By Alexandra Berrocal
I have always had an interest in end-of-life related things. A close friend of mine died when I was seventeen years old. She was no ordinary friend. I had been planning on moving in with her. So, having said that, I don’t know when my interest in end-of-life related things began. It could have begun with that thick book in my grandma’s house that was called How We Die, by Sherwin B. Nuland.
I also tend not to get overly upset when people around me die. I got upset when my friend died, but when other people around me have died, I haven’t been as upset. My therapist says this is because of my autism, and that a lot of people with autism are this way. That being said, I am not sure I am any better with mortality than anyone else, in terms of knowing what to say to a dying person and things like that. To be exact, my therapist said I am friendly with death. I feel this is pretty apt.
Final Conversations: Helping The Living And The Dying Talk To Each Other, published in 2007, was written by Maureen P. Keeley and Julie M. Yingling. Keeley is an associate professor at Texas State University and has taught college students for 20 years. Yingling is a retired professor emerita at Cal Poly Humboldt. During her 25 years as a professor, she specialized in communication.
Final Conversations is a book about how to communicate with people who are on their deathbed. It especially focuses on final conversations as something that can be positive both for the dying and for the people they leave behind. It doesn’t sugarcoat the difficult aspects, but it also gives helpful suggestions on why you should still try to communicate with a dying parent even if your relationship in life wasn’t that great.
What I took away from the book is that life is precious and that you should nurture your close relationships while you can. There was a big emphasis on family in this book, which I can relate to because I’ve had rough periods with my family, as much as I love them.
Spouses were also heavily featured, because most people in our society marry. Interestingly enough, a lot of spouses want their surviving spouse to remarry — this is something I didn’t expect. You don’t see this in other relationships. But then again, other relationships can’t be replaced. On the other hand, you can replace a spouse to a degree. You can’t replace the person, but you can replace the role. I am not sure if I see myself with a spouse in the future, but you never know.
The perspectives of children whose relatives have passed were also featured in this book. That was refreshing. Their viewpoints were treated with respect, too, instead of condescension. I feel that children are often not treated with respect in our culture. When a kid says something, they are not taken seriously. Adults make decisions for them, often without their input, which can be justified. However, in this book, children are given a remarkable amount of airtime, comparable to adults.
I relate to this book. My biological father died roughly around the end of 2020. One of the saddest things about his death, from my point of view, was that he couldn’t go to the beach in his final days because of COVID-19 restrictions in his country. My dad is from Colombia. I am not against COVID-19 restrictions, however it did make my dad’s death sadder.
I did get to have a final conversation with my dad, though. Before the COVID-19 pandemic started, he came to this country to visit my mom. I have never had the best relationship with my dad, so it was a difficult time. However, one time we went out to one of my favorite restaurants. I have bipolar disorder and, unfortunately, I was depressed that day. When my mom told my dad how I was feeling, he started crying. She told me later that he wished he could have been the sort of father I needed at that moment.
Some time passed. That evening, he was standing in the kitchen. I just sort of looked at him, and said, “I don’t think I’ve been a very good daughter.”
He said, “No, you’re nice.”
We hugged, and that was my final conversation with my Dad. So, when we did fly to Colombia to say our official goodbyes, I wasn’t too bent out of shape when my mom got the text that my dad had died the moment our plane hit the ground. My mom was destroyed, but I had already said my goodbye. So, for me, I was okay. I still have no regrets. It’s these sorts of conversations that Keeley and Yingling promote in Final Conversations, and I agree with them. I think everyone deserves that sort of closure.