A review of ‘Death’s summer coat’ by Brandy Shillace
Amongst the most unusual questions I have ever been asked as a Baptist Minister is whether or not I “do deaths and that”. The answer to the question is that I do. In my role it falls to me to sit with both the dying and the grieving. I find myself frequently admitted to the innermost circle of grief when it has shrunk to the person dying and their closest family, or simply that person and their professional carers. This confined space is a privileged place to be, and in it we see humanity in its rawest form.
Dr Schillace has been there too, both as an academic and a human being. Her academic acumen and historical analysis is plain for every reader to see, but so is her warm humanity. In a journey which takes us from the sky burials of Tibet to the jewelled skulls of Bolivia and from memorial tattoos where the ink is mixed with the ashes of the dead to the questions surrounding digital legacy on Facebook – we actually start and end with her own family. The mixture of the analytical and the personal is part of what makes the book so readable. This is not a detached and mawkish analysis of death, nor is it an indulgent exercise in auto-counselling.
For Shillace we live in an age where we are caught between the twin polarities of immortality and disposability. Unable to reconcile the two, we may be even less able than our ancestors to articulate what we feel about death. ‘Death denial is a privilege’ , she says – with characteristic candour. She does not hold back on the reality of losses :
Such losses are more like amputations. We carry them always; the world is changed after loss. And so it should be. The challenge is how to respond properly to that change.
Readers will find that the book’s center of gravity leans more towards America than the UK, and more towards the medical than the spiritual. I found that neither of these troubled me, though. More than anything else this book is a plea that we should have a conversation about death and dying. Those who have heard me talk about it on the radio and from the pulpit will know that I could not agree more.