'People are crazy to talk about death'

[Photo: AP 1997] Pulitzer Prize-winning author Studs Terkel, 89, has written of interviews about the Depression and about working. With Will the Circle Be Unbroken?, he has moved on to death. But he says, “The theme of the book is really about life.”

By MARGO HAMMOND

© St. Petersburg Times,
published October 30, 2001

Who wants to talk about dying? Studs Terkel finds that the topic is a priority - and something certainly on many people's minds. His latest book is about "how we live that prelude to death, life.''

Studs Terkel's books of interviews, many of them bestsellers, are like invitations to drop in on a series of therapy sessions. Shockingly candid at times, these are refreshingly honest thoughts from real people.

In Hard Times he asks people to describe their experiences during the Great Depression. In Working, he talks to people about how they really felt about their jobs. And in Race, he tackles a subject too often avoided in this county.

Now at 89, Terkel has brought up another subject that conventional wisdom tells us is a sure way to clear a room: death. Who wants to talk about dying?

Plenty of us, it turns out.

When the subject turns to death That death will happen to each of us is a given, but death is the subject we seem least comfortable discussing. People seem to be perfectly at ease talking about sexual escapades and heart problems, even gastrointestinal difficulties. If it's my terminal illness, however, I don't want people feeling sorry for me or imposed upon. If somebody else is sick, I don't wish to cause further discomfort or distress by mentioning it.

In Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith, Terkel discusses the big D with, among others, a police officer, a firefighter, a hoodlum, a woman who had been two years in a coma, a falsely accused man who spent years on death row, medics, AIDS and breast cancer victims, religious leaders and atheists. Not only are these people willing to talk about their fears of, proximity to and brushes with death, they are eager to do it. "People are crazy to talk about death," Terkel said in a recent interview. "It's on their minds."

Ira Glass of National Public Radio talks about his childhood fears of death. Author Kurt Vonnegut describes the details of his funeral. Actor Uta Hagen admits she thinks about death "all the time." But those are the more famous names included in Terkel's compilation of thoughts about death and dying. Most of his subjects are ordinary folk, talking about the first time they say a dead person, about their personal visions of an afterlife and about how they'd liked to be remembered.

The cumulative effect of reading all this death talk is surprising. These monologues are strangely life-affirming. "The theme of the book is really about life, living now," says Terkel, who had to deal with the death of his wife of 60 years soon after he began the book. "It's about death, but it's really about how we live that prelude to death, life."

Here are some excerpts from Will the Circle Be Unbroken:

I feel life is like the twenty-four-second clock in a basketball game. I got the ball now and I gotta score. By scoring, I mean I want to travel, see the world more. I got twenty-four seconds left and I want to stretch it out. But if they hook up tubes to you and you're on a monitor and unconscious for months, they gotta be kidding. I'm outta here. Twenty-four seconds ran out.

-- Tom Gates, retired Brooklyn firefighter

During the first eighteen years or so of my life, I looked at death as an objective event that occurs -- I didn't get very emotionally involved. Now, at this end of my life, the other end of my life, I react very personally to the deaths of my patients. . . . Dealing with death is a third-rail issue in the United States. We don't talk about death and dying as a societal problem, but it's going to become more and more of one. . . . I think of people who have lost a loved one, as I have -- my first wife died ten years ago -- and then later remarry. How is that going to work out if we're all up there together with two wives? Maybe the Mormons were right.

-- Dr. Joseph Mess, chief of cardiology at Rush-St. Luke's Presbyterian Hospital in Chicago

Ultimately the patient, not the doctor, may decide life or death. Ultimately, who decides when you die is you.

-- Dr. Sharon Sandel, retired Chicago doctor

I do believe in an afterlife, but I don't believe that it's up there in the clouds somewhere with angels flying around beating their wings, and God is an old geezer with a long beard.

-- Dr. John Barrett, chief of the trauma unit at Cook County Hospital in Chicago

I think anybody who says they're not afraid of death is kidding themselves. I don't know whether we fear death itself, I don't know whether we have any understanding about death itself. That's what we fear about it: it's something that we can't possibly understand.

-- Ed Reardon, Chicago paramedic

When I think of dying, I think vault. I don't want to be buried, that's just a personal preference. I'd rather they put me in a vault above ground. Maybe I'm claustrophobic, but I just don't like the thought of being six feet underground.

