It has been a few years since I had a Monday Mourning post, but then I started the 2020 Quarantine Book Club on Facebook, and one of the authors in the group wrote a book about the death of her spouse, so I figured I’d see if she would be willing to answer the standard questions I used to ask everyone. And she said yes!
Billie Best is the author of “How I Made a Huge Mess of My Life (or Couples Therapy with a Dead Man)” an uplifting memoir that dives deep into the power of women in midlife. With poignant humor and brutal honesty, she takes on her broken marriage, cheating, grief, death, downsizing, starting over, and learning to age well.
Who was the person that died?
My husband, Chet.
How old were you at the time?
I was 54.
How old was Chet?
He was 54.
Was it a sudden death or did you know it was going to happen?
He was diagnosed in June 2008 with Stage 4 lung cancer, and after 5 months of chemo and one month of hospice, he died in January 2009.
Did you and Chet ever talk about death?
We talked about death often from the time of his diagnosis to the time of his death. For several years we had lived on a livestock farm where we raised and killed cows and chickens. We discussed how our animals should be killed, we saw good deaths and bad deaths. We had seen my father-in-law die a miserable death, even though he was in hospice, because he refused to discuss his own death and left it to his wife to decide his care. His wife felt death was intended to be a punishment for all we do wrong in life, so she thought it morally just to withhold pain medication from her husband. The memory of his father humiliated by death, writhing in pain on his death bed, had a huge impact on my husband. He knew he wanted to die with dignity.
During the months before his death Chet researched the many ways of dying and celebrating death. He decided that death was the completion of the cycle of life and must be like birth in reverse. He insisted we put as much planning into his death as we put into our wedding and we did. He forbade me to dial 911. He didn’t want to go to the hospital or be in a body bag. He planned to be naked, wrapped in a white sheet in his cremation casket. He thought if he calmed himself and embraced the process of dying that it would be like falling asleep. He made me promise that after he died only people who loved him would handle his body. He didn’t want to be shipped around like lost luggage and kept in cold storage. He wanted to be kept at home from the time he died until he went to the crematory for his cremation. I promised I would honor his wishes.
What neither of us could have foreseen is that he would die on a Friday afternoon at the beginning of a three-day holiday weekend. In order to honor his wishes, I would need to keep his dead body in our home for five days. Having my husband’s corpse in the house made death feel normal. The spirituality of the initial dying ebbed, and he was just a man, cold as stone in a room with the windows open and the winter breeze blowing through. I learned that death is ordinary. As ordinary as birth. As easy as sleep. Just as he imagined.
Had you experienced any other deaths in your personal life before Chet died?
My husband and I had experienced the deaths of grandparents, as well as his father. Also, my grandparents and great-grandparents had operated a family funeral home business in the small town where they lived. As a kid I played hide-and-seek with my brothers in the casket showroom. My mother told us stories about styling the hair on corpses her father had embalmed. And my grandmother told us stories about playing tricks on her father, my great-grandfather, by moving the arms and legs of corpses he was embalming. Death was the family business, so it was natural for them to make jokes about it. Interestingly, most of them chose to be cremated.
Were people supportive of your grief or did they shy away from you when you were grieving?
People were very supportive of my grief. After Chet died, I invited friends to visit him at our house, we had a party for him, played music and read him poetry. For the people who experienced his dead body in the same place where they had enjoyed dinner with him, sat on the couch with him, watched movies with him, it was a revelation. We were busting taboos, completing the circle of life and embracing the inevitable. It felt radical to have a dead body in the house, and yet once we were all there together celebrating, it felt natural.
Is there anything you wish you'd done differently with this person?
There are many, many things I wish I had done differently with my husband before he died. But that is the story of my marriage, not his death. His death was a beautiful experience.
Was Chet buried or cremated? He was cremated.
Did you learn anything about the grieving process you'd like to share?
Grief is forever. I kept thinking I would get over it, outgrow it, cure myself of it, distract myself from it, forget it, move far enough away from the past to be out of reach of grief. But it’s always there inside me, seen or unseen. At first it was overwhelming, then it sat like a dark cloud over my life, now it drifts in and out of my experience, but it is always there, near or distant, silent or awakened, and I have accepted that it is part of me.
Were any songs played at the memorial service that were important to Chet?
On the day of Chet’s memorial service I had a dinner for 100 people at the farm and afterward we spread his ashes on the land while a bagpipe player stood on the hill above the barnyard and played Amazing Grace. Chet had always loved the mournful moan of bagpipes, and to hear it echoing around us as we took fistfuls of his ashes and sprinkled them about is one of my most treasured memories of the whole experience.
Billie with Chet. Photo by Jason Houston
Thank you Billie Best for sharing your experience on the Monday Mourning blog. It is not easy to talk about death and grief, so I am grateful for your willingness to share your story. We don’t always know what to say when someone is talking about the death of someone they love. So, if you’re here and you don’t comment, please hit the “like” button so we at least know you read the post.
If you’re still here, I have an added bonus for Memorial Day. My book Death Becomes Us, is FREE on Kindle today 5/25/2020. While you’re there, pick up a copy of Billie’s book. I’ve read it and it’s really good!
The 2020 Quarantine Book Club will be interviewing Billie about her book on 7/9/20 at 5pm CST, so if you’ll like to join us, join the Facebook Club.
If you’d like to take part in a future Monday Mourning post and share your experience with my readers, reach out to me! I am also looking for women of a certain age to interview about perimenopause/menopause for my newest blog, The Pause.
Last, but certainly not least, help me save the USPS. I bought a TON of stamps and if you sign up for my newsletter, I will send you some swag (stickers, bookmarks and now buttons!) from my debut novel Forever 51.