Why do some people have a problem with death? I don’t mean the concept of it, though admittedly that may be where the problem lay. No, I’m taking about the simple concept of expressing to someone that a person has died.

I may have to scream if I hear again, “he/she passed on” or sometimes this is shortened to “he/she passed.” Passed what? Wind? A note? Or merely passed by? I don’t get it. Why are we so leery of stating that someone is dead?

This is not a metaphysical question. I’m not questioning the concept of heaven and/or hell. Faith is not a part of my complaint here. It’s just that dead is dead. A person’s spirit lives on (whether we like it or not), but that body is dead, dead, dead.

After my mother died, I was speaking to a friend form high school days and she asked about mum, “She’s dead,” I answered. “Oh, Anon, how could you just say that?” friend asked. “’Cause she is. Did you want me to say the she ‘passed on’?” “Well, it’s just that ‘dead’ is so final, so cold.” “I’m sorry, I’m not getting this. Are you saying that my mum isn’t dead?” “No, it’s just so, I don’t know, final.”

‘So final,’ yes death is that: final. I cleaned up her house and its stench of death. I paid her bills and closed her accounts. Finally, I followed my mother’s wishes and had her cremated and had her ashes scattered in the Pacific. A friend, who’s a helicopter pilot, did the scattering for me. He said that in the trade it’s called, “bake and shake.”

So, am I cold? Perhaps I am. I did cry when she died, but not because I missed her. I cried because we had such a crap relationship. She never liked me and constantly told me so. I was always a disappointment to her. She never tired of telling me that I ruined her life. She left me a letter saying that I was the “pollution” of her life, amongst other things.

It’s not just about my mother that I express these feelings about death. But death is not in any way ‘passing’, it’s not ‘passing on’, it’s not ‘passing away’: it’s death. Of course it’s always harder for those left behind. It’s worse when the relationship was crap, but even when happy memories predominate, the yawning chasm that death creates can be inconsolable too.

So, dead is dead and when I’m dead I promise that I will haunt anyone who has the nerve to say that I ‘passed’ anything.

Please give what you can to Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders).

And, of course

(hewa ni hataraki: work for peace)

*Meditation xvii

Who casts not up his Eye to the Sunne when it rises?
but who takes off his Eye from a Comet when that breakes out?
Who bends not his eare to any bell, which upon any occasion rings?
but who can remove it from that bell, which is passing a peece of himselfe out of this world?
No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine;
if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me,
because I am involved in Mankinde;
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
-John Donne