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.”
Oh my. The joy and the pain circle one another as long as we live. Bless her, bless you, bless Jon, wherever he is.
Oh, yes. They circle each other. So true.
In the Unity tradition we say a person, animal, etc. made their transition to another level. We also favor reincarnation. Metaphysis can be deep. My personal beliefs are a combination of Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Metaphysis, Buddhist, and more. It’s all a beautiful mystery for me to explore every day.
A day usually does not go by without my consulting my mother, who died almost 20 years ago.
Dear Barbara,
I find it important to use the word “died” in counter to our “afraid of aging. dying, and seeking to live forever” culture.
When people close to one have died, it is their death one suffers, the finality of it, the complete loss of this deeply loved person in one’s life. The term “passing” protects others from the reality of death, and from one’s reality as the person mourning the reality of a deeply and long loved one.
The term “passing” is not helpful; it is a nuisance. Death confronts one every day and one must confront the profound substantive loss of a deeply loved partner or child every waking minute.
One can make but a lame sentence out of the lame idea of confronting “passing.” “Passing” has no body.
That’s it exactly: “‘Passing’ has no body. It evades a lot of realities, not just the reality of death.
I couldn’t agree more!! I hate that phrase ‘Mrs. Smith has passed.’ What did she pass? You are right, people die! Someone even told me once that it was impolite to say that someone died, we should say they passed. Please!! It ranks up there with “I appreciate you.” And we have covered that one a few weeks back. Keep writing, you may get to all my pet peeves.
I love that we share so many pet peeves. And that you are happy to let me rant a bit. More to come!
😉
I love that when a grandchild is born, so are grandparents. EB
Yes. As a grandparent, you get try on a whole new self for size. Jon was especially good at playing with young children. He loved being goofy.