Death is not a secret

When I was a little girl, I remember watching everyone get dressed up and gather at our house. I asked where they were going. “To your grandmother’s funeral,” someone answered.

I didn’t even know she had died.

At the time, I remember feeling sad, but not fully understanding why. Children often accept what they are told because they trust the adults around them.

It wasn’t until years later that I began asking myself…

Why didn’t anyone tell me she was sick?

Why didn’t I get to say goodbye?

Why wasn’t I given the choice to attend her funeral?

The older I got, the more I realized those questions were never really about the funeral itself. They were about being left out of something important. They were about losing the opportunity to tell someone I loved them one last time.

As a hospice nurse, I encounter a different version of this same story over and over again.

Families often pull me aside and whisper, “Please don’t tell her you are from hospice.”

Or, “Don’t let him know he is dying.”

I understand where this comes from. It is rooted in love, fear, and a desperate desire to protect someone we care about. But after nearly fifteen years of sitting beside people at the end of life, I have learned something important:

Most people already know.

They may not say it out loud.

They may not use the word dying.

But they know their body is changing.

They know when they no longer have the strength they once had.

They know when treatments are no longer helping.

They know when something profound is happening within them.

Think about your own life. You know when your body is trying to tell you something. You know when something feels different. You know when you need help. Why would dying be any different?

When we avoid honest conversations about death, we don’t eliminate the reality of what is happening, we eliminate the opportunity to talk about it. And in doing so, we often lose the chance to say the things that matter most…

Thank you.

I love you.

I’m sorry.

I forgive you.

Goodbye.

These conversations are not easy, but they are sacred.

I am not suggesting that every child should be told every detail or included in every circumstance. Children need information delivered in age-appropriate ways, and every child is different. But I do believe that most children deserve honesty. Most children deserve the opportunity to know that someone they love is seriously ill.

More importantly, they deserve to be given the chance to say goodbye.

I think about my own granddaughters. They are seven and eleven now, but even when they were younger, I know they would have wanted the chance to say goodbye to me if I were dying. Maybe they would have chosen to visit. Maybe they would have chosen to write a note, draw a picture, or simply tell me they love me.

They would have had the opportunity, because they were given a choice. I would have liked to have had that choice.

When we withhold that opportunity, we sometimes leave people carrying questions for decades. Questions like the ones I still carry.

When we make death a secret, we unintentionally teach the next generation that death is something we don’t talk about. And then they grow up and repeat the same pattern with their own children because it is all they have ever known.

Death is not a secret.

It is part of living, and of loving.

It is part of being human.

And when we are honest with one another, something remarkable happens. We come closer together. We share the heartbreak. We carry the sorrow collectively instead of alone. We create space for final conversations, final hugs, final hand squeezes, and final expressions of love.

Years later, when we look back, those moments do not erase the grief, but they often soften the regret.

There is peace in knowing you had the chance to look into someone’s eyes one last time.

There is comfort in knowing they heard your voice.

There is gratitude in knowing they left this world understanding the place they held in your heart.

Sometimes the greatest gift we can give one another at the end of life is not protection from the truth, but the opportunity that truth provides, which is to be given a choice to be present if we wish, and to say the things that might otherwise be left unsaid.

xo

Gabby