Reclaiming Death
by Ed Searl
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A few months ago, in sun-drenched, seemingly timeless July, my
eighty-eight year old mother-in-law, Norma, entertained her long-time friend, Marvin, also
an octogenarian and a recent widower. The setting was the front porch of an old homestead
in a small village in northern New York where both had lived for more than half a century.
They exchanged complaints about the infirmities age had brought them. Marvin speculated
that soon he'd have to give up driving because his eyesight was failing, though his eyes
still sparkled whenever he spoke with conviction or humor. My mother-in-law's eyes looked
resigned. "It's no fun getting old!" she declared with the authority of
experience and repetition.
"You know, you could always 'go to Billings.' You don't need Dr.
Kervorkian," Marvin suggested. He explained that each winter in the North Country a
driver or two is found in a car by the side of the road, frozen to death. "Not a bad
way to go. If I decided it's my time, I'd wait 'til the dead of winter and a clear,
moonlit night, get myself a Rent-a-Wreck, put a tape of my favorite music in the player,
place bottles of apricot and blackberry brandy beside me on the front seat, and drive
toward Billings, Montana."
When his wife died a year earlier a friend had asked him if he were
going to "go to Billings." Marvin hadn't been ready then, but I had the sense
that he'd considered it; and though he'd decided against it, he was holding it in reserve.
I registered the poignancy of the lives of these two eighty-year-olds
in the midst of the little eternity of a summer's day in the country. There was
foreshadowing, too. In the eye blink of thirty years, I'd be in a similar situation. As I
often do when such a realization becomes conscious, I vowed to appreciate the lyrical
interlude of a rare day -- not to squander the preciousness of my own being interacting
with the life around me.
I needed to connect with Marvin. As he said goodbye, I asked, "If
you were to 'go to Billings,' what tape would you play?"
"Paul Robeson," he answered. In my imagination I heard
Robeson's rich baritone singing, "Going Home."
Death, A Social Construction
Death gives life its meaning. That's so obvious it is almost the
definition of trite. But there's nothing trite about death. It is the profound reality of
the human condition
Death, however, has been alternately trivialized and denied in American
culture. Blame for this sorry attitude is often assigned to a funeral industry that grew
out of the peculiar needs of the Civil War to embalm bodies being shipped home from the
battlefield. By the mid-twentieth century, the funeral industry had appropriated most
death rituals -- and reaped obscene profits by coercing the bereaved. But other factors
played in the commercialization of death, including the influences of urbanization, which
helped fragment the community and scatter families, the advancements of health care, the
expansion of hospitals and long-term care facilities, and an increasing life span.
Organized religion, supernatural in outlook and hoping for, if not promising, an
afterlife, has to be factored in, too.
My interest in death comes as part of my job. I'm a Unitarian minister,
steeped in natural religion and humanistic in outlook. I adhere to tradition only if it
remains meaningful. And I've long maintained that our traditional cultural construction of
"death" is misguided and often evil.
Early experiences as a minister made me a consumer advocate for the
dying and bereaved. Twenty-two years ago, when I first witnessed a funeral director's not
so subtle, but wrenchingly effective, compliance techniques to sell highly profitable
coffins, I was already influenced by Jessica Mitford's exposé of funeral industry
practices in The American Way of Death (1963). I began recommending Memorial Societies.
Begun in Seattle in 1939, these not-for-profit consumer organizations that provide low
cost, dignified funerals for their members became a national phenomenon after World War
II.
On the spiritual side, I followed a well-established Unitarian way of
conducting funerals and memorial services: I presided over celebrations of life, centered
on an honest and sensitive eulogy affirming the deceased, while also addressing the
psychological needs of the bereaved. This way was subsequently informed by Elizabeth
Kubler-Ross's 1969 On Death and Dying, the bible for how professionals best serve the
dying and bereaved.
In pace with other emerging trends in the field, I supported the
hospice movement -- bringing the dying home from the antiseptic hospital and providing
compassionate care. I stayed apprised of the debates in medical ethics over the patient's
right to die and merciful euthanasia.
