MODERN LOVING AND DYING

BY SARAH DELMONTE

Part 1: Promethea pops her clogs

I was sitting down, enjoying my morning coffee when I got a call on Good Friday 2020. My best friend’s voice, thick with emotion, simply said my name, “Is it Promethea?” I replied. I hear sobbing and I take up the chorus. 

Promethea was a feline old lady, a black, British Shorthair and almost 20 years old. I’m not 100% sure exactly how old, since she was a rescue cat that my and my partner at the time got from a rescue centre in some back garden in Peacehaven. She and her brother/husband Pegasus(Peg), were the absolute apples of our eyes, the closest thing we had to children. We’d been craving our own furr babies, waiting until we lived in a flat that allowed pets so after months of staring at picture books of fuzzy kittens we finally made the journey to claim our own furry family. Peg was a bombastic and charismatic male Maine Coone who came with the name Pegasus. He was beautiful and uncomplicated, all he ever wanted was food and strokeses and he wasn’t shy about letting you know it! Promethea on the other hand was a completely different kettle of fish, she was the most inscrutable creature I have ever known. Neurotic and shouty and shy, but when you were able to gain her trust and she let you in, she was incredibly sweet, loving and charming in her own way. We didn’t go to the shelter expecting to get two cats, but they came as a pair, devoted to each other though their personalities were so different. They’d come from a bad home, we were told; domestic violence, but no more detail than that. Promethea had already had a phantom pregnancy even though she was quite young (she also occasionally lactated throughout her life, which made her belly smell of Hobnobs). They had been there for almost two months without being claimed, which we couldn’t fathom as they were both so beautiful and charming but apparently these qualities were lost on the other people that had visited them. The lady who ran the rescue centre even seemed a little puzzled that we were so taken with them, asking why we wanted these cats particularly. In retrospect, they were almost like our little avatars, or daemons. A brown hairy boy admired by everyone and a mincing, pouty girl that talks a lot. Over the years, even after we split, they became symbolic of the epoch of our lives, the unconventional cross species family unit we created. 

Part 2: Nothing Ever Ends

O and I parted ways over 8 years ago. In every friendship circle there is often a couple that is held up as ‘the perfect relationship’, the benchmark against which all other relationships are held. We were that couple, so our relationship’s end had ripples beyond just the two of us. I felt like parents having to tell our children we were getting divorced. I actually had one friend cry and wail “But why?!” Another put it; “But you two are the pillar around which WE all flail”. I felt the collective breath being held, wondering on which side friendship would be divided, and who would lose touch with who as a result of this break up. I mention this because the end of a relationship is, itself a kind of death, and like a material death, how we approach the loss and change profoundly affects how much long term damage that loss causes. I am extremely proud of how O and I handled this. We are still the best of friends to this day. As human beings we are capable of handling almost anything thrown at us, as long as we approach it in the correct way; that is with a sense for the desire for impeccability. To remember, it's not what you lose, it's what you had. Nothing lasts forever, none of us, not even our planet, not even the universe itself. At the same time, nothing ever truly ends, every piece of matter and every mote of energy has existed since the Big Bang, things simply change and are transformed. So that is what he and I did, our friendship survived because we were committed to not abandoning all the good things we’d built over the years. We were open and dynamic. We had never been the type of couple to do things the way others did, we were creative and found our own ways of doing things.

It was in this spirit that I insisted he take the cats; that said we did share custody of them to a certain extent, a few months with him, a few with me. However, as they grew older and more frail, they became more permanent residents with him. This was in part because they were his first pets and his attachment to them, like a first love, was irreplaceable. This may seem like an unusual set up for a couple at the end of a relationship but it was of paramount importance to both of us that, even though our romantic relationship had run its course, we would continue to bring an energy of support and care, of love to our breakup. I’m sure it's a familiar scenario to many, of a relationship ending in your friend circle followed by the panic of how friends get divided in the divorce, so to speak. This wasn’t for us, it’s not that a thing ends, nothing ever does, truly. The status quo is simply transformed and we have control on how that happens. We were then free to rejoice in the memories and carry the knowledge and wisdom the experience imparted with you into a changed future. For myself, our cats were a powerful metaphor for this, they became inextricably bound in it. 