-- Robert Soreghan, Chicago police detective

One of the terrible things about executions is to jump people off into the universe like that. I think for a soul to be wrenched from the body is for that soul to be in anger and in pain and in hatred. I believe it impacts negatively on our world, that probably a lot of the calamities that happen are a result of that sort of thing. I mourn for the whole world because it's such a horrible place so often.

-- Delbert Lee Tibbs, on death row for two years before his conviction was overturned

I think a lot about death now. I read the New York Times obituaries and I take the average of the ages and I've been over the average for a couple of years. Yet I don't feel old at all.

-- Haskell Wexler, 78-year-old cinematographer

When I speak of home, it's closely tied to death.

-- Tammy Snider, an hibakusha (survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima)

Fear death? Hell, no. I've been through some of the worst crap in the world. Jesus, when you got something that people don't talk about . . . One of the things they were interested in over there was a body count. If you didn't have enough bodies, they'd go around, taking a machete, chopping off body parts, putting them in different bags so you have more bodies. Enemy bodies.

-- Victor Israel Marquez, veteran of the Vietnam War

I believe the ultimate Heaven is where all good people will be. Ultimate Hell is where all bad people would be. But there is heaven on Earth. When you've got trust, and loyal friends, and when you can help people that need your help, that's heaven -- that's heaven.

-- Rev. Willie T. Barrow, chairman of the board of Operation PUSH

I believe that same power that brought me here, that brought everything else here, will continue afterwards. I don't believe that all these bonds we've had, all these life experiences with people end with death. It continues, if nothing more than the memory.

-- The Rev. Leonard Dubi, pastor of St. Anne's Catholic Church in Chicago

When I think about death, I don't think about something abstract, because that defies all logic. I think of the concrete people I know, and of the possibilities for me some day being united with them in some way that transcends anything that I can possibly imagine.

-- Rabbi Robert Marx, rabbi of a Jewish Reform congregation

Sometimes when I go to sleep I say, "Well, I might not wake up." And I say, "If I don't wake up tomorrow, am I satisfied with my life right now? Do I think I did a good job? If there is a God -- if I'm wrong and there really is someone who's going to be waiting up there to judge me -- do I think that I have more checks in the plus side of the book rather than in the negative side of the book? . . . Some Buddhists think that you can choose when to die. I fly a lot, so I might die in a plane crash. If I do, I hope that Roger is sitting next to me and we're holding hands.

-- Chaz Ebert, lawyer, married to film critic Roger Ebert

I'm not afraid of death at all. It's part of life. So I will continue. I will come back as another form of human being.

-- Karen Thompson, who was in a coma for two years

I have absolutely no fear of death. I know that one of these days, poof! I'm done, I'm gone. But I'll live on in the memories of a hell of a lot of people that I affected.

-- Hank Oettinger, retired printer who has written thousands of letters to the editor

I think of death coming all the time. I feel like something happened to me four or five years ago, where the future vanished. I see the way that I live my life: I don't have enough time in it. I don't really take the very best care of myself. I've been to a doctor once in the last fifteen years. I think it's because I don't believe in a future for myself -- that it could just end like that. I'm just trying to get through this day and get through the next day.

-- Ira Glass, who conducts This American Life on National Public Radio

Now, I don't fear dying. The great fear I have is dying a failure. We all go. I don't want to go out a nothing. I want to go out a man among men.

-- Kid Pharaoh, former Mob employee, now 73 years old

I think death's going to happen to me. (Laughs) It happens at the rate of one per person. There's no way out of it. I'm sometimes tempted when I see someone's jogging in the park to yell at 'em, "You're gonna die anyhow."

-- Quinn Brisben, retired public schoolteacher

I've told my lawyer and I've told my oldest son what I wanted for a funeral service. It's not to be in any holy place, it's not to take place in New York City. I don't want a Viking funeral where they put a guy on a boat with treasure and set it on fire. I want it to be on Cape Cod, where I raised my family, and I want to be cremated and my ashes scattered over Barnstable Harbor.

