Let’s Talk about Death (Over Dinner): An Invitation
and Guide to Life’s Most Important Conversation. By Michael Hebb. Da Capo.
$26.
Sincere to the point of being simplistic,
well-meaning to the point of being naïve, Michael Hebb’s Let’s Talk about Death (Over Dinner) is an anecdote-packed attempt
to enliven (pun intended) the American avoidance of direct discussion of death
– one’s own and that of others. It is in part an advocacy book for Hebb’s own
businesses: he is the founder of an organization called Death Over Dinner and
of the New Age-y sounding “Convivium, a creative agency that specializes in the
ability to shift culture through the use of thoughtful food-and-discourse-based
gatherings.” Not surprisingly, Hebb is from Seattle, where descriptions of this
sort are taken very seriously indeed.
In the United States, however, Hebb
argues, we tend not to take death
seriously – or rather, we take it so
seriously that we practice avoidance of the topic. That means we speak of
people “passing” rather than dying or say they “went to heaven” or “exited this
life” – or any one of a variety of other euphemisms. So the first thing we need
to do is use the words “death” and “dying” so we can confront their inevitability.
So far, so good. But this is difficult for
Americans and many other Westerners because, as one of the many counselors and
educators quoted by Hebb states, “Western medicine tends to think it can beat
death.” Really? Yes, says Hebb, and this means “it’s as if we’re heroes in an
action film, squaring off with an evil foe, and everyone knows the good guy
wins in the end. …If it’s us versus death, we will come out victorious.”
To say this is an oversimplification is to
understate. On one level, it rings true, as do many of Hebb’s comments. But on
another, it ignores deep-seated cultural imperatives and foundations that
cannot simply be swept away with a nice dinner. The counselor whom Hebb quotes
grew up in Hong Kong, and Asian cultures have multi-thousand-year histories of
ancestor worship, respect for elders, family structures geared to protect the
elderly and usher them gently out of life, and much more. Although some of
those cultural elements have become a bit faded recently, the point is that they
are deep-seated and rooted in hundreds of generations of practice. Contrasting
them with American culture, and speaking as if action movies are somehow the
cultural imperative for American medicine, is barely to skim the surface of the
difficulties underlying “the American way of death” – to uote the title of
Jessica Mitford’s famous 1963 study of funeral-industry abuses.
Hebb never mentions Mitford, but he does
briefly discuss Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whose insights into death and dying are
now classic. In fact, Hebb briefly discusses a great many death-related things:
Let’s Talk about Death (Over Dinner)
jumps around quite a bit, mentioning planning for our own death, how we are
affected when people we know die, how our own death may affect others, how
different cultures handle death, and much more. There are numerous topics to
which he gives short shrift, bringing them up and then dropping them just as
they become intriguing. One is “death shaming,” of which Hebb writes, “None of
us can say until we get there how we will feel as we stare down our own death,
and there are no ‘shoulds.’ …Shame drips into every part of our lives, and
death has some of the richest waters for it to dissolve [in].” But there is
little more than this on the topic; indeed, there is little enough on any topic
here (or subtopic, given that death is the overall subject). Hebb moves quickly
from methods of giving comfort to examples of religious and nonreligious thoughts of and responses to death; he
discusses the death-with-dignity movement and what a “good death” looks like to
various people; he even attempts, far too briefly, to explain reactions when someone commits suicide (not within a death-with-dignity
setting). Let’s Talk about Death (Over
Dinner) is weakest when the topics are most intense: Hebb’s few pages on
the death of a child cannot help being heart-wrenching for any parent, but they
are far too surface-level to offer structure, guidance or any sort of closure.
What is valuable in Let’s Talk about Death (Over Dinner) is simply its basic suggestion
that death is as good a dinner topic as anything else – that people can and
should (yes, a “should”) get together, on their own if not through one of
Hebb’s businesses, to talk about their feelings regarding death, their
experiences of it, their reactions to others’ deaths, and their anticipation of
their own. And then – well, what? Hebb several times comments that the
death-dinner discussion is meaningful to participants, providing insight and
comfort with the topic. But he never quite explains what people can or should
(another “should”) do after the
dinner. Have another one? Have them regularly? Have them whenever someone close
to the participants dies? Have some other sort of “refresher course” in death
and dying? The last two sentences of Hebb’s book are, “Death walks with us
through our entire life. The best thing I can suggest is that we all get better
acquainted with our constant companion.” That is at best a very partial and
rather wan conclusion. Readers may find other approaches to death and dying far
more congenial than this: perhaps the writings of Kübler-Ross, perhaps the
portrayal of Death by Terry Pratchett in his Discworld novels, perhaps reading
(hopefully re-reading) Shakespeare’s gloomily poetic lines about “the
undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.” All these examples
offer more insight than is to be found in Let’s
Talk about Death (Over Dinner). But Hebb does deserve credit for suggesting
a venue where some level of conversation about death and dying can potentially
take place.
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