What my mother taught me about death

As a student walking the halls of TU Delft, death may be the last thing on your mind. You have your whole life ahead of you. But lately, with all the atrocities of war and climate anxiety, perhaps it has been pushed to the forefront.

While death is one of the few certainties of life, it is still one of the hardest things to talk about. Even in a country often seen as pragmatic about the end of life, death remains hard to discuss in everyday life. And at a university, like TU Delft, where so much is built around deadlines, solutions and productivity, there may be even less room for it.

I was fortunate enough to have a mother who taught me how to live with the reality of death long before I had words for it.

She grew up in Kimberly, South Africa, in the ’60s. They didn’t have much, but she found ways to enjoy life. She would hide behind bushes and spray strangers with water from syringes. Once, she and her friend dressed up in her old grandfathers’ coat and frightened her little sister so badly she peed in her pants.

But for all the light she gave to the world, she also lived close to death.

At 18, her best friend was killed in a car accident

At 18, her best friend was killed in a car accident. Just before they drove off, they switched seats. A truck hit the side of the car where my mother had been sitting. Her friend was killed on impact. There is no logic to this, just the brutal truth that she died so my mother didn’t have to.

Later, as a nurse, my mother lost patients. She lost friends to suicide, gunshots, disease. She lost both her parents before I was born. Eventually, she lost her sister too. I remember being a child at the kitchen table while funeral plans were being discussed and asking, “What happens when Beryl dies?” My mother took my hand and said, “My baby, Beryl is already dead.” She made talking about death open.

I understood this more deeply when our dog died. Overnight, grief became visceral: the cold place at the end of the bed where her warm body used to lie, the silence where her paws used to tap across the floor, the dryness of my hand where she used to lick my palm. And still, I was able to mourn. I cried, I wrote, I let myself feel the loss. Looking back, I think my mother prepared me for this. She showed me that grief is not something to rush through or hide from. Loss is part of love, and therefore part of life.

My mother taught me that talking about death doesn’t resolve its pain. It only makes that pain easier to bear with others. At a place like TU Delft, where so much value is put on solving, building and performing, perhaps one thing we can do as a community is to admit that some things cannot be solved, only shared.