As we accompany Lincoln Brown in his journey through the Shadow of Death, his daughter-in-law shares the wisdom gained from the experience of Standing The Watch for her much loved Elder. A vivid sense of humour is evident in the liberally scattered and light-hearted ancedotes. This is surely a tribute to a tradition that is sadly lacking in much of our modern day society.
The author is as honest in her assessment of the professionals in modern society as she is fiercely tender in her regards toward her much loved Poppa, her husband David Brown, and the supportive online friends who stuck with both her and her husband through this troublesome and exhausting time.
I was able to look back upon sitting with my own elder and sharing with her this part of her journey. I was blessed to know that she left with no remorse, or regret.
"By attending death with the same seriousness as birth we learn how to die. We gather around to welcome new life, yet disappear when a loved-one signals it's time to die. This is why you must make space in your schedule for writing Standing The Watch", said one of the women in her support system. What a gift we have received, and what a lesson we can take from the experience of Rebecca Brown and her husband.
Standing The Watch is a compelling endorsement for home death, as well as a lesson in the social, financial and psychological impact of death, providing a list of books that deal with many of life's more difficult issues including grief. A short, but fascinating eulogy pays tribute to the life of this most endearing man who's epitaph reads, HERE LIES A GOOD MAN.
The author's initial experience with death was of a double absence: she not only lost her father, but was prevented from seeing him or even speaking about her feelings to her family. If this level of silencing is somewhat unusual, bear in mind that the American phobia of death has motivated a clinical-medical bureaucracy designed to make this most final of departures clean and pretty. (In Southern California we even have Forest Lawn, a kind of Disneyland of Death, where the fast food paradigm has been applied to the managing of passed-on loved ones.) What it does instead is hold the dying at a distance while traumatizing those who survive.
Much of this book was written during the author's caretaking of her father-in-law as he lay ill, sometimes comfortable and sometimes in pain. It is not a book to entertain or philosophize, but to reveal what such an experience can be like: the details to tend, the feelings that surface, the constant struggles against laws written to protect people from getting close to death's unpleasantness. For the author, "standing the watch" was a way to deepen her connections with her patient as well as with her husband and family members. It also allowed her to deal with the unfinished pain around her previous inability to properly mourn her father.
Some among the existential philosophers have insisted that we all die alone. That is often true given the legal and medical and psychological isolation of the dying in our death-fearing culture. But what's so often taken as a normal state of the end of an existence need not be. The man tended by a woman who started life as a war orphan and the son who married her died at home in the presence of loving family members who took the time to see him off.
For him this was a great gift, and for them a reminder to seize the time while refusing to let our pioneer cult of individuality keep us from exploring those healthy interdependencies that make life worth valuing enough to end on a note of dignity.