Abstract
It is now 12 months since we lost our son, Dylan, aged 32, who was killed while flying in his wingsuit on Monte Bente in the Italian Dolomites on 3 June 2022. At that moment, early on a beautiful summer morning, we joined the club that nobody wishes to belong to.
The death of a child before their time and before their parents must be among the most traumatic of life’s experiences. Many of us experience this devastating loss each year and the circles of grief spread far beyond the immediate family and intimates; yet, we seem to lack the will or emotional literacy to face up to and deal adequately with this most bitter of griefs.
In the Victorian era, characterised by large families, often living in poverty, overcrowded conditions and periodic epidemics of infectious diseases, such loss was an everyday occurrence that affected all families, often to the extent of losing two or three children in a single family. Culturally, the rituals and traditions were well established, centred on faith and the church. Life was hard, but people muddled through and got by, supported by the solidarity that comes from shared experience.
Today, in our diverse society characterised by small nuclear families, many faiths and none, together with the normative expectation of longevity, the everyday experience of death is largely seen as a phenomenon of old age. When the aspiration of all children being born into a supportive and safe environment with a potential lifespan of upwards of 70 years can at least be seen as a potential aspiration, the loss of any child assumes a different place in the ecology of emotional response.
In a typical district of 500,000 people, the number of annual deaths in those aged under 18 years can be measured in the low dozens, with relatively few being accounted for by traditional medical causes. After the first year of life, and increasingly in young adults, many deaths are the result of injury and other external threats, in which alcohol, drugs, violence and death by suicide feature strongly and add to a sad toll that will potentially impact on families and intimates for their whole lives. 1
Despite the reduction in death rates and the overall shift of the burden of death away from younger ages, the World Health Organization suggests that approximately 1.3 million adolescents (aged 15–19 years) and young adults (aged 20–24 years) die globally each year. 2 Recent reports point to a growing gap between the sexes, with male deaths accounting for over 60% (aged 10–24 years) and there is recent evidence of rising death rates among middle-aged and younger Americans.3,4 Many of these deaths are potentially preventable.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (1926–2004) is responsible for providing us with a coherent framework for understanding the five stages of normal grief, if there can ever be such a thing. 5 The sequence of these stages, from Denial to Anger, Bargaining, Depression and finally Acceptance, has been well described and provides a template for both professionals and the bereaved to frame the journey of distress. However, most of the work of grieving does not occur in professional environments but rather in the day-to-day lives of those affected and in their interactions with those in contact with them.
In the aftermath of the mass premature deaths of the past we have yet to scratch the surface of what an emotionally literate personal and community response to untoward death should be. Failure to grieve effectively can result in enduring psychological ramifications that can seriously blight everyday living. The recent loss of over 200,000 lives to COVID-19, under circumstances in which many of these deaths occurred out of the blue, and under circumstances where normal grieving was impossible, will leave a tale of misery in its wake.
In his book, ‘My Father’s Wake: How the Irish Teach Us to Live, Love, and Die’, Kevin Toolis provides a powerful and convincing argument for finding another way, one which is not dominated by the medicalised denial of the inevitability of what comes to each of us, whether timely or not. 6 Through the device of revisiting his own family roots and his father’s death in a remote community off the west coast of Ireland, Toolis argues convincingly that in our denial of death and the medicalised search for eternity we have lost sight of the experiences that familiarity with death and its rituals provides us to live a full life.
Since Dylan’s death, we have come to know other members of the ‘Club That Nobody Wishes To Belong To’, and some common themes and issues emerge. Whether death has come unheralded and suddenly, as with our boy flying from a mountain top in his magenta-coloured wing suit, through injury sustained on a motorbike or other vehicle, violence, alcohol or drugs, by their own hand or from a medical condition, a common experience is of the inability of many around them to find the right words or responses to play their part in healing.
This is perhaps best illustrated by the lack of acknowledgment of what has happened; the avoidance of the use of the words ‘Died’ or ‘Dead’; the inability to talk of the deceased by name; the inappropriate use of the quasi-religious term of ‘passing’, implying the assumption of an afterlife and the use of the sanitised, avoidance expression of the Victorian ‘Condolences’, with no sense of what words of sorrow may lie behind it, together with the trivialisation of the psychological concept of finding ‘closure’.
From sympathy, through empathy to compassion, it seems that we have become emotionally illiterate and unable to play our part as fellow humans in a rite of passage that will impact on each of us without exception. In the very culturally specific context of traditional rural Ireland, Toolis tells us that the whole community is drawn in to the deaths of its members at each stage of the dying and the hours surrounding the death; that the wake is a shared send-off that accompanies the last hours and in which every community member can feel involved, rehearsing from an early age what will one day be our own departure from life and in which the expression ‘I’m sorry for your troubles’ captures the Irish heart of compassion.
For Kubler-Ross The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.
Our Dylan died doing what he was passionate about, flying with the birds in his beautiful wing suit; he was no reckless ‘adrenalin junky’, as is sometimes lazily attributed to those who wish to hone and test their skills against the elements, but was meticulous, experienced and at the top of his game. He accepted the risks of participating in an extreme sport that is known to have killed nearly 500 people since 2009, many in the prime of their lives. 7 He and his fellow base jumpers work constantly to reduce the risks of their sport by examining in forensic detail where things go wrong; however, the safety of the rapidly growing range of extreme sports, including the governance of related commercial activities of which this is part, is barely on the public health radar. The recent catastrophic deaths of the Titanic submariners may raise the profile of Health and Safety at these cutting edges of human endeavour. 8
In our personal grief, we are able to take some comfort from a young man dying pursuing his dreams; it must be even worse if your child has been a victim of a dysfunctional society in which they have had no dreams nor felt any control over their own destiny. For each of us, the pain will endure. We owe it to those lost to work for all young people to be able to find and pursue their dreams while reducing the risks. 9