Writing About Death and Grieving

This opinion piece in The New York Times  today is powerful. It’s deeply emotional and obviously heartfelt, and it was written by a doctor. (Surprise: doctors can be emotional!)

It reminds me of a very different piece of writing by another doctor who was also thinking about how we speak of death. That doctor was the poet William Carlos Williams, who wrote “Tract.” (Surprise, surprise: doctors can be poets!)

Despite very different forms and subjects, they really do have a lot in common. Both are lectures that are basically second-person narrations telling the reader how to behave. The opinion article is addressed to other doctors, explaining how to inform a mother that her child has died. (“You use the mother’s name and you use her child’s name. You may not adjust this part in any way.”) The poet is telling his neighbors how to conduct a funeral. (“No wreaths, please—/especially no hot house flowers./Some common memento is better/”)

But you don’t have to be a doctor to get something out of the first, and you don’t need to be arranging a funeral to be drawn to the second. The larger subject for these two writers is our attitude toward death and grieving. If I had to boil down their messages to one sentence, each of them is saying something like this: Pay attention, people, and show a little humility!

The other thing they have in common is that tone of moral outrage. The reason they’re delivering these lectures in the first place is that they have each witnessed plenty of bad behavior. What makes their writing so effective is that they’re filled with detailed examples that bring their messages to life for all of us.

The wrong ways doctors talk to mothers and neighbors memorialize dead people have so exasperated these writers that they have no choice but to teach us the right way. Just beneath the surface we can hear them muttering, “My God, people, what are you thinking?!”