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My grandparents wanted to die at home.
My grandmother took honour in the fact that my grandfather died at home. When my grandmother’s time had come, I also took pride in being next to her on her deathbed at home.
I even laid next to my her in her last days, just holding and talking to her.
People get uncomfortable when I tell this story, but this is definitely not how I experienced it.
Due to the fact that they were home in the same bed that they were sleeping in ever since I can remember-
because I could accompany them and I was part of the process I experienced it as a peaceful event. Painful, and nevertheless serene .

The Wailers; ‘an occupation of loss’ that is also a lost occupation (in our western society), as I never heard anyone lamenting in a funerals I attended. If the deceased was young, there were some soft tears somewhere in the back of the funeral home. Tayrn Simons was researching the primal universal sounds of mourning lamenting for seven years. His historical, ethnographical and cultural research resulted in a performance. Where musician and singers from Armenia till Cambodia were wailing, singing and crying in an underground cavern in London. You can read more in:

The Gauardian

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/apr/18/taryn-simon-occupation-loss-review-islington-green-london-underground-mourners-grief

NRC

https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2018/04/23/duister-theater-vol-huilende-professionele-rouwers-a1600480

There are small incidents that can change a life. They reveal unannounced, seem trivial at first and yet cause a domino effect. In 2014 I was watching a Tedtalk by, Matthew O’Reilly, a US paramedic. He wasn’t the most adequate speaker I have seen on Ted. He wasn’t the most famous or prestigious either and yet when I finished watching this talk; my life took a different turn.

His idea was worth spreading; according to his experience as a paramedic in the final moments of their lives people are having one of this three concerns:

01. Regrets: I should have spent more time with my grandchildren.

02. Being remembered: will I be remembered? Will you remember me?

03. Legacy: How will I be remembered? What have I contributed to this world?

It struck me like lightning; perhaps instead of waiting for the last 3 minutes of one’s life, a person can use the last 30 years of his/her life. We can use the extra 30-40 years that our great-great parents did not have,  to understand, to change and make sense of our lives. I decided to do it with films.

 

 

 

 

It’s so easy to forget what is dear to me amidst the daily routines of rushing and running.  Watching Candy Chang’s  ‘Ted talk’ in 2012 made me think for the first time, really thinking about what is it that I want to do before I die.

Candy Chang turned a deserted house in New Orleans into a giant chalkboard, where passersby can write what they want to do before they die.

‘Before I die wall’ became a worldwide project ‘over 2,000 walls have been created in over 70 countries and over 35 languages’, including three in the Netherlands Eindhoven, Rotterdam and Amsterdam.

 

 

 

Watching ‘Island’, a film by Steven Eastwood, at the Rotterdam Film Festival left me speechless. And with many tears, as I was crying even when the film finished and during the whole Q&A.

What captired me the most is watching the process of dying, that mostly take about a year, in 90 minutes. It helped me revisit the journey I took with some of beloved one and process it with a distance. But oh so close.

Death is not a subejct we use to talk about or look at, not so closly as Eastwood takes us. Or as in the words of the newspaper, Independent* :

“Most of us have very little knowledge of the process of life ending, physically and emotionally, until it comes suddenly into our own experience. The fact that we will die is as certain as the fact that we are born, and yet we repress this eventuality, in Western culture at least. Death and dying remains partitioned, not widely shared, shown or talked about.

And because of this, death is one of the least accessible and malleable subjects for art and non-fiction film. It is as though the image of dying is not something we should see, or even want to see. As a consequence, there is very little filmmaking done with the consent and collaboration of the dying person and there are few moving images of the very end of life.”

 

*http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/island-steven-eastwood-bfi-london-film-festival-a7979466.html

This week I read in the New York Times about a new application for smartphones named “WeCroack”. This app reminds its user five times a day that he/she are going to die.
The concept derives from the Bhutanese folklore saying that to be happy, one ought to contemplate death five times a day.