GUEST POST: Muffled by a metaphor

There was one discordant element in my nine-year-old son’s marked homework assignment. The task had been to write a description of his school journal. My son’s journal is covered in pictures of everything meaningful to
him, from his beloved green jacket, to the Pokémon characters he adores, to photographs of his immediate family. Until recently, his family consisted of his father and me, his sister, his grandparents, and his aunt Tanya. Just over a year ago, however, everything changed. His aunt – my only sibling – died tragically when I was heavily pregnant, and our new baby girl was born just three weeks later.“The photos include my gorgeous, adorable baby sister, and my dead aunt Tanya,” my son had written in his report. When I first read these words, I was touched. The love he has for his baby sister – his description of her as gorgeous and adorable – nearly brought tears to my eyes. And I saw nothing inappropriate about “dead aunt”. After all, Tanya is dead. She was dearly loved, and is horribly missed, but unfortunately she is no longer living. She has died.

His teacher, however, did not agree. When the homework was returned, there was a circle of bright red pen enclosing the words “dead aunt”. Underneath this circle was a resolute arrow pointing to replacement wording, written in her own hand: “my aunt who sadly passed away”. This, she clearly believed, was a description more fitting to a person who is not alive.

Noticing the teacher’s correction, I was distressed, to say the least. Why on earth were my son’s words altered? As far as I knew, there was nothing grammatically incorrect about the term ‘dead aunt’. We say ‘dead man’, ‘dead flower’, ‘dead fish’ – why not ‘dead aunt’? It seemed obvious that the teacher’s objection to the phrase had nothing at all to do with grammar, nor the spelling of the words, which was perfect. Her objection reflected her own
discomfort with the bluntness of my son’s language. This reference to death, stark on the page, unmitigated by metaphor, was too much for her to bear.

I gently raised the topic with my son later that afternoon. “I noticed the teacher corrected those words,” I said. Before I could even tell him that it was okay, that he hadn’t done anything wrong, he mumbled, chastened, “I know, I know, I’ll fix it!” His discomfort made me even more angry. Why should he be made to feel ashamed of mentioning his aunt in the ‘wrong’ way? He loved her deeply, and was profoundly affected by her death. He rarely talks about her to anyone outside of the family (unlike my elder daughter who talks incessantly about her), and I found it very poignant that out of all the people pictured in his book, he mentioned only the baby and his aunt in
his writing.

My son’s teacher is a lovely person, and I do not believe she intended in any way to be insensitive. Her response to his words seems to me to reflect a societal, rather than personal, prejudice against certain references to death. However, the replacement phrase she chose did carry a subtle judgement. The implication was that my son was being disrespectful to his aunt’s memory, by failing to acknowledge the sadness of her death. More specifically,
the implication was that thinking of Tanya should always make him feel sad.

My son does not need reminding of the tragedy of Tanya’s death. He has lived the grief. He misses her terribly. But if he can speak of her, think of her, write about her without pain – if he can remember her with pleasure – then all the better. That is how we want him to think of her. That’s what she would have wanted too.

Why do we need euphemisms for death? Why do we need euphemisms at all? I was raised in a family that spoke plainly, and I have raised my own children in the same way. They don’t go ‘nigh nigh’ – they go to bed. They don’t have ‘pee pees’ or ‘front bottoms’ – they call their body parts by their proper names. When my youngest daughter
was born, she was born. And when my sister Tanya died, she died. My two older children have experienced death – they have lost a great-grandfather and an aunt – but they have never heard the term ‘passed away’. It’s not a term we use.

Who are we protecting when we use metaphors? Does the term ‘passed away’ alleviate the pain of death? I wonder if the teacher was attempting to protect my son from reality, or if she was trying to protect herself. Reading about a ‘dead aunt’ is hard; it conjures up all sorts of brutal images. ‘Passing away’ is much gentler and easier on the emotions, implying a peaceful transition from living to not living. My sister’s death, however, being
sudden and shocking, was most definitely not peaceful. Even if I did use the term, I wouldn’t use it in regard to her.

My son may have enjoyed discussing his aunt with his teacher, but the chance for that was lost the second the red pen hit the paper. At the very least, even without a dialogue, he would have benefitted from knowing that his teacher had read his description without unease. My children need to know that it is okay to talk or write about people who have died, that the dead  are still in our lives via our thoughts and our memories, and that other people are strong enough to deal with it.

Of course, language is rich and colourful and I’m not advocating a world in which everything has one name only
and thesauruses become extinct. Phrases such as ‘kicked the bucket’, ‘met his maker’, ‘the big chill’… all have different connotations and add flavour and depth to our descriptions and interactions. But we shouldn’t be afraid of speaking plainly. We shouldn’t need to speak in metaphors. And we shouldn’t back away from other people speaking the truth.

I wish that this story had a noble ending. I wish I had confronted the teacher and been honest about my frustration and disappointment. But it wasn’t that simple. I did write a letter. I explained that my son hadn’t heard the term ‘passed away’ – that in our family, we use the term ‘died’, and that what he had written was natural and appropriate
for him. However, I told her that, should she prefer it, I would suggest to my son that he might use the term ‘late aunt’ in future. I guess I was afraid of being too confronting. I guess I was afraid of hurting her feelings.

In the end, I, too, turned to metaphor.