Translator: Shrikant Bhimrao Patil Reviewer: Hélène Vernet
Language matters. The words that we say matter.
They matter for truth; they matter for honesty;
and they matter for reality.
"Euphemism" is defined as a mild or indirect word or expression
that substitutes for one deemed to be too harsh or blunt
when referring to something unpleasant or embarrassing.
Come on! Let me get back to you again. You know what a euphemism is.
It’s a prettier word, a better word, a softer word,
used to talk about something
that you might find unpleasant or uncomfortable.
Let me tell you, there's very little in this world
as uncomfortable as having a child diagnosed with cancer,
and there's almost nothing in the world
as unpleasant as having a child who dies from that cancer.
And yet that is what I found myself faced with in 2012,
when my then six-year-old son Sam was diagnosed with leukemia.
Right from the start, I found myself drowning in euphemistic phrases,
words like "warrior" and "hero," words that made it seem like
he was more than a child whose body had rebelled against him,
words that made it seem like he had some say in the matter,
as though his very will
will lead him down a path of healing or a path of destruction.
And so, words became my weapon of choice against cancer.
I tried to choose my words very carefully, speak plainly, clearly and simply,
so that he would understand what was happening
and so that I wouldn't use words that might muddy the waters later.
Ultimately, Sam’s leukemia was very strong
and overran the treatments available to medical knowledge.
And when he died,
I was faced with a whole new list of euphemisms,
phrases like "passed away," "earned his wings"
or even "lost a child."
Now don’t get me wrong, there're religious identity issues here,
but no matter what you have as your religious beliefs,
no matter how you feel about the Afterlife,
it's hard not to admit that these are euphemisms for "dead,"
pretty sugar-coated phrases for:
"His life ended and there's no turning back."
Now some of these became intensely frustrating for me.
When someone refers to me as a mother who "lost her child,"
I mutter under my breath, "He's not lost. I know right where he is."
My friend Rebecca wrote about it after Sammy died.
She wrote it like this, she said,
"His parents haven’t lost a child,
they would never, could never be so careless.”
When someone says that Sammy "passed," I’m equally frustrated.
It sounds so painless, so simple, so easy,
but it wasn't.
Passing is something that we do to the car in front of us
that’s moving too slowly.
We pass tests and we pass kidney stones.
We might pass through life.
But Sam didn't pass us by.
I did a little bit of research, and according to Legacy.com,
which has over 6.5 million obituaries on its site,
over five million of those obituaries use the term "passed away."
Are we so scared of the phrase "dead"
that we can’t even say it in obituary?
I think that some of this states very far back to a time, long ago,
when we held the magical thinking
that talking about something could bring it closer to us.
Well, wait a minute ! We don’t still believe that, do we?
Have you ever done this?
"Did you hear what happened? He...
(Whispering:) ... died."
Oh yeah, we totally don’t believe in that magic stuff anymore, do we?
Death makes us so uncomfortable.
It’s so hard for us to wrap our scientific logical selves around this idea,
to explain it, to rationalize it, to understand it.
How is it that someone is here one minute and not here the next?
How it is that their body is still there but yet they are not alive?
And so yes, we have turned to euphemisms, to phrases
that help us talk about and maybe understand
this great mystery.
All the euphemistic phrases, I am sure you've heard so many of them:
"dearly departed," "lost his battle,"
"slipped away,"
"left this world,"
"crossed over,"
"breathed his last."
And then of course, there are the less sweet ones:
"kicked the bucket,"
"cashed in one’s chips,"
"taking a dirt nap,"
"gone offline,"
"gone to the big baseball stadium in the sky."
There is a very famous Monty Python’s sketch,
in which a man goes into a pet store.
He is carrying a cage and he goes in because he wants to register a complaint.
It seems that he has been sold a dead parrot.
The shopkeeper actually argues with him and says,
"No, no, no. The parrot is only stunned."
And in what has become a now famous rant,
John Cleese says something like this,
"This parrot is as expired.
He's gone to his final rest. He has breathed his last.
If you hadn't nailed him to the perch, he'd be pushing up daisies.
He is off the twig. His metabolic processes are now history.
He has run, shuffled off his mortal coil, run down the curtain
and joined the bleeding choir invisible. This is an ex-parrot."
(Laughter)
Okay, it’s a little bit funnier when delivered with the British accent,
but you get the idea.
All of those phrases strung together, it sounds a little bit ridiculous,
because truly all of those remind us that "dead" is "dead."
Now, I have been a rabbi for nearly 12 years.
And in that time, I have officiated at countless funerals
and memorial services.