Part 3: A Funky Feline Funeral

Peg died a couple of years ago. Same as with Promethea, I got a call from O, who was at the vets. He had had a stroke and was sedated, waiting for me to get there to say goodbye, which was an absolute blessing. No such opportunity when social distancing is in force. Not only that, but because Promethea was a more fragile and complicated soul, her passing was so much more wrenching, her own vulnerability mingled to give our grief its own unique pain that, whilst so sad and I miss him all the time, simply wasn’t there for Peg in the same way.

So how to meet these challenges of having an effective and meaningful goodbye whilst staying safe and abiding by social distancing? Well, myself and my co-parent were pretty primed to do so. We are both trained celebrants, performance artists and activists within the death positivity movement. I am also an undertaker, he a ritual expert. We are both, shall we say, mystics of a sort. Because of this, there were signs and synchronicities that we were able to perceive, contributing to giving our little fur baby a beautiful and meaningful goodbye. One of the most poignant being to do with the Greek goddess Hecate, goddess of magick, ghosts and witchcraft. As witches traditionally have their own black cats; their familiars, believed to be demons living inside the bodies of animals. In a way, O & I believed Promethea to be our witch queen, and we her familiars. I’m aware that this may sound strange to many, but since O is a ritual expert and has written several esoteric books on ritual and myth, to us this made perfect sense. He was, at the time, writing a book that had a chapter on Hecate and so was primed to interpret seemingly innocuous things as portentous and meaningful synchronicities. One of the symbols of Hecate is the two lamps; one to light our way into the world and one to light our way out again. On the very day Promethea died, there appeared two lamps, left outside her home beside the communal bins by some unknown party. 

We decided that we would apply our experience as funeral professionals to give Promethea as good a send off as we could, especially as I wasn’t able to be with her as she died. Myself, and my co parents (Promethea now has a stepmum, who is also enraptured by her charms) set up a Whatsapp video call.

...the two Hecate lamps are lit, O reverently carries a bundle of fabric into view and lays it out on the coffee table. I can’t hear him but can see his torso shake as he gingerly unfolds the material to reveal a skinny form of oily black fur. Promethea looks so peaceful, just like she is sleeping, which was oddly reassuring; she isn’t in pain anymore. She had suspected liver cancer and had been deteriorating for some time. In the last few years her girlish soprano mew had become more of a slightly cantankerous growl, her patchy, matted fur from the difficulties of grooming with arthritis, her little face in an ever present scowl. All these memories flood through me, and endeared her to me in that moment, for the millionth time.

We all took turns to share our favourite memories of her. The times (usually just after I’d washed my hair), she would creep along the back of the sofa and furiously sniff my hair and rub herself on my head. Of how the happiest I’d ever seen her was when she was chasing a moth around the flat, until finally she caught it and I watched her swagger across the room with half a moth hanging out of her mouth. I’m sure anyone who has lost a loved one, of any species, can relate to how precious these memories are. Orlando shared a memory of a time he was feeling particularly distraught and in despair, lying on his bed, and Promethea, normally so shy and aloof, for the first time, came and lay next to him, pressing her face against his and soothing him with her little breathy purrs. Her stepmum would sing her little songs every day, always with slightly different lyrics but always along the lines of “you are so little”, “you are so black”, “you are so sweet”, “how did you get to be so little, black and sweet?”. Orlando says a prayer to the Goddess Hecate at the end of the ceremony, asking Her to make sure our little girl makes it to wherever she will go for the next part of her journey. Which I presume was a heaven with an infinite number of string threads, hanging from above and the ground; a carpet of dreamies and every five paces there is a hand profering belly rubs.