It's now obvious that a flood of change relating to death and dying
began to surge about a half century ago. It hasn't crested yet, nor will it soon. Death
traditions, especially the institutions that maintain them, are inherently conservative
and slow to change. The rather dramatic changes of recent years have come from the grass
roots. These significant changes are emblematic of deeper social transformations within
American culture. Many persons today yearn for substance over form, for meaning over
rhetoric, for reality over dogma. They're determined to reclaim death.
It's worth emphasizing: the notion of "death" is a social
construction that changes through time and varies among cultures. Phillipe Aries's classic
The Hour of Our Death (1982) established five evolving death epochs in Western history
over the past millennium: A thousand years ago tame death prevailed. People lived in
intimate communities. Death was integrated into everyday life. Death rituals were both
personal and public.
The rise of individualism, coincident with the end of a feudal order
and devastations of the black plague, shifted the focus in the next epoch to the death of
self. Biography became a literary and spiritual genre, because at death God was thought to
judge the life a person had lived.
The Age of Reason in the 1700s, through new lenses of secularization
and science, saw a remote and imminent death. Death was such a distinct break with life
that it was best put out of mind.
The Romantic Era of the nineteenth century shifted the focus from death
of self to death of the other -- especially one's family and beloved. The results could be
melodramatic. Emerson actually dug up his son's body to contemplate mortality and renew
his grief.
The modern epoch is marked by invisible death. In this era death has
been kept out of sight and mind. In part, this began in reaction to Victorian excesses. It
is reinforced by the view of the natural sciences that an individual life is of no
consequence in the greater scheme of nature.
The changes of the last half-century converge in a halting movement to
correct the contemporary shortcomings of invisible death. The changes point to an emerging
new epoch, not yet defined. One thoughtful observer of contemporary death practices,
ChrisTina Leimer, who has an entertaining and informative Web site, The Tombstone
Traveler's Guide, cites certain commonalities among funeral and memorial practices of the
emerging new era: personalization, participation, less formality, secularization, greater
inclusivity, and diversity. She points out that new situations and dilemmas are often met,
when the need arises, by spontaneous rituals created by innovative persons rather than by
unresponsive institutions. Her favorite example of spontaneous rituals, the curious
"roadside memorials" that spring up like mushrooms where tragedies occur,
testify to the need and will of people to fashion meaningful, personal responses to death.
There is ample and varied evidence that "death" is being
reclaimed. The changes seek to make death more human and less commercial. A new death
epoch is under construction with the timeless goal of assigning a contemporary meaning to
death. This work in progress is grassroots and humanistic.
Chicago Area Influences
I've lived in the Chicago area since 1983. I've found two local
resources particularly influential in my musings about death.
Gary Will's' outstanding Lincoln at Gettysburg (1992) introduced me to
the "rural cemetery movement" of the Romantic era associated with my beloved
American Transcendentalists. (Gettysburg was designed in the mode of a rural cemetery and
Lincoln's famed "Address" was a funeral oration.) The rural or garden cemetery
imitated classical Greek practices. It removed the grave from the pallor of the church's
traditional graveyard, taking it to the sunshine and fresh air of nature. In an inspired
and carefully crafted landscape, a park of philosophy and even recreation, human mortality
could be contemplated under liminal influences. These cemeteries remain to remind us today
to integrate death with life.
Chicago has two early and important rural cemeteries: Graceland and
Rose Hill. Graceland (1860) is better known, thanks to its celebrity mausoleums and
monuments. But Rose Hill (1859) is more expansive and sublime -- a not-so-well-known
treasure that is a carefully crafted oasis of meaning, beauty, and repose. I recommend you
stroll Rose Hill's grounds. Know that it wasn't designed so much as a place for the dead,
as a place for the living. You might discover what brings me back repeatedly to Rose Hill:
a sense of the continuity of generations within the soothing eternity of nature. Thanks to
Rose Hill's influences, I now counsel deliberate memorialization -- dedicating a special
place to the memory of a loved one. Such places strengthen the fragile bonds of memory
that link the generations.
