Death's Summer Coat E-Book

Brandy Schillace

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 342

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

A new conversation is starting on this most universal of topics. But to know where we are heading, we need to know where we have come from... Death is the one subject we will all confront; it touches our families, our homes, our hearts. And yet we have grown used to denying its existence, treating it as an enemy to be beaten back with medical advances. What led us to this point - what drove us to sanitize death and make it foreign and unfamiliar? In Death's Summer Coat Brandy Schillace explores our past to examine what it might mean for our future. From Victorian Britain to contemporary Cambodia, forgotten customs and modern-day rituals, we learn about the incredibly diverse - and sometimes just incredible - ways in which humans have dealt with mortality in different times and places. Today, as we begin to talk about mortality, there are difficult questions to face. What does it mean to have a 'good death'? What should a funeral do? As Schillace shows, talking about death and the rituals associated with it can help to provide answers. It also brings us closer together. And conversation and community are just as important for living as for dying. Some of the stories are strikingly unfamiliar; others are far more familiar than you might suppose. But all reveal a lot about the present - and about ourselves. It's time to meet the new (old) death . It's time to meet the new (old) death. As seen reviewed in The Guardian in the article Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty review - startling stories from the crematorium

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Introduction: Meet the New (Old) Death

Chapter 1: Dead and Knowing It

Chapter 2: Eat Your Dead (and Other Advice)

Chapter 3: Through a Glass, Darkly

Chapter 4: Dying Victorian: Memento Mori, Hair Jewellery and Crape

Chapter 5: Death at the Anatomy Theatre

Chapter 6: Death and the Doctor

Chapter 7: Death Comes to Dinner

Epilogue: Beginning at the End

Notes

Index

Introduction

MEET THE NEW (OLD) DEATH

Why a book like this one, and why now?

The theatre was box-like, crouched behind razor wire off the strip in Los Angeles. Unremarkable, really; a dust-coloured square barely discernible from the others that dotted Beverly Boulevard under a hot October sun. You weren’t going to miss it, though. There were too many people out front, and nearly everyone – whether in evening attire or metal studs – wore black. A funeral? No, though the Grim Reaper was in attendance (with an actual scythe). A concert? An art show? Not quite. Here, not far from Hollywood, were gathered scholars, morticians, curators and an interested public for the first ‘death cabaret’ – part of the first ever Death Salon. The talks and events showcased something most people rarely, if ever, consider: our own mortality.

We die. We know this, in principle, and yet in the Western world we don’t live with the idea of death. We refrain from thinking about it, we avoid reflecting upon it, and death is something most of us simply don’t talk about. Death Salon is an unusual organisation in that it chooses death as a focus for discussion, but it’s part of an emerging ‘death-positive’ movement, one that includes death cafes and death dinners. These gatherings call for the breaking of taboos, a desire to reclaim ground that has been lost – particularly in the West – during a century and a half of sanitisation and silence. Insulated by their relative wealth, health systems and the successes of hygiene and sterilisation, post-industrial nations have the privilege of a protective screen from unmediated images of death. Even so, these advances cannot ultimately protect us from death itself. It’s time to rejoin the conversation.

Jon Underwood, a former British council worker, founded Death Cafe in 2011, inspired by the ideas of Bernard Crettaz, a Swiss sociologist who began a decade ago to encourage people to talk freely about death. Tea, cake and death are the order of the day, and many new death cafes (not run by Underwood) have sprouted up here and there as places to speak about the inevitable. These mortality meetings tend to create a stir, showing up in blog feeds, on Twitter and Facebook, and in news sites such as the Huffington Post and the New York Times. Even more recently, Kate Granger, a thirty-one-year-old British physician with terminal cancer, has committed to live-tweeting her final moments, and comedian Laurie Kilmartin (a writer for the Conan O’Brien show) live-tweeted her father’s last days in hospice care. But these attempts at making death part of the conversation are not without their problems – and detractors. Some commentators question whether making public these personal events is an appropriate use of social media, while others worry that these are novelty encounters which will ultimately lead to a clichéd sense of death rather than true engagement with it. Regardless of what side you take, these platforms suggest an increasing number of us want to explore death – or, at the very least, to broach the subject.

