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Death days

By Eleanor Hogan - posted Friday, 18 January 2008


Colonial types used to mourn spectacularly openly - all that “good death” and lengthy narration of the circumstances and elaborate processions bespeaks a much healthier sense of mourning. Personally, I blame the wars for rendering death too awful to speak of, but not as much as I blame the baby-boomers, for refusing to look at anything ghastly (including Howardian bastardry).

S, a friend of mine from Laos, expressed similar thoughts to me about the strangeness of the Australian way of grieving. Several years ago, a cousin of his was killed in a car accident. They'd been brought up together as part of an extended family structure, a bit like blackfella-way maybe, in which cousins can be as close as brothers. S recalled his surprise when he realised that in Australian culture, life was meant to go on as normal once the funeral was over. In his culture, a year of rituals followed anyone's passing, and even after that, there were further remembrances. He felt that the Australian way was unnaturally brief and blunt, and that people hadn't understood the significance of a cousin dying: Aries' quarantine.

But I also found that a strange confederacy of people can appear when a sibling dies. Some people who were otherwise peripheral in your life - extras, supporting actors - can suddenly appear and say insightful things that hit the mark in a way that other, well-meant words don't.

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A rather brusque and forbidding unit manager at work visited my office one day and told me how her brother had died from cancer several years ago at the age of 44, and of how even now, at Christmas time and around his birthday, she found herself wandering through department stores, wondering what she should buy him.

Another rather forbidding femocrat and manager from my office told me that although her brother had died some years ago, she'd never stopped thinking about him, and his death left a lingering stain on their family life.

One of our media officers told me how her 40-year-old brother had committed suicide all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, 18 months before. We'd talked about many things in our short work friendship, but she'd never told me that before.

“Were you close?” others asked. I always found this a strange question; I didn't know how to answer it. I suppose the point in asking was to commiserate if you say that you were close to the one that's died. But its flipside is disturbing: is the death not to matter, to be of less consequence, if you say you weren't close? (And can we please change the subject now and move onto something else?) And what can you say about someone who'd been living at a geographical distance for a number of years, who was poor at communicating by phone or email, but to whom you felt close by virtue of shared experiences?

I have no doubt that there's a taboo around death and grieving in Australian culture maybe over and above that which exists in other Anglo-Saxon cultures. I would have said this before I experienced it myself. For me, added to this was the improbability of a young person's, a sibling's, death and what it might mean for my family. Before my brother died, my only close-at-hand experiences of death were “natural”, expected ones, such as grandparents, great-uncles.

One of the assumptions about a sibling's death is that it cannot be important to you as a parent's, a partner's or a child's death. On the Holmes-Rahe Survey of Recent Experiences (Social Readjustment Rating Scale: SRRS), which measures life events in “life change units” (LCUs), the death of a spouse scores 100 LCUs whereas death of a close family member scores only 63 LCUs (it's very precise).

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There's a footnote to the “death of a spouse”, suggesting that the death of a child may be rated as high as or maybe a little higher than this death. I can't comment on the death of a spouse or a child. But my experience of a sibling as opposed to a parent dying was that it was far worse, for the reasons that people usually state in relation to a child's death: a younger sibling's death is generally unexpected, out of the natural cycle of things. It brings home your own mortality, the mortality of your own generation. It taints all your childhood memories, like spilt ink on blotting paper. Think back to the earlier, happier days, and you can't, without thinking of the one who's gone.

What kind of person was I meant to be as a result of my experiences? I had no idea. I found grieving exhausting, for a whole range of reasons. I now think there's no proper way to grieve. In the main, you want to talk and to be listened to (and gay men and people who'd had similar experiences proved the best audiences for me). It's all the old clichéd stuff; you want people to validate your reality, not pretend it didn't happen.

And if some of the latest research into trauma is correct, talking and writing about bad experiences helps you to take control over your own narrative, to diffuse tension and to take the sting out of the bad, the inexplicable and the inhospitable.

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First published in The View from Elsewhere on April 11, 2007.



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About the Author

Eleanor Hogan is a freelance writer living in Alice Springs with a background in Indigenous policy and research.

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