I am watching my father die.

And that’s o.k.

Yesterday I walked in and found him asleep in the hospital bed hospice had delivered to the house earlier that day. They'd put it in the family room rather than the bedroom. Jan, the wonderful nurse, explained that he would be less isolated that way. My original bourgeois recoil at the thought of this violation of household decorum shrank in the face of her logic. How can he be right out here where everyone can see him?, I had thought to myself. He's dying, for crying out loud.

Well, yes. That's exactly the point. People die, and we don't need to hide that fact. But in the United States, we're pulling out of nearly a century of trying to do exactly that. People used to die at home, same place they were born, before both of those processes became medicalized in the early twentieth century and moved into hospitals. At that point we began to lose our familiarity with death as a natural process. At the same time advances in public services like water treatment drastically lowered both infant mortality and adult death from cholera and other diseases. In fact, around 1917, one magazine trumpeted our total victory over death, and urged people to turn the "parlor" of their home into the "living room," to signify that we no longer needed to that place where we’d traditionally laid out the corpse for viewing. There would be no more corpses was our optimistic American Dream.

Of course shortly after that one of the worst flu epidemics in modern times originated right here in the United States and then swept all over the globe, decimating millions. In spite of this, though, we continued to bury, if you will, the domestic mourning rituals and deaths that had made our mortality so visible, so homely, for all of preceding history.

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross was one of the visionaries who started to change this for us. She noticed that doctors had no training or skill in speaking to the dying about death. Seeking to redress this, she approached the administrators at Brigham and Women's Hospital. "I'd like to speak to the terminal patients," she said. "We don't have any," was the reply.

At this moment Kubler-Ross discovered a crucial dynamic in modern medicine: its view of death as a failure of the system. We had become so focused on controlling nature, and had experienced such apparent successes, that the most basic fact of mortality had become a problem to solve rather than a reality to embrace.

We're still trying. But we haven't solved it yet. So slowly, and surely, and messily (Terri Schiavo anyone?) we accept death as inevitable, and seek to alter its course off of the machines and out of the institutions that would prevent it unnecessarily and steer it back towards the home where it should logically reside.

This movement towards home death, facilitated by organizations like hospice who give those of us now clueless with the realities of death all the information and support that we need to walk through it, brings human mortality back into visibility. I remember when my grandmother died in the 1970s in Southern California, I was only allowed into intensive care for a brief moment to say goodbye. Minors were officially excluded, and it was incredibly alienating to be parked in the sterile hospital hallway only to be ushered in for an awkward, quick, “goodbye I love you grandma.” Hiding death from children, denying its inevitability as adults, is one effect of "progress" that we would do well to transcend. I will invite my father’s grandchildren to his bedside to spend all the time they wish with him.

It was hard seeing my father lying so close to death yesterday—really hard. His decline has been sudden. Dad's hands were pulled tightly up against his chest, his skin was yellow, his breathing shallow. I was shocked by the changes and by the reality of what I was seeing, right there in the family room. And I knew exactly what to do. I dropped into the nearest chair and sobbed. I kept sobbing for the next hour or so. I cried so hard I retched.

It's called grief, this sobbing, and I learned how to do it when my mom died. We live in a “don’t cry” culture, but at that time I realized that far from being inappropriate, grief is the visible manifestation of all the love you carry for someone. When you lose that love, it hurts like hell, and all of our cultural attempts to prevent us from doing the grieving that should come naturally at this time seem to me a disparagement of the most beautiful aspect of all creation.

It makes no more sense to force a dying man to live than it does to prevent the people who love him from grieving.

So let dying people die. Bring them home to do it. And then let people cry. Let yourself cry. Quit saying "she's in a better place" to someone who has just had her heart ripped out. Instead say "this must be incredibly painful." Because it is. It should be.

And that's o.k.

I love you dad.