The next day, I came to take her to the pet crematorium, a wonderful establishment where we sent Peg. The people there are clearly all animal lovers and there isn’t a whiff of judgment at the cascades of tears as we say goodbye to our little furry friends. O brings her cat basket out onto the step outside his house, the same one that we brought Promethea and Peg home in all those years ago. His eyes rimmed with red and fresh tears gathering on his eyelashes.

Here we stand, a flight of stairs between us, no hugs, no hand holding, just almost two decades of unspoken memory shared with silent eye contact. Our faces, a mirror of each other's emotions, without the catharsis of contact. He puts the basket down, there is a slightly uncomfortable pause, “So what, do I just close the door and leave her here?” I shrug, thinking, “Yeah, I guess’ as the tears start to fall again. There are a few moments of awkward silence as O works himself up to say goodbye to her for the last time and send her on her journey… 

It was in this moment that the full force of what our relationship has evolved into hit me. I have a complicated family, and O has been for many years the first person I go to for advice and solace. We are family and he is by far the person that I have spent the most time with in my adult life. When people develop this kind of closeness, the barrier of flesh doesn’t armour us from another’s pain, empathy is like a knife when it can’t be tempered through touch. But I could take our little girl on her last journey, which he wasn’t able to do as he didn’t have access to a car and is high risk.

Part 4: Lessons for a Better Funeral Culture

So, what have I learnt from this experience and how can I use it to potentially make the future of funerals better.

One of the first things I noticed at the start of lockdown when funeral numbers were limited to 10, was that Zoom link-ups became the instant quick fix. Whilst I understand the impetus for this, I would do the same myself. However, having experienced this type of format myself I realised how inadequate it is, how much of the processing of grief involves physicality. Grief is isolating (particularly in our culture) at the best of times and is made so much worse due to the Corona pandemic. A cuddle, a squeeze of the arm, eye contact. When these things are denied, something fundamental is lost. This digital distancing doesn’t seem to cut it and it really emphasises the need to rebuild how we approach the organisation of funerals from the ground up. Contemporary funeral structures and rituals still mimic the traditional religious, Christian ceremony; celebrant/priest speaking to the congregation from a pulpit. Why? Why bother even trying to have a funeral in the conventional sense? Does it help? What can we do to be more creative?

Now, I don’t want to throw the digital baby out with the silicone bathwater, it does have its uses. Specifically, I think it would be helpful in allowing people to publicly express their grief and remembrance and to share memorials, photos, vids, etc. In fact, why not expand that so that people can document their goodbyes so that the deceased can be part of this conversation. There are already apps that tackle this, in particular “Legacy”. But would this even be something that people would be interested in? 

Putting the mediatisation of death culture to one side, what I believe is needed for people to have fully rounded (for want of a better word) bereavement experience, is some sort of physical connection with the deceased in order to have a meaningful goodbye. Having a lock of my kitty’s hair helped so much more than a phone screen funeral. I could look at it and know that a small piece of her is still with me. I think it would benefit us as a society and go wild, think outside the box. Be bold and try to find a way to rebuild death culture from the ground up. A useful way to do this is to look back over history for inspiration. We look back at other cultures through history and see them as fetishising death, whereas the reality is that it is us that are the ones who are atypical in this respect. Take ancient Egypt for example, we think of them as being obsessed with death, that they spent more time preparing for the end of their lives than living. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the ancient Egyptians did not even have a word for death. The event that we call death, they called ‘westing’, a transformation, rather than an annihilation. The Momento Mori tradition of the British Victorian Era. They would often keep a lock of a loved ones hair in a locket or keep a photograph of the body of the deceased. When death is present in the everyday, as it has been globally and for the vast majority of human culture; infant mortality, the smallest infection being potentially fatal and such, it is normalised, integrated into cultural norms and rituals so as to better process the experience. Even today, Torojans of Indonesia mummify their dead and keep them in the house, in Hawaiian shirts and RayBans, asking them for shopping advice. It is us who are the morbid ones, in our arrogance we deny what we can’t understand; the innate mystery of death. We have purged from our secular, materialist culture of the West, the mythologies and rituals that allow us to process feelings and experiences that cannot be verbalised. We push, what is literally, the most normal thing in the world away from us because  we don’t want to think about it. We want to stay young and beautiful forever. We ghettoise our elderly instead of respecting their years of experience of life. 