Why, someone asked recently, are events like Death Salon happening in Europe and the US? Why not elsewhere? To begin with, they are happening elsewhere; death cafes have been held in Hong Kong and in India. In an article entitled ‘Care to Talk About Death Over Coffee?’ the Times of India asked people what they thought of the concept. One respondent, Soma Mukherjee, replied: ‘I don’t know if it will really work here [because] death is discussed from the time the first pet or grand-uncle dies.’ In cultures where death already has a place, where it already appears as a normal and approachable subject, there need be no taboo-breaking. It’s only where we have lost the ability to discuss these subjects openly that we need new perspective.

Of course, in some ways, we are talking. The overwhelming popularity of Mary Roach’s humorous look at what happens after death, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, is a good example. Roach proves that we can learn a lot by studying the hidden, or at least less familiar, practices of the body after death – from bodysnatching to ‘medical’ cannibalism. The dead body, the cadaver, may reveal a lot about anatomy and the functions of the body. The history of those bodies can tell us a great deal about how perspectives have changed. But death in the abstract is a very different thing from death closer to home; it touches our families, our homes, our hearts. Death is a balancing act: we know it will happen to us, to those we love, and yet we live in denial. That denial often leaves us entirely unprepared for the other element of death: grief.

Most of us remember ‘the sex talk’. I got mine early, after catching the neighbours at it. I was five, and met my mother at the door when she got home, demanding to know ‘how it was done’. (I was horrified by the explanation, as most of us probably were.) It has long served as a kind of cultural touchstone in Western society: frequently referred to as ‘the birds and the bees’ or, more ominously, ‘the talk’. But how many of us recall any similar kind of conversation on the subject of death? Or grief? Hospice care provides one means of readying the dying and their families, but more often the mortally sick go to a hospital, where they remain until death. Their bodies are transported from that sterile room to a funeral home, where they are prepared without our knowledge and often without our input. It’s little wonder that discussion of death is taboo. My best friend’s mother, a breast cancer patient, tried repeatedly to talk about the looming possibility of her own death, only to be told that she should not speak of it. It is a strange irony: the last thing we are supposed (or allowed) to do when preparing to meet death is talk about death. Can you imagine the inverse? We would not plan for the birth of a child without addressing the subject of labour. Major events demand adequate preparation – more than that, they require solemnity, significance. These make up our cultural rituals, and rituals have enormous power.

We find ourselves today in a culture of opposites: bent on living forever, but committed to the disposable nature of absolutely everything else. Looking to find meaning isn’t an arbitrary quest: it is the human condition, and rituals are human events that help us find that meaning. While the word itself suggests imagery from religious practice, ritual really refers to behaviour – actions performed with intention and significance. They may be as simple as a handshake or as complex as a rite of passage, but they stand for so much more. Rituals are the fabric of our cultural identities and they enable us to proceed through life’s great moments.

Has something happened to our rituals for death? For dying and for grieving? The silence that currently surrounds mortality is actually comparatively recent. In the death announcements of eighteenth-century Britain and the US, people did not ‘pass on’; they died. Euphemisms were used, too, but not often. Someone might, on occasion, ‘kick the bucket’ (an expression that probably refers to the process of slaughtering hogs) – and in the case of hanged criminals, they might ‘swing home’. But the real push towards euphemisms for death happened later, mainly in the mid to late nineteenth century. This shift can be seen even in the American funeral announcements shown here, which changed the wording in death notices from ‘moulders here’ to ‘slumbers here’ in the space of a decade. References to decay are removed for the more esoteric image of sleep; but why? What changed in Western culture? Fast-forward to the twenty-first century, and our language is even less able to confront the reality of death. We avoid using the word itself, talk in metaphors about ‘brave battles’ and shy away from anything that might remind us of our own mortality. What drove us to sanitise death, and in so doing, make it foreign and unfamiliar?

Death notice from the nineteenth century.

Death notice from the twentieth century.

Eternal or disposable?

