Birth, Death and Allowing the Natural Processes to Run Their Course
Ever so slowly, over the past six months or so, I’ve been reading Kathyn Mannix’s book, With the End in Mind. It’s not the only book written by someone who works in palliative care about the lessons from that, but what I can tell you is: it’s a powerful one.
Mannix’s reflections, from decades of working with people as they die, is that we used to know about death. But as advances in medicine meant that people went to hospital when they got ill, people died less and - when they did - they died somewhere else. For both reasons, we stopped seeing death around us in our lives.
And so our expectations of death don’t match the reality of death for most people.
The deaths we see are on television - either on the news, always following the biggest disaster, always focusing on the unusual; or in a drama, literally created for dramatic effect.
They do not, she explains, reflect the reality of normal dying.
The slow process that almost everyone goes through, which she describes in her TEDx talks and in her book. Knowing the reality of this often, she says, eases the pain, worry and fear for a person approaching death and for their loved ones. It won’t require facing up to extreme pain, for example, for most people. It will be unexpectedly peaceful at the very end, instead.
Juxtaposed with this reading, my wife and I returned recently to the Positive Birth Company’s hypnobirthing course. And I was struck by the symmetry and the similar story that the company’s founder, Siobhan Miller, tells in that course.
The course, by the way, is my wife and my first thought every time someone we know tells us they are expecting a baby. And as we returned to it for the second time, having also taken it in the run up to our first daughter’s birth, I paused it and turned to Emma and said something like, ‘How has this woman not got an MBE or something? This is extraordinary stuff and about an incredibly important part of everyone’s life. She is literally changing lives, two at a time, with every course people take.’
Miller explains that most of us have - as Mannix says about death - a distorted view on what birth is and can be. Built from horror stories (mostly told by our friends, not the news, but also following humans’ tendency to share bad news stories) and television, where everything from giving birth on your back to when waters break to all the pushing and screaming isn’t (or doesn’t have to be) how the - again, totally natural - process of birth unfolds.
More than that, the Positive Birth Company’s view is that if a woman expects it to be a pain-filled nightmare (and of course some people do have really difficult births), her body will tense up, generate stress hormones, resist the process of birth and make it more likely that she has a pain-filled nightmare. The fear increases the chance of what is feared happening.
Instead, the possibility is that women’s bodies are designed for childbirth, ready for the magic to occur.
It’s interesting to reflect on the things we used to know that we don’t know.
It’s interesting to notice how the incredible medical advances do, in the end, also cause problems.
How we need to return to what we knew before with what we know now, integrate both, use both.
Transcend and include the medical world and the world before that, where people in our communities (usually in both cases, I imagine, wise women) knew about and guided the processes of death and birth (and they still do, as thousands of midwives prove every week).
Don’t believe what you see on the news - it isn’t an accurate picture of reality.
Don’t believe what you see in a drama - it’s created to entertain not to educate.
Inside all of this, is one of the most fundamental lessons of personal transformation: that our expectations and how we choose to see reality affects how we experience it.
Sometimes in the creation of extra worry and anxiety at an already incredibly difficult time.
Sometimes increasing the likelihood that the things we fear happen.
You can’t change everything. Some people will have experiences of childbirth that are painful. Some people will die horrible deaths.
But most of us can expect these processes to run their natural course, as they have for millennia.
And in knowing that, we have the opportunity to make our experiences of each fulfilling, inspiring.
Beautiful, even.
—
This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.
Subscribe to this blog here
Read the archive here.
The 12-Minute Method series of books, written 12 minutes a week over three years, is out now!