-- Kurt Vonnegut, novelist

If there's a spirit, if there's a God, you know, hey, I'm a fan. I don't know if there is a God -- it's not central to me. I believe in life, I believe in how we should live. I believe we're here, each of us is here, to answer the big question -- which is to figure out why we're here. . . . Instead of a headstone, I'd like to have a bench somewhere with a pretty nice view, where somebody could just sit in the middle of the day. Nobody's going to be doing that in the middle of a graveyard. I could just give somebody a nice moment in their day. They could park their butt down on a bench and take a deep breath and think about things.

-- Bruce Bendinger, marketing director

Can you imagine being a slave in America, where you don't see any future at all for your physical being? So what you have is a spiritual being that is going to outlast the rest of this. I used to hear my grandmother and the other old ex-slaves sit around and sing, When the Saints Go Marching In: "I want to be in that number." Suppose they didn't have that song. . . . They couldn't say: "This is all. This is it. There's nothing left." So you have to create something to make you want to bother with just being here.

-- Vernon Jarrett, retired Chicago Tribune columnist

I don't want to die, but I'm not so afraid of it. What concerns me is the grief of the ones I leave. That is the bad part. You know they're going to be heartbroken, just like I was when my mother went. I wish I could do something about that, not being here with them. Of course that concerns me. It happens to everyone. Death is a leveler.

-- Peggy Terry, a Southern white woman who came to Chicago during the civil rights movement

You know, I've never thought of death as unfriendly. I was raised on a farm by a family where, when someone died, we all took turns sitting with them till they finished doing it. I always thought it was the last thing you do, and you would want to do it as well as you could.

-- Rosalie Sorrels, traveling singer of folk ballads

I am HIV positive. It frightens me. What frightens me more is I don't want to see my friends and my family suffer because of me. I want to be able to live a good life, give back to life until the very end.

-- Tico Valle, former assistant dean

A lot of people feel very isolated with cancer. They don't dare tell anyone. In particular breast cancer, because it's so altering to the body. At least in the old days it was. Cancer is a very hidden subject still. People don't talk about it. . . . I had never thought o death before. I'd lost both my parents when I was young, but I never believed it would happen to me. Someone gave me a book that influenced me greatly. It was by Audre Lorde, the black lesbian writer who eventually died of breast cancer herself: The Cancer Journals. She spoke about her battle with cancer. It was different than how everybody else spoke about cancer. She talked about it as a battle, and that we are warriors. That you have to be a warrior in how you're going to fight this plague.

-- Nancy Lanoue, diagnosed with breast cancer

Burial or cremation, it doesn't matter, because in that day, whatever you were, it's your soul and your spirit that lives on. What happens to the body doesn't really matter. . . . To me, Heaven wouldn't be Heaven unless there was music.

-- William Warfield, 80-year-old baritone

I think about death all the time. Then I pretend I'm not thinking about it and I pretend it doesn't exist. The notion that when we get old death doesn't bother us is baloney, because it bothers me a lot. It bothers me that I watch my body disintegrate slowly but surely. When people say, "Oh, but you have so much vitality and you're so alive and look so young," I always say it's because I love to work. If I'm allowed to work, I feel younger and I forget that I'm going to die.

-- Uta Hagen, actor

The poet Octavio Paz says that in the capitals of Paris and London the word death gets caught on the tongue, burns the tongue, but in Mexico, they embrace it, they play with it, and they celebrate it. It's illustrated in the toys around the Day of the Dead. Skeletons, little pushcarts with skeletons are given to the children: This is what you'll become some day. Don't be afraid of death. What's more important: Don't be afraid of life.

-- Carlos Cortez, painter and poet

In the 19th century, everybody knew about death. In the 20th century, nobody knows about death. People die in hospitals now. In the 19th century, nobody knew about sex. In the 20th century, everybody knows about sex. Death has become the new pornography. We don't talk about it.

I would describe myself as an advocate for the dead. I don't see anyone else worrying about where cemeteries are, where people are buried. I can't separate death from life. It's just as much part of life as anything we might do.

-- Helen Sclair, frequent visitor to cemeteries

When the tuxedos went out of style, a friend brought me a whole carload of them. So when they had nothing -- indigent veterans that we got out of the TB sanitarium or the VA hospital -- they would send them over to me and I would bury them for Veterans and Social Security. Whatever I got, that's all I got. I put them all in tuxedos. People would say, "I thought he was penniless, I didn't think he had any money." I said, "I took care of it." I gave him suit, shirt, tie, underwear, everything. They went out first-class.

-- William Herdegen, semiretired funeral director

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