Our medical establishment is primarily concerned with prolonging life, not with preparing us for death. Death has become the enemy of medicine, to be fought at all costs, regardless of the situation. This is evident from the various debates about assisted suicide and enforced life support, and legal cases such as that of Terri Schiavo, a woman in a vegetative state whose feeding tube was removed only after seven years, fourteen appeals, five suits in federal district court and a Supreme Court decision. Major companies are investing in ways to prevent the ageing process – Google recently got in on the act with Calico, its biotech subsidiary aiming to ‘cure death’. Ray Kurzweil, an engineer, philosopher and inventor described by Forbes as ‘the ultimate thinking machine’, suggests that advances in nanotechnology will allow humans to live forever. While this sounds far-fetched, it is essentially the ultimate mission of Western medical and scientific research: replacement parts, better genes and the end of all diseases. We have not moved towards the acceptance of death, but rather the erasure of it.

But, as my grandmother was fond of saying, everything dies. Though separated by culture, context and chronicity, all humans must face the coming of death in a way distinct from our nearest mammal cousins. When we witness death, we must grapple with its finality, but also with our own mortality and the knowledge that one day we too will die. Whereas once this was understood as the natural order of things, we now find ourselves conflicted and less willing to see death as ‘natural’. If anything, death breaks into our lives as an unexpected surprise.

Our disavowal of death’s naturalness makes it harder to grieve properly. The Victorians had incredibly complex mourning rituals, including mourning jewellery, photographs of the recently dead (memento mori photography) and the public wearing of mourning clothing. Like birth, death was a social event that drew communities together. In a large city, scarcely a day would go by without some sign of bereavement being visible. Compare this with today, when illness and death are either hidden away in hospitals or sensationalised through popular culture, and when prolonged grief is likely to be medicated as abnormal rather than openly acknowledged as an inevitable part of life. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a Swiss-American psychiatrist, developed her theory of the five stages of grief in 1969 as a response to the lack of information on death and dying in the curriculum of medical schools – but even these stages hardly cover the enormous range of emotions that accompany death, and they certainly weren’t a plan for how to go about the process of grieving.

Religious service and practice once provided a universal framework for dealing with and understanding death; they still do, of course, but for many people today, these traditions don’t reflect their beliefs and experience, and little has replaced them. In a 2011 article for Prospect magazine (‘Death Becomes Us’), Sarah Murray addresses the plight of her atheist father; he believed fervently that humans were but organic matter, but nonetheless wanted his ashes to be spread in a churchyard. His desire was not a return to belief, but rather, as the author writes, recognition that ‘dismissing the significance of “organic matter” is not that easy’. We long for a permanence of ‘things’ and places to grieve. This is just as true in the wake of great tragedies such as the 2005 London bombings, the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight M-17 or the collapse of the Twin Towers. Our need to grieve can become explosive if kept inside us. It needs an outlet. Otherwise, where are we to put all that sadness? Or – to put it another way – what are we to do with ourselves?

In the relentless rush and hurry of modern life, too often death comes like an unplanned interruption. But the world keeps moving on, swift in its course, and often the experience of death whips past us in a series of distorted scenes we hardly recall and decisions we scarcely remember making. This is especially true if death comes suddenly, or if the dead person made no explicit plans for their passing. However, when my grandfather died, things happened slowly enough for me to take some notice. My cousin officiated the ceremony – the funeral parlour was a quiet house not far from the family cemetery. We had coffee upstairs in the faux-brick kitchen, and I had time to think about death as something – almost a someone – to be approached intimately. To me, this was new. But it isn’t new. It is old – nearly as old as history. Rather than continuing to avoid death, or to fear it, what if we changed our perception? Might we conceive of death, instead, as the winding down of life’s frantic clock – and dying as a means of coming to terms with our identities, our loved ones, ourselves?

We do still have rituals. Why aren’t they helping? It is hard to examine something when you are too near to see it properly, and without engagement, reflection and sometimes reinvention, rituals can lose their meaning. It is often easier to understand one’s own country by looking outward. The mediation of distance is important, not because it prevents us from facing death, but because it is only from a distance that we can appreciate the vast complexity surrounding it. We’ll start by looking at certain grief rituals and death practices of cultures different from the West, from sky burial to mummification, and then consider how they compare with the history of the Western approach to death and dying. If knowledge is power, then greater knowledge about how death is viewed elsewhere and in times gone past is a powerful tool to help us think about whether we can do better in the here and now. Looking for ways of approaching our mortality isn’t foolish – it is a war on fear and misinformation, and on that vacuum of silence.

