We just got back from vacation. It was a week filled with laughter, fun, but not as one anticipates a vacation to roll out, with calamity and tears. One remarkable event was getting word that my husband’s aunt had passed unexpectedly.

“Unexpected death” is such a strange term for when someone passes who has not been in what hospice has labeled “active dying,” which is also an odd phrase. Technically, death is always expected, although our journey is different at every age. Children don’t believe they will die. When in their thirties and forties, young adults don’t expect to die. The older you are, the more likely you are to expect it, and when you expect it, it is much more likely.

Last year, when we were on a spring vacation, my sister passed. It took me entirely by surprise, yet it was anticipated at some point for someone who had spent most of her life playing for people’s sympathies by manifesting illnesses. Still, I felt and heard a rumble rise from the depths of my soul as an instant sign of processing this news.

The business of death and dying is incestuous in the sense that it has become a network of organizations dependent on people passing and resistant to new ideas outside their group. Since the early days of passing and being buried before sundown of that same day, dying has become an often long, drawn-out affair that plays on people’s emotions. Even in the days of early burials, women were forced to show their mourning for a year by wearing black and wearing a widow’s ring, both of which were also money makers and cultural rules of control.

My mother’s passing was the first funeral for which I had sole responsibility. She wanted something simple; if people wanted to see her, they should have come to see her while she was alive. I tend to hold that same view. On the other hand, those on this side look for means of closure, of entertaining the beginnings of grief and growing through the experience, so while we didn’t have “visiting hours,” we had a church service. A new charge was added to the final bill each time my mother was moved.

Hospice and palliative care exist to provide an experience of kindness, comfort, and other support while a loved one is dying or preparing to die. As hospice care slowly gained traction, organizations realized it could be a money maker. With that growth mindset also came structure and rules.

In the long run, life includes death and dying. There isn’t anything that wasn’t once living, and within everything, there is God, so it makes sense that we would privately ponder death, but it doesn’t make sense that we fear it and are resistant to talking about it. Leaving this planet is a fact of life. It’s sad for those left behind, but the better we understand it, the more likely we will accept it, and our passing will benefit from that understanding.