And each year in late October or early November, I take a pilgrimage to
the Mexican Museum of Fine Arts in Pilsen to experience the yearly Day of the Dead
installation. This year's exhibit, the largest in the United States, runs through December
10. Day of the Dead altars are spontaneous outpourings of their artist creators. They also
are personal tributes to the deceased they honor. They're eclectic in blending the
traditional with the contemporary, the secular with the sacred. And they're windows into
another culture's approach to death, giving perspective on our own. What at first appears
excessively morbid actually grants one permission to explore beyond traditional cultural
strictures surrounding death.
The installation suits a late autumn mood -- the midway point between
the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice, when the curtain between the living and the
dead is imagined to be particularly thin. It also makes good psychological sense in the
important scheme of grieving -- strategies we also must employ so that grief for our
beloved helps us return to living.
The altars always astound me with their boldness. Their images of
skulls and skeletons -- absurd and defiant--make me laugh and lead me to important
insights: I realize anew the gift, the value, of being counted among the living; and I
reaffirm that the best way to meet death is to confront it, to live bravely and deeply
despite its onrush.
The Day of the Dead's public altars, an innovation by Mexican Americans
who've emigrated to the United States, fuse native and imported Catholic practices. These
altars testify to the persistence and malleability of death practices. They encourage our
larger culture to reform practices that have lost their meaning, to dare to innovate, and
to be brave in the face of death.
Rituals of Remembrance
I can't emphasize enough the value of a good, personal celebration -- a
funeral or memorial service that honestly and lovingly eulogizes the deceased, addresses
the psychological needs of the bereaved, and speaks, at least a little, to the spiritual
or philosophical meaning of death. Such a celebration gathers community. It gives closure
to death's immediate, numbing circumstances and is prelude for the effective grieving that
eventually culminates in a new life for survivors. The preferred setting is the home,
social hall, or church -- now accessible with the option of direct cremation.
I also counsel subsequent rituals of remembrance, including interment
of remains in aesthetic, sacred places of memoralization, including well-crafted garden
cemeteries. Memorial or Decoration Day, Easter, All Saints Day and All Souls Day
(coincident with the Day of the Dead), and Veterans' Day catch the spring and autumn moods
that favor remembering. Personal anniversaries are also apt dates for private, simple
rituals. Around these days create home altars or shrines that speak to human emotion, and
visit graves or memorial sites.
What the Future Holds
Demographics predict a death rate that will rise each decade for the
next fifty years. The bulge of graying baby boomers, in conjunction with longer life
spans, will bring aging and related dying issues to the forefront of cultural concerns.
We will learn for ourselves, then, that Death is no abstraction. This
is perhaps the ultimate irony of the human condition: that death gives life its shape and
meaning. A culture that denies death or makes it invisible, demeans life and its living,
and is paradoxically a culture that has already died many little deaths. A person who
doesn't have a well-proportioned awareness, a living acquaintance with death, does not
possess the proverbial examined life -- the one life worth living.
If this article were an old Puritan tombstone, its inscription would
admonish in all compassion and with deepest empathy: "Reader, Be Advised!" But I
also urge you to keep in mind Marvin's parting words.
"Now you didn't ask me about the two bottles of brandy I'd take
along." He paused for dramatic effect. "I'm hoping it's a long, slow drive to
'Billings.' And I intend to enjoy myself along the way." Marvin winked and waved
goodbye.
Edward Searl has been a Unitarian minister for twenty-three years, the
last eighteen at the Unitarian Church of Hinsdale. He is author of In Memoriam: A Guide to
Modern Funerals and Memorial Services (Skinner House, Boston, 1993, 2000) and A Place of
Your Own (Berkeley Books, NY, 1998), a guide about home altars with fifty-two weekly
devotions.
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Source: http://www.consciouschoice.com/