Death’s summer coat

For many centuries, death was an expected part of life, but in the past 150 years, our approach to death in the West has changed markedly. For the most part, we aren’t aware of this change – but if we don’t know where we’ve come from, we aren’t likely to know where we’re heading. Through the help of ‘weird’ science, history, literature and a number of previously unpublished photos, this book reimagines the journey the West has taken – and takes a closer look at our final destination. Once we meet death and keep it near, it ceases to threaten us, ceases to be alien. Death, when embraced, can be the means to healing and to progressing through grief for the living. It can also be our greatest means of connection. The chapters that follow are about ‘putting on’ rituals, wearing them as the vestal garments often used in ceremony. Wrapped up in these, in death’s ‘summer coat’, we find it easier to approach our common end.

As a medical-humanities scholar, I have lived my professional life at the intersection of several fields: history, literature, medicine, anthropology. Intersections are valuable. The inroad that another person’s belief makes as it comes into contact with my own is not an invasion so much as an invitation. Sharing our stories provides hope and community, so that none of us needs to face death alone in the silent dark. Learning about other practices is enticing partly because the unfamiliar looks so new; that unfamiliarity encourages us to engage with every aspect, to ask questions, to wonder and to reconsider our own ways of doing things in turn. We do not need to agree with a cultural tradition or religious belief in order to acknowledge its value and its power.

The title of this book is not intended to put a rosy hue on what is hard and unfathomable. It is not an attempt to make palatable a bitter pill. To me, the phrase ‘death’s summer coat’ is recognition that all things ephemeral are made lovely in their brevity. We long for spring or summer despite – or perhaps because of – the seasons being fleeting: a glimpse of life’s bud, followed by autumn and the long, dark winter. We ritualise the coming of the warmer months by cleaning our houses, planning reading lists and summer holidays, celebrating Easter or any of the other holidays that rejoice in the thaw. We shed our layers and put on new clothes like a new skin. Death’s summer coat is life’s unexpected beauty, and when each of us passes ultimately into that last winter, I believe it, too, will be followed by a new spring. What that spring will be like, I don’t know. Many religions describe it. Many who are not religious nonetheless see continuity in our return to the earth, and our part in the life cycle and the seasons.

It’s time to meet the new (old) death.

Chapter 1

DEAD AND KNOWING IT

What to expect when you’re expecting death

‘Awake,’ my mother said. ‘To sit with the dead.’

We were on our way to West Virginia, to an unremarkable two-storey colonial where my grandfather’s remains had been washed and laid out for viewing. It had been raining all night, but apparently no one in this homey funeral parlour had been sleeping. They’d been sitting up with the body. Sitting up – with the body – all night.

There are no good adjectives to describe my initial feelings about this. I was seventeen and grieving, but as I thought about it I realised I wasn’t horrified. Shocked, yes, but the idea was strangely enticing, even fascinating. Really? We do that? This wasn’t my first funeral, but it was the first time I’d encountered the intimacy of a ritual like this one. My West Virginian relatives had traditions I had not encountered before, traditions that still exist around the country even if only in pockets or among particular denominations. The wake struck me with its unfamiliarity, and helped me to look at the buzzing activity that surrounds the newly dead in new ways. I asked myself what seemed like suddenly obvious questions – why wash a body before putting it in the dirt? Why sit awake with someone now permanently asleep? Even the practice of embalming the body (which prevents decay) before interring it in the ground (where it is supposed to decay) struck me as a very strange thing to do. With only a minor leap of morbid imagination, care of the newly dead began to resemble care of the newly born. And sharing this, I knew, was going to upset people.

