My Uncle is on His Death Bed And Here’s What I’ve Learned About Death

Death is all about perspective.

My uncle is dying.

He’s in his early 70s. He’s been in shitty nursing homes longer than I can remember.

It’s been decades of the people on staff not giving him the proper care. They neglected him so much that he ended up with bedsores.

He got surgery to have them removed, but it did a huge number on him.

He’s in hospice care and can die any day as I write this.

But a few days after I discovered that devastating news, I saw a Snapchat from one of my friends. Her uncle passed away too.

Here’s what she said:

“My uncle may be gone, but look at the legacy he left us.”

The picture she showed was the house that her uncles built for her family back in Senegal.

My friend always tells me about her culture, family traditions, and how damn happy she is to be from Senegal.

The death of her uncle was sad, but it was more of a passing of legacy than a death.

That experience showed me that death doesn’t need to be a horrible experience. I’ve never lost anyone growing up and death was never a conversation in my household.

It’s so taboo for me that I’d rather die myself than deal with the pain of a family member dying.

But the best way for me, and other people, to feel better about death is to change our perspective on it.

How do you do that?

By having more open conversations about it.

I signed up for a college course called Sociology of Death and Dying and so far it’s helping me cope better with death. If you don’t have money to take a course or talk with a therapist, then talk to anyone close to you.

It may sound weird at first, but some people are way more at ease when discussing death than others.

Either way, you need to do the mental homework of making death more positive than negative.

Everyone dies eventually — it’s up to us to carry on what they left.

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