the grief on our backs

mortality and memory

“Do you know when you’re going to die?”

I’m building a Lego house, trying to find the right pieces in the bin. My five year old nephew is sitting on the other side of the flat Lego sheet. He’s wearing a blue hoodie, the hood pulled up over his very red hair. This hoodie is something one of his Doaktown family members got him; it says “Miramichi River Life,” and even though I, his beloved auntie Alison, live in the Miramichi, I have never actually purchased any of the Miramichi-branded things from the many companies.

Very slowly, I put down my handful of bricks, and look at him. “Well,” I say. “Would you be sad if I died?”

He sucks in a breath. “If you died, I would…I would fall right over.”

I smile at him. It’s clearly the most dramatic thing he could think of, trying to express his reaction to something he’s not totally grasped yet. I explain to him that, no, I don’t know when I’m going to die, but it’s probably not going to happen any time soon. The odds are good I’ll be around to play Lego long after he stops wanting to play with me.

My nephew is asking this because of a conversation we had just before this: talking about his grandfather’s new-to-him four wheeler. My partner’s grandfather died last March, and the four-wheeler belonged to him. Now it belongs to my father-in-law, his youngest son. When my father-in-law tells my nephew about the four wheeler, we verify that it belonged to Great-Grampy. “Great-Grampy died,” my nephew said, looking at us sombrely. Yes, he did die, but Great-Grampy was very old and had a good life.

Five minutes later, death is still clearly on my nephew’s mind. He wasn’t quite five when his great-grandfather died and not were they particularly close - his great-grandfather was two weeks shy of his ninety-sixth birthday. Their lives barely overlapped, and my nephew will almost certainly forget Great-Grampy in the years to come.

This isn’t his first brush with death, either. Other great-grandparents on the other side of his family have died too, when he was even younger. But this one was the first one where he had an idea of what was going on, or at least enough to ask questions about it. He was also very well-behaved the entire day, which was impressive when you think about how we made him go to church twice and toys were in short supply at Great-Grampy’s house.

In that moment where he says Great-Grampy died, almost confirming that it happened, I think about my first brush with death that I was old enough to have some grasp on. I was a little older than my nephew, almost six, when my paternal grandparents died, two days apart, in August. It was also not my first brush: my uncle and godfather died when I was just shy of six months old. I knew this from very early on.

I base my prediction of my nephew’s memories of his great-grandfather on my grandparents’ deaths. They’re hazy to me, just a little out of reach. I remember pieces of them, flashes of memory. What I do know as an adult is a composite of these and my father’s stories. We also didn’t go to the funeral; my dad and his siblings decided that all of their kids, most of whom were very young, weren’t going to attend. My maternal grandparents came to stay with us, which was glorious and also blots our my memories. My parents went to Cape Breton. They came home with presents and furniture. The presents were small things from my grandparents’ belongings. A necklace. A bracelet. A barrette. My nana’s favourite pen, a silly witch.

The furniture included the table which still stands on my parents’ kitchen.

Something I often leave out of my job talks or my panel discussions or my canned answers about being a hospital librarian is how much death is involved. No, I don’t work directly with patients. And I get to learn a lot of cool things every day, as I do literature searches. I also deal with a lot of questions and literature about all of the ways you can die.

There are a lot of them.

We talked about death in my house growing up. Perhaps more than most? It was a little bit unusual to only have one set of grandparents living when I was that young. We talked about it in developmentally appropriate ways, and later, my parents started to make their wishes known, spurred by my maternal grandfather’s sudden death when I was fourteen. He left no wishes, because he said, “I’ll be dead anyway.” This was stressful to everyone. When I turned twenty-one, my parents revised their will and named me executor, as well as the guardian of my youngest sibling, if they died while my sibling was still a minor. My mother made me come to her bank to sign paperwork to have me be a designate for their safety deposit box, so I don’t have to get a subpoena when they die. I have copies of their wills on my files, at their request.

These are all of the practical, checklist things you can do with death. We talk about it extensively now. We rarely talk about the messier aspects of death, however, and this is where my professional life dwells instead. A large chunk of my daily work involves combing through the published research to answer questions clinicians have about diseases, drugs, treatments, interventions, etc. And a lot of these questions brush up against death. Some are very clear-cut, some are not, but either way -

You don’t feel great when you spend your day looking for articles on suicide in institutional settings, for example. You don’t feel great when you’re looking up an experimental treatment for what is a terminal condition. And you become less and less interested in pursuing these kinds of life-prolonging treatments yourself, should it come to that: why would I want to experience any of the adverse effects I read about, day in and day out?

Because I’m a librarian, because I went to library school and not nursing school or medical school or pharmacy school or any of the other allied health professional schools, I didn’t get a whole lot of education on what to do when your work is bleak. There were no discussions about self-care or debriefing. Largely, this is something I’ve had to sort out on my own. I love the puzzle of my job and the people I work with and help, but there are days when I look at the stack of horrors on my desk and try to pick the least bad one.

My nephew forgets his question almost as soon as I answer it. We return to playing Lego, picking the best bricks to build out house. He is delighted to be at his grandparents all by himself, with his uncle and aunt too. The recipient of our undivided attention. We paint and read and drive cars around, he begs to play video games with me. His mother is a nurse, and so we will talk about death again, probably more than most. And he will come to recognize the signs of a day gone wrong, a patient who didn’t make it, the heaviness of healthcare. As a child of the pandemic, he knows about grief far more than I ever did at 5, even though he might not characterize it that way. He knows about a lost world. He knows about all of the things that vanished instantly, and the separation of family.

While his question unsettles me for a blink of a moment, I relax into explaining why I’m probably going to be around for a while. Death is still an abstract concept to him. And for that, I am thankful.