Death and birth are not, strictly speaking, as divergent as you might expect. In my work for the Dittrick Medical History Center in Cleveland, Ohio, I curate exhibits on the history of childbirth and midwifery. The Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus was found at El-Lahun, Egypt (Faiyum, Kahun, ) by Flinders Petrie in 1889. It is one of the oldest surviving medical texts and concerns aspects of pregnancy and birth, as well as various associated diseases, around 1800 BC. A woman was rarely so near death as when giving birth, and this is true in Ancient Greece and Rome as well. Expectant mothers would offer miniature statues showing a healthy and safe delivery to a Greek deity such as Asklepios in hopes of protection (or as thanks). As time progressed, more books with better instruction for saving infants appeared, but numerous diseases, poor health and no concept of germ theory meant that mothers and infants still perished together, joining the end of life with its beginning. In fact, death might almost be responsible for the future saving of lives.

Two doctors were busily working to understand pregnant women’s bodies in the eighteenth century. William Hunter published Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus and William Smellie A Set of Anatomical Tables. These incredibly lifelike images (by artist Jan van Rymsdyk) helped to explain why things went wrong and how to address problems before they became deadly. The mothers and children pictured here helped obstetrical medicine save countless others, but even so, a woman’s child-bearing years were also potentially her dying years.

An image from William Hunter’s Gravid Uterus (1774).

Childbirth and death remain linked today, despite Western scientific advances, but in certain other cultures, reproductive destiny supersedes death. If a child died before marrying among the Karo Batak of Sumatra, they were ritually married so that they might, at least symbolically, start a family. In some cultures, ‘ghost marriages’ are performed for single children who have died; sometimes they are married to the living, and other times to the dead. Similarly, death and rebirth link the community to those who have passed on, from the mythology of the Ancient Greeks to Hindu reincarnation. The idea of ‘transmigration’ was very important, because the life you led could determine how and when you were reborn in the future . . . or where you would be travelling after death. In his groundbreaking work from 1907, Death and the Right Hand, anthropologist Robert Hertz explains funerary rites as consisting of ‘two complementary notions’: death as a lasting procedure and death as transition. From Egypt to Borneo to Madagascar to India, death was – and sometimes still is – seen primarily as a transitional state, a state of becoming as much as ending. In this nexus of death, birth and rebirth, is death an event or a process? And how does our perspective influence the way we prepare for it?

Preparations for the death journey.

Death as event and process

Most of us, whether consciously or not, seek to collect and categorise information. In February 2009, a team led by psychologist Alfonso Caramazza of Harvard University examined brain response and found, rather surprisingly, that the organisation of categories remained the same whether you were sighted or born blind. If you think first of a dog, and then of a hammer, two different category areas of your brain will be active. So far, so good. But if you have never seen a hammer or a dog before in your life, the result will remain exactly the same. How can that be? Apparently, the connections between different areas of our visual cortex and the rest of the brain are almost hardwired. We are born with them; they don’t form gradually as we age. That means we are living categorising engines, and this kind of thinking is very useful to us as a species because it allows for quick identification. Bear? Wolf? Lion? All filed under ‘animals with teeth, best to avoid’. Rock? Stick? Steel? All under ‘potential weapons to thwart animals with teeth’. There is, however, a drawback to this kind of thinking.

We operate with an understanding that one thing is not another; an apple is not an orange, I am not you. But reality is much more complicated. Physics tells us this: the desk I am writing at, in addition to being a hard, sturdy surface, is also a jiggling mass of atoms, a cloud of whizzing electrons and a whole lot of empty space. I know both sets of things are true, but my category-loving brain has enormous difficulty thinking both at once. The same is true of our reaction to death and dying. Death is rarely if ever simply a thing – for example, only or merely the event of ceasing to physically live and breathe. It is always things – emotions, states of being, a constant flux of changing relations; a closed door that separates one consciousness from another, felt by both the dying and the grieving. In other words, death is both an event and a process.

Even as I write this, I feel my own need to differentiate: surely death is the event and dying the process? Perhaps. But every day that we live, we also die. Our cells – the skin on our hands, the lining of our internal organs, our blood and other tissues – shed themselves daily and we carry some of this small death about with us. In fact, our houses are filled with the remnants of who we were last week or last year; we are the dust that twinkles in a sunlit swirl from an open window. It is almost easier for me to imagine my own body as that vortex of atoms, with its ever-renewing and decaying pulse. But if I am living, how can I also be dying?

