CALEB WILDE is familiar with death. He is the descendant of two long-term generational funeral home families and went into the funeral industry himself. His first book, Confessions of a Funeral Director, delved into some of the more uplifting stories he’s had in death care. His latest book, All the Ways Our Dead Still Speak, is more introspective.
The early chapters detail a few death experiences — an atheist seeing the dead parents of her husband as he dies, for instance — and at first, that’s what I thought the book would be about: exploring what people’s deathbed visions meant to them, regardless of whether those visions were real. But for Wilde, that’s missing the point. What matters is that the dead are still speaking to us. Death isn’t necessarily an end, Wilde argues — it’s a transformative experience; the living carry inside us the essence and dreams of the dead. Open conversations about death and dying can lead to a healthier society.
Wilde specifically calls out white people, his ancestry and mine, for being disconnected from their ancestors. He cites the difference between the polite, private, quiet funerals of white people versus the communal, intensive, emotional funerals of Black people. Many white people believe that grief is a personal, private journey. However, in many Black families and cultures all over the world, grief is a communal process. People come together to remember, love, and support each other. In these times, they cease to become individual selves and instead focus on the plural self — on community: A community of people both dead and alive.
In writing this book, Wilde had to speak to his own ancestors, too. As he points out, this is a particularly difficult task for white Americans — not only are we disconnected from our own ancestors, but our ancestry often hides the horrors of racism, colonialism, slavery, genocide, and displacement that we helped perpetrate. Wilde speaks wisdom into this: “Human history is messy. Our descendants won’t be able to remove themselves from their ancestors any more than we can. But we can change. And if we change, we’re changing our ancestors too. ... When we decide to become better, more compassionate, more equitable people, we bring our ancestors along with us.”
As someone who was born and raised in the white, evangelical South, it’s difficult to imagine my ancestors empowering me in any journey for social justice, especially racial justice. I’ve tried to ignore the perspectives of relatives who are still alive, much less the ones who have long been dead. However, All the Ways Our Dead Still Speak makes me want to hear them. Remembering our ancestors — both the good and the bad in them — is a loving act.
“Love is the seed of eternal life, and it’s also the dirt, water, and sun that keeps it growing,” writes Wilde, who before writing this book had started to suspect that belief in the afterlife was merely a coping mechanism. Now, he believes eternal life “isn’t just some static dimension that exists after death ... Eternal life is love in process.”
While searching for that version of eternal life while we’re still alive, we can seek out the wisdom of the past. We don’t have to let the dead die twice.
Jennifer C. Martin is a writer living in Richmond, Va., whose work focuses on religion, culture, and sexuality.
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