Jennifer Horgan: Does our own death anxiety feed cruelty instead of kindness?

How unbearable for the family of the deceased.

Death is on my mind this week. Like many, I’m thinking of the continuing loss of life in Gaza. How so many humans have been betrayed by angry, warring men — Israel reacting to the horrendous October attack in the same way America reacted to 9/11 — with a desire to spread and amplify its terror, with little regard for death tolls or democracy.

Someone said to me recently that when soldiers die in the battlefield, they cry for their mothers. It’s true — there are many, many reports of it. I wonder if it’s for their actual mothers though. 

Possibly, they cry out for comfort in a more general sense — to return to a time when they were held and cared for, when their absolute vulnerability was last acknowledged and addressed

We need more of that acknowledgement in our world, throughout our lives, and in our dying. How does John Martyn’s song go? “May you never lay your head down, without a hand to hold. May you never make your bed out in the cold.” This is what it means to be human — to be vulnerable, and to be conscious of it.

Support, hope, and validation

Last week, I attended a wonderful conference in the garden oasis that is the Nano Nagle Centre in Cork City.

Attuned in Practice (formerly The Heart of Frontline Practice) aims to provide reflective and insightful space for practitioners. The conference was open to all frontline workers in healthcare, social care, and education. It was a space for people (read women) to gather with other practitioners as a community, reflecting on the values, mission, and purpose that drew them to their work. It offered time to reconnect, to help people stay motivated and well.

Three wonderful speakers explored topics as diverse as death, professional succession, early trauma, small kindnesses, and the healing power of the voice. The wisdom of the speakers found replication throughout the room. To my right sat a woman who had fostered five children and had recently fostered a two-year-old little boy. To my left was a woman who has worked for thirty years with young children in a therapeutic residential home in Clare. She spoke of the challenges and great satisfaction of her work, how she felt lucky to be a voice and an advocate for children in school and society. 

Our wonderful facilitator, Máire, helped us all to contribute. It was a day of support, hope, and validation for caregivers — much needed at a time when such work continues to be under-valued and under-resourced. One only needs to look at the headlines about teacher shortages this week to know this to be true.

At the core of this gathering of caregivers, was an underlying message about the importance of respecting the dignity and vulnerability of all humans, including ourselves. The title of the day was “Beginnings & Endings in Practice” and so we discussed the experience of humans from the cradle to the grave.

For all our political experts, all our ongoing debates, on air and on television, too often, we miss a fundamental truth in how we talk about one another and the world. Perhaps our loss of religion plays a part?

Well, here is a basic truth: without a good and fair start in life, a safe home, a quality education, nourishing food, and peaceful shelter — humans suffer, and that suffering has a ripple effect outwards. Even with fame, power and influence, we suffer. Indeed the unyielding spotlight of fame deprives us of basic dignity, threatening our intactness. I can think of little worse than being famous. Humans behave horrendously around it, and most horrendously when the famous person dies. Fame tricks us into thinking we know celebrities. We don’t. We know their holograms. Our grief at their passing is about us, not them, and too often, it is ghoulish.

How should we respond to death then? Well, at the conference, Dr Tim Dartington asked a question. When we say “I’m sorry,” to a family member who has lost someone after ten years of ill health, what do we mean? Are we saying sorry for the death, or for the ill health? Or are we saying sorry for the fact that we all die, that we are all dying, all the time?

He told us about the medical pause, a practice among medical staff to stand in respectful silence, when a patient dies. It is described online as offering closure to both the medical team, family, and the patient. “It is a means of transitioning and demarcating the brevity and importance of this moment… Silence allows individuals to personalise their practice while not imposing onto others.” The pause honours a person’s last rite of passage.

I wish celebrities were given some of this silence. I also wonder if our own death anxiety feeds our cruelty. If we focus on the vulnerability of other people, depict it as damage, as happening elsewhere, maybe we get to deny our own fragility for a bit?

 Maybe our zero tolerance to crime is part of this denial. Maybe this is why we so easily call people scumbags, before locking them up for as long as possible?

This week too we heard from Saoirse Brady of the Irish Penal Reform Trust. Speaking on The Katie Hannon Show she shared that an estimated 70% of prisoners suffer from addiction. Our prisons are bursting at the seams because we still believe they work as a deterrent to crime, despite all the evidence to the contrary. The root causes of crime require care and attention. We can’t do that work from a distance, from an ivory tower, a judge’s bench, from a place of denial.

We need more social supports for vulnerable people from birth to death, not more space in prison. And no, Simon Harris, I don’t mean one-off payments, a flutter of cash to appease voting parents. I mean actual services.

I was lucky in other ways too this week. I interviewed people in Kidscope, a paediatric-led clinic in Knocknaheeny, under the expert care of Dr Louise Gibson, a consultant paediatrician. Kidscope now has the research to prove the positive impact of their work, having tracked their families over the last four years. More care in the community, where that community is known and understood, works. Kidscope’s wish is for it to be replicated, and funded, across the country. It is currently run on human initiative, some funded administrative hours, and good will.

Once again, in this context, women are leading the way.

Yes, you’re probably noticing my man-weariness this week. I’m full of it. I’m bone-tired of it being women, far too often, doing this work. The only sadness I felt at the wonderful conference I attended last week was that there was only one man in attendance, excluding a male speaker. We are getting better at quotas for women in industry and in STEM. Where are the quotas for men in care roles?

Mothering in a physical sense is a purely female act, but mothering is not. Gloria Steinem reminds us that Mother’s Day, when it was introduced in 1870, was called Mothering Day – a reminder to “young and old, male or female, of the possibilities that lie within us as human beings.”