That seeming contradiction represents one of the great human dilemmas. We know we will one day die, and yet we live. Animals know death when they see it; they even express grief or go looking for their deceased litter-mates, housemates or masters when they are gone. However, animals largely recognise the event of death rather than the process of expecting death. Sociologist Allan Kellehear gives an example about a mare who witnessed her colt being lost to a swollen river. The mother horse ran back and forth along the bank, frantically whinnying. She had witnessed it being buried, but she never expressed any interest in the grave, only in the river. Death happens in a moment, and it’s the river she fears, not mortality itself.

That doesn’t mean that animals don’t grieve. We have many examples of it – too many to ignore. Elephants, for instance, will return to the bones of those that died, sometimes stroking or carrying them about. There are examples from primates as well, and Kellehear even cites stories about animals that feign death (like the opossum) to suggest that animals do know what death is, what it looks like and can even imitate it. The difference between the animal kingdom and the human race lies primarily in this: in seeing the death of another, we recognise our own mortality: ‘dying’ says Kellehear, is ‘a self-conscious anticipation of impending death’. We see the herald of our own death, we hear the approaching footsteps and we know that one day, death will come for us. We needn’t know the deceased well – it need not even be a human death. All the same, mortality speaks to us.

Pictorial gravestone, Scotland.

When I was four years old, I lived with my mother and grandparents in a white house with two porches. I remember a day in spring, when little bluebells were blooming next to the front steps, I began thinking of each little bell as the life of a person. How long would it live? Fifty years? Maybe I even guessed a hundred. But the point is this: I worried about what would happen when the bluebell’s life was all used up. What happened then? The real question, of course, was what happens when you die? In my confused ideas about bluebells, I had grasped that no matter what, no living thing would stay the same. Change happened. Nothing was permanent. Not even the people I loved. Not even me. Process meant change, and change meant dying.

At what point does dying become death? The knowledge ‘I will die’ becomes ‘I am dying’ largely based on timing: when we’ve been diagnosed with a disease that has no cure, when we are grievously injured, when our own systems begin to go offline. ‘Here the “philosophical” point ends,’ says Kellehear, ‘and the “real” or “short personal countdown” to death begins.’ I recall a friend’s experience with his father. He asked the doctors when he would get better, when he would experience the return to normal we’ve all come to expect from our encounters with illness. But this time, there would be no recovery. Suddenly the man’s entire world and all of his preparations contracted and needed to be realigned (and in a doctor’s office, which is often not the best place for reflection). A mad rush of activity usually follows such a shift in perception, either on the part of the dying or on the part of their loved ones. Last days of care must be considered, funerals planned for, loved ones looked after, the great long-term plans laid aside – and once again, the focus tends to be on the activity and less on the process that the body itself is going through. There are worlds between the healthy human’s ‘I am dying’ and the raw nerves expressed in ‘I am dying now.’ The process and the event overlap as all other ideas collapse around us.

For some of us, understanding how we will die shapes the way that we decide to approach it. My grandfather, whose wake I mentioned earlier, died of lung cancer. At seventy-two, he decided against treatment, asking the doctors merely to make him comfortable for as long as possible. The length of time between his diagnosis and his death was roughly a year. In that time, he was able to set many things in order, not just those things on the checklist of finance, social propriety, family engagement and funeral arrangement, but other, deeper things. As those who would be left behind, we also had time to prepare and then months to watch the deterioration that signalled the end. He died at home under hospice care, in his own bed. The ‘event’ of his death began as a year-long ‘process’ before the last beat of his heart, and that period of dying was also a death, or a series of small deaths (some of which we, as his children and grandchildren, also experienced).

Death unexpected

What happens, though, when death cannot be prepared for, or when there isn’t time for this sort of process? A few years ago I was seated at a diner with my spouse, preparing to order a late Saturday breakfast. Suddenly, a gentleman in the booth across from us gripped at his throat, half stood and then collapsed on the floor. The scene was confused; people were shouting for 911 and asking if anyone knew CPR. Having once trained as a lifeguard, I joined a waitress in attempting to resuscitate him – he was not choking; he was having a heart attack. It’s a fearful thing to have your training tested like that, though I was mainly keeping his pulse and counting for chest compression as the waitress administered breaths. My fingers circled his wrist, and then, after ten minutes, I felt a change that I will never forget. He died, and I felt him go, felt the life slide away beneath the pressure of my fingertips. The paramedics arrived but could not save him. We discovered later that he had an undiagnosed congenital defect and that his heart had burst.

