But Death Seems “So Far Away”: Life Lessons From Two Very Different Paths of Parental Loss

Each of us will, eventually, die. But before we do, each of us will experience the deaths of individuals that we love. Yet, we all have a tendency to deny this fact; we put off discussions with our families about our wishes for our own end of life, and we put off discussions with our families about their wishes for their own end of life. From this almost universal human tendency for avoidance comes the titular phrase of Christine Hartmann’s gripping memoir of her own parents’ deaths, inspired in part by her parents’ tendencies to put off such conversations with her, noting that the time was “so far away.” Dr. Hartmann, a health services researcher and social worker, has written a gripping memoir of her strongly contrasting but equally tragic experiences with the deaths of each of her parents: the 20-year burden of her foreknowledge of her healthy mother’s planned and then completed suicide as preemption-of-illness near the age of 70, followed by her father’s unexpected descent from healthy recent retiree to profoundly disabled nursing home resident due to a series of serious strokes. After her parents’ divorce, Hartmann and her brother grew up with their father, whereas their mother lived within walking distance and called the children daily. Early in the book, Hartmann references the plight of families facing the loss of someone they love, stating, “Family members of dying loved ones can cling to hope to stave off a sense of overwhelming doom” (p. 93). Her parents’ approach to advance care planning, aging, potential frailty, and death were diametrically opposed. Her mother, Irmgard, was very purposeful and organized, streamlining her life and possessions in methodical order as the date of her planned suicide approached. An intellectualizer with high need for control, Irmgard studied a copy of Derek Humphrey’s Final Exit (1991) and formed detailed plans. It is curious and upsetting that Irmgard chose to share her plan for suicide with her daughter so far in advance, and it is a testament to the author’s storytelling skill that throughout the narrative she both acknowledges the truth in the reader’s inevitable horror and anger that a mother would burden her daughter in this way, and also acknowledges her own strong need to protect her mother. Thus, Hartmann shares how she lived with this knowledge for nearly 20 years, attempting at times to dissuade her mother from the plan, negating her own feelings and reactions in an attempt to maintain close attachment to her mother, and fearing that not accepting the plan would cause her mother to distance irreparably. She also is successful in creating for the reader a three-dimensional understanding of Irmgard: a loving, even doting mother; a strong, clever, incredibly disciplined, and astoundingly stubborn woman; a woman with a perhaps problematic commitment to logic and rationality, and a troubling ability to cut herself off from those she judged to no longer fit into her life; a woman with much admiration and respect for her daughter, a close friend and confidante to her daughter. Indeed, some of the most beautiful and emotionally wrenching passages in this book describe the time spent together by mother and daughter in Irmgard’s final days. Ultimately, Hartmann describes how, through her efforts with a psychotherapist, she is able to reconcile and share her own experience of