Death from Above!

Not really, just always wanted an excuse to write that.

Also don't mean to be trite. Last night's Living with Death panel covered a range of possible emotions and experiences around death, dying and grief, and as one audience member put it later in the evening, we "didn't expect to hear so much laughter" at this event.

But laugh we did. Festival artistic director Hal Wake as usual did a wonderful job moderating the readings and discussions, introducing us to Australia's Debra Adelaide, author of The Household Guide to Dying, and Canadians Bonnie Burnard, who has recently released Suddenly, and Lisa Moore, with her new novel February. We listened to excerpts from two works that depict the quiet shocks and sorrows within domestic spaces when one, or one's beloved, is dying, and one that (in fiction) explores the collective grief and aftermath of tragedy after the real-life sinking of the Ocean Ranger in 1982, which is, as Moore put it, "still a very raw wound in Newfoundland."

Adelaide's perhaps quirky novel (in the excerpt she read, the main character has ordered her own coffin, which she sets up in the family veranda, and which she asks her husband and children to decorate) elicits murmurs of understanding as well as chuckles and guffaws from the audience. She reminds us that although dying and grieving may be serious and dark, there is still room for mirth, for laughter, in short for living in what time is left.

Burnard is concerned with "the losing of the self and the losing of the ego and the state of grace" that may occur to those who provide palliative care. Her sparse description of the dying woman's best friend shaving her legs, the foam on the legs, the small nick at the ankle and the blood, the dying woman's relaxation into the gentle touch of skin on her skin, brought me right back to an afternoon in a care facility in Calgary when I cupped my dying grandmother's beautiful face in one hand as I waxed her eyebrows with the other. Feminist discussion of female grooming rituals aside—and I could fill pages on that topic, believe you me—these moments are the provenance of women; these small but meaningful gestures that women do for each other when we can no longer do them for ourselves. The touch of my skin to yours, because I want to comfort you, because I want you to feel beautiful.

In February, Lisa Moore shows the life of those left behind, specifically a widow with three young children and one on the way, writing through "the paradox that the person is gone" but that in memories of the departed, time collapses, and the person is still there. Grief is different when the death is unexpected; the shock is perhaps more violent, there is no time to say goodbye. She read a powerful section that described the young couple's wedding night, their youth, their love and lust for each other as the hardship of the years to come is foreshadowed in the moment a mirror shatters. She said that she wanted the novel to be "an elegy to the men who had died."

All three of the writers, warm, engaging and intelligent, are trying in their new works to open up a conversation about death, to confront our general cultural discomfort with death, to ask why we say that "so-and-so has ‘passed'" rather than "so-and-so died." It is indeed a conversation worth having.