I still recall that moment with peculiar clarity; if ever death was an event rather than a process, surely this was it. I had been present for the moment of separation. But even here, the line is not as clear as you might suppose. How many of us have lived through a minute that felt like hours? Time loses its relevance under the pressure of immeasurable events – it simply does not matter how long. A car accident might seem to move in slow motion, slow enough for you to see your life flash before you and to think, suddenly, of those who matter most. In those few cases where people have apparently died and been brought back, they report feeling and seeing everything around them with clarity as well. Whether it is adrenaline, or merely the conscious sense of the impending, under pressure there is often time enough for the smallest of details. More problematic is the concept of brain death, when no activity is detected. Neurologists still struggle with the line that demarcates alive and dead, here and truly gone, something I’ll return to in Chapter Six. Ultimately the answer to the question ‘where is the line between dying and death’ – or between process and event – is this: there probably isn’t one. But that should be a comfort to us; there is no wrong way to see it, and that means no wrong way to feel it, either.

I have suggested that expecting one’s own death is part of what makes us human, though exactly when in our pre-history we began to understand our mortality is hotly debated. Some argue intentional burials happened as early as 30,000 years ago – and some estimates (particularly those of the archaeologist Francesco d’Errico) say 170,000 years ago. The hunter-gatherer life was difficult, fraught with danger and likely to end suddenly; there were few examples of lingering illness, few chances to accept death slowly or to adjust expectations. Instead, death was ever-present. Every day, the hunter – like the warrior – had to acknowledge that it might be his last. Every member of the community ‘took part’ in mortality through the deaths of other people. Their elaborate grave rituals, some of which lasted for a year or more, were the inverse of the process my grandfather went through. Instead of the dying making preparations in the twelve months leading up to death, preparations (this time for the other-worldly journey rather than for the death) happened among the living in the year that followed. Fast-forward to 1913, when Sir James George Frazer documented Fijian after-death rituals; for them, the real work began after death, where the soul would encounter numerous dangers that could, in fact, ‘kill’ it (really this time). For Fijians, the dying process happened after burial, not before. Sometimes the deceased soul might linger for months, might even need to be cared for (or feared) by its nearest relations. Among the Arunta, Frazer describes a second ceremony to force a lazy soul on its journey. For these peoples, the burden of ‘dying’ is carried by the living – a sentiment that anyone who has recently experienced the death of a beloved friend or relative may understand only too well.

Admittedly, among the young and the healthy, facing mortality is generally a distant and somewhat vague proposition. In the developed world, fewer people under the age of thirty have to address the looming unknown. What does it mean to stand upon the precipice of consciousness and look into the void, wondering if we will still know ourselves on the other side (or if there is an ‘other side’)? This is one of the chief complaints against ‘death-positive’ networks like Death Salon or the death cafes appearing in the US and Europe: those seeking to break death taboos are frequently (though not exclusively) young and able-bodied. How can they really know what death means? The question is slightly wrong-headed, as biological age is no guarantee of insight, but I think there is something else at its heart. In a culture where we are rarely taught to expect death, much less discuss it, it is frequently the aged and the ill who have the most immediate experience of it. To those in terminal pain, who are looking at death in all its faceless ambiguity, it seems perverse that anyone else would try to, and perhaps wrong that they should presume to do so. That moment is so personal, so intimate, so crushing, so full of mixed hopes and despair, it is little wonder most people want to avoid thinking or talking about it. But let us consider again – dying is a process carried out by the living. It is, in fact, the most challenging and daunting experience of life.

