Pentre Ifan Domen is a Neolithic stone sculpture created about 5,500 years ago. Located in western Wales, it is one of some 80,000 dolmens, or burial chambers, located throughout the world — impressive evidence of mankind’s concerns about death and the hereafter from earliest times.

Dylan was oh so right back in 1964 when he wrote “Times they are a changin.” At warp speed it seemed then and, if anything, continuing to speed up. I don’t think it has ever slowed down. I don’t believe there is a single aspect of our lives that hasn’t changed since our childhoods. Well… maybe one.

It has to do with what we deem right and proper to discuss openly in our normal daily exchanges with neighbors and friends, loved ones and relations. When I was coming up, the three big discussion taboos were sex, religion and politics. And now? Except for a little sensitivity among our friends about politics, those subjects are mostly acceptable if the occasion warrants.

Pull Quote

How interesting that the internet provides the pathway to a Death Café discussion group — just as social media sites provide pathways to friendship these days.

But there is a fourth subject that has remained pretty much off limits. Death. It’s a topic that goes hand-in-hand with religion, but even as our attitudes, understandings and tolerances have changed about religious preferences, we still remain silent about our inevitable ending. Some of us have strong feelings about the ways in which animals are killed and we are often vociferous about that. But of our own deaths… not so much.

In fact, when I was a child, my parents did not even believe in children attending funerals. I’m not sure where that came from — I know that my mother attended not only the funeral of her grandfather, R.H. Espy but, also, his wake. She was six and long remembered that he was laid out for viewing in the parlor for family and friends came to pay their respects.

My first funerals

But when our neighbor Harry Wachsmuth died in 1943 (I was 7), I was sent down to the bay to play with my 5-year-old neighbor while the rest of the town went to Mr. Wachsmuth’s service. Perhaps, it was thought that we’d be disruptive — I’m not sure. As it turned out, that’s exactly what we were! It seemed like we had been “abandoned” for ages when we decided to cut across the field and have a peek in the church windows. We were barefooted and found ourselves stranded in a patch of sandburs (Ow! Ow! Ow!). And there was a bull in the field with us!

That’s when we started screaming and before you knew it my mom was running up the street in her high-heeled, open-toed-spectator-pumps to the rescue. I’ll never forget her disgust as she scooped us up and tossed (?) us over the barbed wire fence to safety. “What is the matter with you girls! Surely you know the difference between a cow and a bull!”

The next funeral I remember was held in Berkeley, California in remembrance of photojournalist Dorthea Lange. It was 1968 and I was 22 years old. I remember that I sat with Imogene Cunningham and “followed her lead” in funeral protocols. It was the first funeral I’d ever attended and I’ll never forget how ill at ease I felt.

And thereafter?

Now, all these years later, I attend funeral services of one kind or another much more frequently than I would wish. At my time of life, many of my friends and loved ones are making their final departures from this life. But still, we don’t often talk outside of the funeral setting about death. This came as an almost visceral awareness recently when two of my friends, elderly but in the best of health, chose to commit a double suicide. Their friends and loved ones, caught unaware, were devastated.

After the fact, I learned that this was something they had been considering for as many as 10 years. They had been researching and exploring and discussing the subject of death, mainly at Death Cafes. I had never heard the term before and found (by Googling, of course!) that “A Death Cafe is a group directed discussion of death with no agenda, objectives or themes. It is a discussion group rather than a grief support or counseling session.” The first Death Café was organized in England in 2011 and has since spread to 90 countries worldwide.

So, perhaps I need to revise the premise of this column. Death is being discussed these days — just not in a way that we would consider “normal conversation.” And how interesting that the internet provides the pathway to a Death Café discussion group — just as social media sites provide pathways to friendship these days. My mind boggles. As Shakespeare so famously wrote all those years ago: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in our philosophy.”