People Don’t Die Anymore — They Pass

People don’t die anymore, I’ve noticed. They pass.

I hear the word pass used all around me these days. By my physicist friend. By the officer at the bank. By the woman next to me at the gym.

Dying is not nice. But it happens. It’s brutal and it happens. There’s a word for what we do when we die, and it’s not pass. It’s die.

Pass is an obfuscation. But there’s no hiding the fact of death. We die. We are extinguished. We are no more.

Unless, of course, we do indeed slip into some other realm of being. And the words for that eventuality, in the Christian tradition I grew up in, is “pass away.” By the Christian lights of my forebears, a soul passes away into a place where time does not exist, nor matter. But where some essential thing of us does indeed continue to be.

Those are radical concepts both: To die, to cease to be. And to pass away into another reality.

To pass, on the other hand, is a cop-out. It’s neither here nor there. It neither consents to the fact of death, nor asserts a reality beyond death, a reality where maybe your loved ones (and not-so-loved ones) await you — or some vestige of what you consider to be you.

People Don’t Die Anymore — They pass.

Author William B. Bradshaw did a little research into the evolution of the terminology around death. He went through obituaries and funeral notices in the U.S. and found that “died” gave way to “passed” or “passed away” beginning in the 1970s.

“Passed away” had become not so much a statement about the afterlife as a more tactful way to announce a death than “died.” And by the early 1980s, Bradshaw concluded, “passed away” was the norm for American funeral home obituaries.

One funeral director Bradshaw interviewed suggested that the use of “passed away” instead of “died” reflected an era in which people “tend to prolong facing up to the hard facts of difficult situations as long as possible.”

As I see it, we live in a hard-headed, evidence-based age, in which sophisticated Westerners, many of them, reject the idea of heaven or God or spirit or anything not apprehendable by the senses or by logic. And so, it amazes me that the very people who try so mightily to be hard-headed about religious belief can’t bring themselves to be hard-headed about death.

Her Grandpa Jon

I like the way my No. 1 grandchild thinks about things. She’s 6 years old and she remembers her Grandpa Jon.

Jon was fond of setting obstacle courses in the backyard for his then-preschool grandchild. The two had an unspoken tradition that the  obstacle courses he devised would always end at the back wall of the house with his granddaughter reaching up to touch a rusty nail embedded in the stucco.

Last month, I’m told, Grandchild No. 1 discovered another rusty nail at her house. This one was indoors and nearly out of sight at the back of a medicine cabinet.

“Hey, there’s a rusty nail in the bathroom cabinet, too,” she told her parents. “Did Grandpa Jon put that there? Hi, Grandpa Jon, wherever you are!”

Wherever you are.

More about grandfathers at “Child Is Born, and So Is a Grandpa.”   Also at “Babysitting Via Webcam — Helping Out Those Frazzled Parents During Covid.”