***

I have talked about the linguistic difficulties of understanding what death is, but there is a more fundamental level at which we experience death, and it is worth consideration. At its most basic, how does the human brain conceive of and respond to death and the feeling of grief that it inspires? You might be surprised to discover that a field of study has been given over to this question – the neuroscience of grief and bereavement. In 2003, Professor of Psychosomatic Medicine & Psychotherapy Harald Gündel and his team performed a ‘Functional Neuroanatomy of Grief’, an MRI study to compare brain imaging in bereaved women. In their conclusions, they found that grief was ‘mediated’ by a widely distributed neural network rather than a single part of the brain. It involved memory retrieval, visual imagery, autonomic regulation and more. In other words, grieving involves an entire network of the brain, and this network functions differently in different people. Of course, as with all attempts to map the brain, neuroimaging doesn’t give us the full picture: it tells us only that our brains light up in multiple ways, not what this might actually mean in terms of human experience. Our responses are just as – perhaps far more – important, because we are creatures of context. What neuroimaging does offer is an analogy. Just as death is both process and event, dying is both a personal and a communal activity. Metaphorically speaking, it takes an expansive network functioning together to respond to death. Essentially, then, in dying – and in knowing that we die – we are among friends, connected in that sense to human culture past and present.

Grieving Family, from the collection of Steve DeGenero.

The loss and recovery of grief ritual

Despite this privileged (or cursed) awareness of our mortality, and despite the fact that death is a constant across all cultures, many people still don’t think about death until it happens. By that point, when hopes of healing have fallen away and the newly bereaved feel exhausted and alone, it may well be simplest to follow the usual pattern of subsequent events, without stopping to consider whether or not it feels helpful or responsive to your needs. The only reason I was able to see (and so to question) the rituals surrounding my grandfather’s funeral was because they struck me as unfamiliar. We usually cannot get outside our own heads to see with fresh eyes; and even if we feel that we don’t have the right tools with which to mourn our dead, we certainly don’t have time to wrestle with new tools in the moment. This is why multicultural and historical perspectives are so valuable. They unmoor us so that we can look back from a distance and see more of the picture, not just about death, but about grieving. In the chapters that follow, we’ll look at the far away and long ago, because there is no surer route to seeing ourselves anew. If we in the West seem today to be at a loss about how to approach death and its aftermath, why not explore how another culture has grappled with those same questions?

I will begin with a case from Cambodia, where dreams of the dead provided a new means of grieving in a nation torn by war. Devon Hinton, of Harvard, works a great deal with Cambodians suffering post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after the Pol Pot period, 1975–9 (during which more than a million people perished). Those who survived had witnessed horrific deaths, the natural cycle of life had been completely interrupted and they had developed a unique way of grieving as a result. As Hinton explains, remorse and longing sometimes continue long after death, especially when the death was violent and is accompanied by painful memories. Worse, the Cambodians were denied their usual outlets for grief. Execution was frequent, even for the slightest offence (such as stealing a piece of fruit), and bodies were typically dumped in massive pits. It was rare that relatives could find their deceased loved ones among so many dead (something that is also true of plague conditions in the past, which I talk about in Chapter Three). When they could locate them, they were prohibited from performing traditional mortuary rituals because Pol Pot banned religious practice.

Cambodians believe that dreams are powerful, and that they result from the dreamer’s own soul wandering free of the body at night. If they dream of a dead loved one, that means their soul has encountered the soul of someone deceased, and that this person has not been able to move on. To help the dead, certain burial and post-burial rituals must be performed. Otherwise, the dead remain stuck at one spiritual level. Because of Pol Pot, the entire population, in their time of need, had lost key elements of their grief culture, their means of dealing with death. With so many violent and unaccounted-for deaths, how were they to handle the loss of that grieving period? To do so, they eventually created a new ritual, called chaa bangsegoul, explicitly to deal with genocide. All the urns at the temple are taken out and put on a table, and participants can bring a picture of the dead or conjure them in their minds. The monks chant for three hours and then anoint the urns with lustral water. The ceremony gives blessing to all the deceased conjured in the ceremony. The Cambodian culture changed to make room for grief and death in a new way, incorporating a new ritual to heal over a devastating loss. May this serve not only as a lesson about death, but a lesson about hope. Collectively, a society may consciously decide to change the way it responds to even such a major event as death.