So what can we do to change this?

The cultural interaction of East Asian societies with their ancestors. Specifically, the influence of Confucianism philosophy on the veneration of ancestors (living and dead) as a fundamental building block of society. Unlike our own culture, so obsessed with youth that we ghettoise our elders and are disgusted by them. Such a thing is so full of self loathing as to be almost blind in its myopia. Many households in this part of the world are multigenerational, with the elders venerated. Families also continue to remember the family members that pass by making offerings at family shrines. Chuseok, the harvest festival in South Korea involves the formal honouring and thanking of the ancestors for their role in making the crops grow. One of the things that I particularly like about this is the idea that we are part of a continuum, we have our life bestowed upon us by our ancestors, and we relinquish it to the generations that come after. It places a person and their life within a larger context, essentially to provide it with meaning, yet it requires no belief system. So perhaps we could incorporate a person’s family tree into funeral practice, including multigenerational remembrance. I myself have recently been researching my own family history, as I have Sephardic Jewish heritage. This has been a fascinating process of self discovery, not just learning about my ancestors and has led down unexpected paths, like connecting with culinary traditions, which, after language, is one of the most profound cultural markers.

We also have the physicality of a person's ashes and the multiplicitous uses for them, to use as a form of memorial. They can be turned into jewelry if there is money available. A website that makes ash jewels itself even suggests it as an alternative to a funeral. Personally, I love the idea of having my kitty's ashes turned into a subdermal implant. More recently other uses for cremation ash to be used is mixed with paint, perhaps to paint a portrait or scene of the deceased’s favourite place. Ash can be pressed into a vinyl record with their favourite song. And there is always the, shall we say, Keith Richards option! Ultimately, it’s about responding to the personality of the person who passed away and the people they left behind, not having to conform to the restrictive conventions of a funeral catalogue. What other ways can we find to connect to our grief in a physical way when there are no physical elements to interact with? Then we can use actions, for example, organise a time date for all those wanting to engage in a memorial to do a particular thing, play a song, pick a flower, maybe even cook the person who has died favorite food. 

Death is visceral, grief is visceral, funerals and death rituals need to be visceral!

Ultimately, the most important thing for our loved ones who will be left behind, think for ourselves how we want our funeral to be structured, so those left behind don’t have to. I had the privilege of being able to plan a friend's funeral with them in the days before they died. Fortunately, they were already knowledgeable and sympathetic to death positivity and it will always be one of my fondest memories, sitting with him in hospital, what songs he wanted to play, who he wanted to speak, simply wondering what happens after one dies. He confessed to me that, now that he had accepted it fully, he was kind of excited at the prospect, was there a new adventure ahead of him? Sadly, this is a rare perspective, overridden by the fear of the unknown.

This strikes at heart of the problem, people are fearful and freaked out at the thought of themselves or their loved ones dying and planning for what comes after, but as I’ve learnt working in the funeral industry, when a person has just died is precisely the worst time to be thinking about and planning these things. We have an unprecedented opportunity to tackle this toxic cultural relationship with death head on, all our medical advancement haven’t cheated death in the slightest, just medialised it and detached it from everyday, where it belongs! In particular, artists have had a relationship with funerals for millenia and this dynamic needs to be fostered so that these crucial end of life rituals are opened up from being the almost exclusive proviso of the clergy; instead having a more inclusive, creative, relevant and effective death culture.