Goodbyes & Living Funerals

 Today I posted related stories of how Ilene said goodbye to friends and family over the course of her illness and the role celebrations and ceremony played in those goodbyes. 

In the back of my mind, as I was writing those articles, I kept wondering about how different it must be for those with celebrity status (and those around them) to say goodbye.  It must be strange for someone like Jade Goody, the British reality show celebrity who received notification of her diagnosis while on camera, to face her illness in such a public way.

How does she say goodbye to millions of fans, hundreds of co-workers and friends, her family and ultimately her physical body?  What ceremonies or celebrations does she create to affirm her life before dying? 

One ceremony was to marry her partner and father of her two sons.  Perhaps the interviews she has been giving are both goodbyes and public ceremonies too.  And I hope she makes the opportunity to create increasingly intimate goodbye ceremonies with her closest friends and family.

Someone once said “we come into this world alone and we leave alone”.  But that does not mean we need to depart lonely.  Although the dying process shrinks one’s circle of intimates ever smaller, the richness of the goodbyes can increase with each contraction—or not.

I suspect that this diminishing circle of intimates paralleled by increasing richness of content and contact is a key element in having a “good death”.

Have you experienced ceremonies that made goodbyes richer?  Poorer?  Have you experienced goodbyes that were bitter, inadequate or difficult in some way or another?