And in all of that time, I really, really thought about the words that I used
and the way that I referred to the deceased,
and the way that I used phrases like "passed away" or "lost,"
but I never truly understood how those words were heard
through the ears of a child
until I was faced with that in my own house.
You see, after Sam died,
my husband and I were left picking up the pieces
not only of our own grief but that of our three living children.
And in particular, I had to really watch
what I had said around Solomon, my youngest,
who was at the time a very precocious three years old.
You see, we discovered that Solomon’s primary understanding of death
comes from The Lion King.
Now in case you haven’t seen The Lion King ever or lately,
let me tell you Simba’s father Mufasa dies early on in the movie.
This should be a very useful reference for teaching a child about death, right?
Except - and I apologize if you've never seen the movie -
except near the end of the film
Mufasa appears to Simba in a ghostly vision in the sky,
and the ghostly vision even talks.
So if Mufasa can come back, why not Sammy?
In fact, I think Solomon’s exact words were,
"When will I see Sammy like Mufasa, in the sky?"
We discovered that Solomon’s second frame of reference
in regard to death, was the video game.
Yes, even the simplest, most benign of video games
when your character doesn't make it, when he doesn't complete the level,
what do you say? "He died."
And then, you hit that reset button,
start over,
and there he is, alive as ever.
Oh, I'm just getting started.
Really think about all of the phrases that you've ever used to talk about death,
and then hear them through the ears of a young child.
"- He's not here.
- Okay, so when he comes back, can we go to the park?"
"- He is gone.
- Okay, so can we talk to him? Can we call him? Can we FaceTime him?"
"- When we lost Sammy...
- Oh, let’s go find him!"
"- He is always with you.
- Where? Where? I don’t see him anywhere."
It seems as though we've actually run out of excuses,
trying to explain to Solomon where Sammy is.
It’s hard enough to explain death at all,
but even harder when you start to hear all of the expressions that we use.
Now let's be honest here.
Politicians use euphemism all the time to talk about things
that they don’t want to talk about.
We might say someone is "let go," when we mean "fired."
"Casualties of war" might become "collateral damage."
The list goes on and on of the things that we just don’t want to talk about,
and death is at the top of that list.
Death isn't something that we talk about in polite company.
We talk around it instead of about it.
We're so confounded by the idea of death,
we just don’t know what to do.
So what is that?
Are we really so scared of the words "dead, death, dying"
that we can’t say them out loud?
It seems like it.
We do spend an awful lot of our time trying to avoid it.
But, on the other hand,
we talk about death all the time.
"I almost died laughing" you might have said
if I had used a British accent for the Monty Python’s sketch.
Or "I was scared to death."
Or "This chocolate eclair is so good,
I think I've died and gone to heaven."
And then there's this one: "My phone died."
And then of course we make it a little bit worse.
We say, "Is it dead dead?" and what does that mean?
Of course, it means, "Did your phone actually cease to function?
Do you honestly need to go out and get a brand new one?"
or as you probably mean,
"Do you need to plug it in to a charging cable
and there in a few hours, you'll have it again,
good as new, alive as ever?"
I bet you said it today.
And when you hear a phrase like that you really begin to think about it.
Because let’s go back to my son Solomon for a minute.
Oh, he knows all about those dead phones.
He knows how to plug those things in and make them work,
so that he can play Subway Surfer on my phone.
It really makes you think about the things that you say,
because then he said to us,
“If we can plug the phone in again, can't we just plug Sammy in?”
And so I begin to consider and think about the words that I use;
the way that I speak, teach, and act;
my entire collected body of language.
"Dead" is "dead."
"My phone is out of battery charge."
It’s hard to choose those words,
just as it's hard to say that my eight-year-old son "died."
He didn't "pass away," and I didn't "lose" him.
He died.
When I say that, I watch people; they stiffen and try to turn away.
They can’t believe that I've just said that,
that I've used those words.
But the truth is real
and no amount of euphemism can change it.
No amount of euphemistic thinking or magical ideas
can bring him back to me,
can undo that ultimate done deal that is death.
"Dead" is "dead."
And I'm not trying to be harsh, I'm really not.
I truly believe
that using a direct and respectful way of talking about death
can help to erase some of the taboos around the subject.
It’s not giving power to death to speak its name.
In fact, I believe that shrouding and clouding death
in pretty sugar-coated phrases
actually can increase fear and mystery,
and hence sometimes even make it harder to heal.
"Dead" is "dead,"
and the words that we say matter
in every aspect of both life and death.
Thank you.
(Applause)