DeathCare BC
At our most recent community meeting, Emily Bootle from DeathCareBC.ca was our guest speaker. She generously allowed us to record her talk – it has been sent by email to those on the Way To Go list. If you’d like to hear it and are not on this list, email quadrawaytogo@gmail.com and ask for a copy.
What follows is an excerpt from a blog post by Emily:
This is my ninth year in the deathcare industry, after starting out as a fresh-faced 25-year-old in 2016.
In those years I have answered the call many hundreds (thousands?!) of times, coming from people in the midst of the worst times of their lives. I have had the immense responsibility of doing my best to help these folks make decisions, plans, and compromises. Within the fog of their bereavement and my professional obligations, we have come together to do the best we can given the circumstances.
In 2019 I created DeathCare BC as a way to start getting information about the deathcare industry into the general public. Since then I have had the privilege of speaking at conferences, workplace lunch and learns, webinars, PROBUS meetings, book clubs, and niche events.
The goal has always been, and continues to be, to do absolutely everything in my power with the information I have to prepare my community for the inevitable.
To quote myself: “Look, none of us can know the circumstances of our death truly. We don’t get to know whether we will be caught in an avalanche, in our beds, surrounded by friends and family, unexpectedly in any manner of places. But you know what we can know? Exactly what will happen two hours, two days, and two weeks later, logistically speaking… The bureaucracy and logistics are knowable.” – Myself, today (and for a long while now).
Humans are prediction machines. We have our big beautiful brains that spend a lot of their energy anticipating, calculating, and measuring for outcomes. Because of this we can also be fearful-ball-of-anxiety machines. Our fear of the unknown keeps us up at night and it can quickly become overwhelming.
I believe this fear of the unknown is what makes us so reluctant to have these conversations with death. It opens up all manner of questions that we are just not equipped or even able to answer. I have a tremendous amount of compassion for the reasons people avoid it.
That being said, what about all these know-able things?
What if we could say, “well I don’t know how I might die, but I sure do know that I have a neat little green burial and a bouquet of seasonal flowers bought and paid for, so that’s where this body of mine will end up”.
A lot of what we worry about is how the people we love will manage after we are gone. We are worried about whether they will be swallowed up in their grief, or if there are conversations we haven’t had the chance to have yet, or if we are going to miss out on some really incredible things. One of the hard parts is knowing that we won’t be there to comfort or guide them in their grief.
The next best thing for the first two hours, two days, and two weeks, is to have an excellent plan in place.