Thanks, Kitty. In the end we all die, so there is no winning or losing. Which may sound fatalistic, but I was interested in Ian Gawler’s comments about Western society being very ‘death-denying’. I kind of like to think that throughout my life, I am both living and dying all the time …

Hi Sally

I wholeheartedly agree that we are death denying. Prior to my mums dying I watched the movie Ten Canoes. It was the scene in which he was dying and got up to do his death dance that guided me in the last few days of her life. That scene humanises the process of dying and gives dignity to the end of life which we rarely see in western culture. When we see dying in our culture it is all about those who are “left behind”. It is all too sad and miserable. There is no sense of it being profound and necessary.

I am not sure about living and dying at the same time … I’ll have to think about it. I equate dying to birthing in many ways. It is a physical, mental, social and spiritual experience that only you can go through. Others can keep you company but they cannot do it for you. I think we deny people the opportunity to die well in our culture, the same as birthing well. We are so afraid of pain and suffering that we try to cut it short, hide it, ignore it or deny it.

hmm … I guess I must go and do some work … grin …

xK

I must check out Ten Canoes – sounds intriguing.
I take a strange sort of comfort from the idea that from the moment we are born, we are walking towards death. I agree about the link between dying and birthing – I think there are all sorts of spiritual resonances to childbirth. I’m planning to write a book about it in fact!
It struck me today that in many other cultures, a book like Positive that talks about finding life in the midst of cancer would be redundant, because it is understood that people grow, learn, shift through their encounters with suffering and death.