The Damage of the “Good Death” Ideal

I’ve been seeing a lot of language around the idea that a “good death” has common characteristics. I find this language to be harmful and damaging. For me personally, my loved ones didn’t have the privilege of a “good death” and labels like “good death” feel like moral judgements that don’t make my grief any easier to carry. What about those of us whose beloved died of overdose? Or acts of violence? Our kids who died by accident? Those we love who died by suicide? Even elderly grandparents who died alone though it wasn’t what they wanted or died in agonizing pain or died in a hospital bed while the family fought about who should make their medical decisions? These aren’t bad deaths, these are my deaths. These are my memories. These are my beloved and the grief I carry isn’t lightened or lessened by moral judgement about what their deaths should or could have been.

Good/bad are labels that have no place here. Death is holy. Death is transcendent. Death is a face of God, the shadow that ripples across the Blessed Mother as we turn in this cycle.

Last year, I companioned a family with a newborn on hospice. When they turned toward each other in their grief, I held their dying baby. We did every single thing we could to ease his sweet transition but there was NO THING GOOD about his death. But it was unbearably holy.

My elderly friend who articulated every last wish to a willing and supportive care team had one priority: no pain. Despite hospice’s beautiful work and every attempt by family, Death was ushered in by agonizing pain. Please don’t put a simple moral judgement on the holy work we did together, it was beyond good or bad.

My grandmother didn’t get a “good death” nor did my grandfather or my godmother or my favorite cousin who was hit by a car when he was 9. Labels have no place here. Moral judgements feel harmful to me, like trying to control something as big as the cycles of the moon. What is helpful to me is knowing that my grief matters. My loved ones deaths were holy and divine and blessed, even where they were violent or sudden or excruciating. And I doubt I’m alone.