I, Too, Will Die
By Kevin Quiles | July 16, 2019
Tell anyone that the average life expectancy in the US is around 29,200 days and you’ll get a reaction. The reason is simple: the number, which rounds out to eighty-years of age, is small enough to jolt the intellectual illusion of tenacious continuity brought about by the word longevity. Reactions to these sorts of mind games are predictable in our culture. But what about medical and mental healthcare professionals? Are they as easily uneased? In this brief article, I’ll demonstrate how death denial permeates the healthcare and mental health industry and, thus, creates a similar reaction, only well disguised for anyone to see.
Perhaps I should tell you a little about myself to help you make sense why I am taking a friendly jab at the trained caregiver. I fell in love with the field of hospice many years ago and as a result spent fifteen years as chaplain to this diverse population. These years proved invaluable to me. I watched people from all walks of life and from various spiritual and religious backgrounds directly or indirectly dance with a most feared path. And as you can imagine, it has since influenced how I see the world. I saw death five sometimes six or seven days a week; I smelled death, I touched death, and in a way, I even tasted death. This laboratory of sorts prompted my own personal investigations on death, which wasn’t always pretty or neatly packaged. Certainly humbling! And it did one more thing. Such exposure shed light into the healthcare field as a whole.
But before I share my observations there is one more group of professionals I assessed. After my years as hospice chaplain, I moved into the field of counseling. I landed on a new art of caring that provided yet another set of interesting observations. Now over seven years in the field, I have learned that counselors and psychologists are similar to my medical colleagues and friends. Like doctors and nurses, they make great efforts to shift through issues, assess problems, and report conditions in order to help the patient resume some successful function in everyday life.
Both fields demonstrate enormous courage to help people face very difficult circumstances and, in many instances succeed in providing a most useful outcome. Both have great hearts to support men and women in overcoming struggles so that they can check off one more wish written on their bucket list. Although we as a nation spend more money in the name of health with small reported strides of increased life expectancy, say, in the last fifty years and a less than satisfying mental version of happiness that lasts, the efforts of both fields are to be commended.
One thing, though, is missing. While boasting of great advancement, at least on TV, many within both camps seem unaware how solution-oriented models provide a mental escape from the universal truth of death. Raw existentialism says that death will come to all and in spite of ALL we do to try to stop it. Do all that you can to alter unwanted conditions. There will still come an end. But healthcare and mental health professionals are slow to arrive at this sobering truth. To do so they must intentionally convert it into more personal terms: “I, too, will die.” However, this demands that they relinquish not solution-oriented models per se but the façade of omnipotence to fix. Sophisticated minds, be it in white coats or in work attire behind a desk, have found a way to prevent personal death awareness from seeping into consciousness while helping patients. Neglecting their own application of impermanence, the message now reads: “They die; we don’t.”
Who is to blame? I am convinced that death anxiety is not adequately addressed in academia. My own experience supports this conclusion. My counseling training provided little existential movement. And with more online training added at rapid speed, it is difficult to see things changing. My training had more to do with familiarizing myself with traditional systems that define a counselor and that set the profession apart from other fields. Coupled with learning mostly about the methods “that work,” I saw no opportunity for me as a professional-to-be to explore death and to learn how to utilize it while helping others drawing closer to their own.
This was less the case in my ministerial studies, which go back to my true beginnings as a professional helper. I remember one day in particular when the professor took the class to a funeral home and gave us a behind the scene look at the funeral industry. I saw a corpse preparing to enter the retort to produce what we call cremation, the various types of coffins and urns, and the private rooms designated for preparing the body. At the end, I felt a strange sense of normalcy about what I saw, which eventually paved the way for a more flexible attitude about human development. A much-needed honest state of mind when preparing to serve the sick and dying.
While I’ve never trained to be a nurse or doctor, I’ve worked with many of them. I’ve even trained a few in existential thought. And I’ve done the same with some counselors. Unlike the ministerial mindset of embrace I just described above, I saw (and still do see) more of a compartmentalization or desensitization, which seemed to serve as a precursor to the ‘omnipotent’ solution mentality. The vulnerable feeling of “I, too, will die” had no place for professional guidance. Instead, it was all about hierarchy: the ‘strong and healthy’ helping those out there who are needy, sick, and dying.
Don’t get me wrong. While solution-oriented thinking is overpriced – it doesn’t always work and if it does it often does so temporarily – it isn’t the problem. We often need to go from point A to point B. As a counselor, I work with clients where the need to manipulate and heal is perfectly in order. What I do confront is getting the unconscious use of solution-oriented models to hide behind like an adolescent who believes nothing can destroy him. Solutions to help within specific contexts and for a certain time is one thing. Solutions to ultimately distract the professional’s own death investigation is quite another.
When it comes to existential reflections or death awareness, the professional must admit his frailty. There are no two- or three-step models to extinguish the multi-faceted experiences that come with knowing one will die. The trained caregiver faces his fears slowly and carefully and without any ideal notion of ridding himself of them. In short, the professional must seek to change not the experiences that come with death investigation but the mindset in which he pursues them.
Ongoing internal “sit-ins” with one’s own awaiting mortality isn’t a call to abandon current models of health and well-being. Instead, death awareness— “I, too, will die”—is meant as an addition for the purpose of delivering a more honest message to clients and patients while administering care that is free from the supposed omnipotence presented in our how-to methods.
Reactions do occur when it comes to raising awareness around death, as research in Terror Management Theory (TMT) demonstrates. However, and as the authors of The Worm at the Core suggest, cultivating death awareness practice, as seen among Buddhist followers and in other groups, can also provide a type of intentionality that promotes more consistent universal compassion and a deep empathy for those we serve.
Kevin Quiles, MDiv, MA, LPC, served in hospice for fifteen years, as licensed professional counselor for over seven, and a few more in the military. The now 55 year-old has well over a decade of specialized training in the fields of pastoral care and counseling. He is the founder of Conversing with Death, a systematized counseling process that blends existential thought and mindfulness practice to cultivate death awareness. And he is the author of three books: Spiritual Care to Elderly and Dying Loved Ones, Conversing with Death, and Last Breath Awareness. Kevin has a private therapy practice in Atlanta, Georgia. For more information, go to BodyMindMetaphor.com.