lights out, recycling, or mystery.
James: I'm all three. I'm all three.
Hannah: So the first one is this idea, it's kind of like – death is like anesthesia, you just, that's it. You're at the end, you know, there's nothing, and it's often very biomedical, right. It's like sleep, but you don't dream, so it's more like anesthesia. You know, we've all, maybe all experienced that, and that's what these people believe, that that will be the end.
The second one is recycling. So this is the food for worms idea, right, that yes, I will die, but my, you know… Carl Sagan: ‘We are all made of stardust’, right, we'll go back into the universe and one day I will be an oak tree or a, you know, something, quite, you know, a beautiful idea, which I, you know, I think I subscribe to that, I quite like that.
And then the third one that they described around atheists was just mystery. That, for a certain group of people, who knows? And we can't ask anyone. And so that it was, it was almost kind of curiosity and excitement towards the end of life.
So there are, yeah, you know, this is quite a great mystery, it's a great adventure, right, that we should all go on.
James: Yeah, fantastic.
We didn't talk much about, I suppose, the emotion we might feel around death at various points. You know, like, I've observed lots of conversations on the radio where my parents' generation, ‘stiff upper lip’...
Hannah: …Stoicism…
James: …‘How's she doing? Oh, very well.’ Which means she wasn't feeling anything at all. There's been no, you know, like, that's sort of how you're meant to feel. We now tend to be very emotional about death, you know, like it's, like it's part of our funeral rites, I suppose, to release that, to make sure we all howl.
Hannah: Yeah, we have this kind of catharsis model of the funeral, right, which is this idea that, you know, you kind of, even if you might not want to, you go to the funeral and you cry it all out with other people and you have this communal experience of grief. And somehow that is helpful, if not entirely necessary for our long-term grief.
But, you know, there's many cultures around the world where wailing is a big tradition, right, so that, you know, women physically throwing themselves at the coffin, howling, collectively crying. You know, it might be an extended period of wearing a certain colour, wearing black, you know, gathering together.
Those kind of rituals can also be a way for people to process grief and emotion. You think of, particularly like, you know, in the Jewish tradition of sitting shiva, right, that after someone dies, you immediately gather, right, and there's an extended period of everyone sitting together and dedicated to experiencing grief together. That's quite different to our kind of one-day funeral a week or two after the person's died, and we all go back to our home.
Hannah: And it kind of depends on, like, what kind of level of social ties that your cultural society engages in the funeral, right. Do you have a very small private funeral where it's only the immediate family who are the ones that are supposed to be grieving?
Or is it everyone you knew in that society, and you have a responsibility to go and be there because you're part of a much larger social fabric, right. And that can be quite different – it can be a 300 or 400-person funeral. You know, one of the largest social groups in Australia is South Asian, Indian, Hindu migration, right? Often extremely large funerals, 300, 400 people in some cases, right, because there's a different expectation about who are the mourners, who is the congregation, who are the people that gather together and stand against death, as it were.
Tracey: Another big difference seems to me, and I'd love to hear more about you on this, is the cultures that sit with the body for three days, or have the open coffin for viewing…
James: …the body stays at home…
Tracey: …of the body, or the body stays at home. Because my sister and I sat with Mum's body for as long as we were legally and practically allowed to in the hospital, which was hours and hours and hours. And when we told a lot of our Western friends, they said what an awful thing to do. But it was really lovely because it cemented the idea that she was actually gone.
We told her stories. My sister and I laughed. We cried. It was actually incredibly therapeutic.
Hannah: Yeah, and this is one of the difficulties, is people feel, because they have a lot of… People don't have a lot of information, right, so if you're lucky, very lucky, then you'll organise maybe one or two funerals during your whole life, right, and probably there'll be those for your parents, right. And you just don't have a lot of information because we don't talk about it. So you don't know what you're allowed to do. But you know, in all states and territories across Australia, you are allowed to be with that body for an extended period of time. You're allowed to bring that body home. You know, you can actively resist pressures from the hospital and the hospice and everyone else to get you out the door. You can say, no, I would like to be with this body for a bit longer. And as you say, there is also technologies that can allow you to bring the body into the home.
I mean, the reason we call them funeral parlours is the front parlour of the house. That is the room where we used to display the body and be with the body and that still occurs in many cultures around the world. You know, it's difficult; it can be difficult. It's not always the right decision, you know, you have to think about your particular circumstances, but it is possible.
James: Yeah. Well, thank you so much. Any final words?
Tracey: Only that I think we should all choose our own funeral soundtrack. I've been doing that with a girlfriend lately.
James: …What's she gone with?
Tracey: …Because, you know… well, I've gone with Edith Piaf.
Hannah:…Ah, classic…
Tracey: …‘No Regrets’, of course. Absolute classic. And my friend is still choosing from five. But I think, otherwise someone else gets a choice, and they might choose something terrible.
James: Yes, no, I think that's very important, get your, get your, get your funeral songs sorted out…
Hannah: Catering, funeral songs…
James: …the whole soundtrack, the catering you'd be concerned about, you want everyone to have something…
Hannah: … delicious.
James: …any special cheeses or wines you want?
Hannah: French. Yeah, this is what we did for my dad as well. It was like red wine, good French cheese, baguettes, you know. If you're going to grieve, if you're going to cry, you need some sustenance to support you.
Tracey: Comfort food.
Hannah: Comfort food, exactly.
James: Yeah, very nice.
Tracey: Before we let you go, what's your funeral song?
James: Do you mean, what do I want people to hear as the coffin's going out or something like that? I don't know if I've made that choice yet. I don't know.
Hannah: Hard rock?
Tracey: Jazz?
Hannah: Pop?
James: No, it'll be something jazz, I guess, or something in that tradition. It's probably none of the Frank songs.
Tracey: Something majestic, though.
James: So yeah, ‘Zadok the Priest’, Handel…
Hannah: …Oh, I like that. Old school.
James: …Something huge! I haven't decided. Yeah, it's, it's but you're right. Like everything, do it, put some effort into it, you know, and have all that stuff ready for your children, for those that are going to have to do it, a little folder somewhere.
Tracey: You could play some of your television clips from over the years.
James: Oh, I don't think so, Tracey. I think yours might have something like…
Hannah: …a highlights reel…
Tracey: …a showreel!
James: Yeah, my showreel. No, let's not do that. It's largely children's television, Tracey. No one wants to see that.
Tracey: That would be great at a funeral.
James: I could conduct a – I'd like to conduct a beyond-the-grave talkback session, probably, talkback radio or something. That could be very fun.
Hannah: People could all call in to your funeral.
James: Oh, I love that!
Tracey: Interactive funerals!
James: It's a ‘simil’ funeral. It's being broadcast on the station and then people can call in with their tributes. Oh, that's good.
Hannah: Anything is possible.
James: That is good. Okay, we've got it. Thank you for helping me sort that out.
Hannah: We've done it.
James: Well, thanks so much to our guests, Dr Hannah Gould and Tracey Spicer.
You've been listening to Season 6 of Life's Booming, Dying Well, brought to you by Australian Seniors. Please leave a review or tell someone about it. If you want more, head to seniors.com.au/podcast. May your life be booming. I'm James Valentine.
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