Do We Live in a Death Denying Culture - Essay Example

Do We Live In A Death Denying Culture Death is defined as the end of life or the cessation of life (Medicinenet.com). All the religions in the world teach us to accept death as it is a fact of life but we as human beings have learned to deny its existence. It is a subject that we do not like to mention until or unless we come face to face with it. The most prominent religions in the world are Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Islam. All these religions teach us that death is what every human being has to face, it will eventually come upon all of us. It is a part of our lives. Even then whenever we mention death, we make sure that children are not around us and we never tell them in clear words what it is. Death is something that is natural and nobody can stop it. When the time comes all of us have to go and the sooner we accept this fact, the more at ease we will be. We do not teach our children about death and it is something that the children learn themselves, when they experience a death of a loved one or through their experience of the world. We can say that we live in a death denying culture. There may be a few exceptions where people accept death and greet it with open arms when it comes otherwise majority of the people are scared of it; the problems, the diseases and the plagues that it brings with it. The concept of death has changed with time. During the Middle Ages people accepted death more easily and with tranquility. It was considered shameful to die suddenly; the concept of tame death was common among these times. People wanted to prepare for their deaths and for this they needed time, thus the tame death was what everybody wanted for themselves. Also, friends and family would gather around to offer their support and prayers. At this time people believed that the person entered sleep-like state to peacefully await salvation. It was believed that the dead person slept tranquilly during this period in a garden of flowers (Moller, 1996). Cemeteries were built far away from towns and cities as people were scared in the presence of the dead. The cemeteries slowly moved into the Churchyard as towns spread, but only the people who the Church recognized as virtuous or holy could be buried there. One very interesting fact was that to make space for the dead, the old graves were dug up and the bones were removed. As more time went by, the cemeteries became an attraction to the people; more people met up there and started living around the area. This was because the population started to grow and there was not enough space for housing. People started to be less scared of death and could be around it for a longer period of time. Many theories and patterns of death evolved; tame death being the first. The second patter was that of the death of self. An individual's acts, during this time, were categorized as good or bad and people had the ability to choose which path they will follow. The participation of the devil and the angel were brought into consideration and the records that they kept were evaluated when a person died. Based on there records, an individual was either sent to heaven or hell. In the fifteenth century, the concept of the day of final judgment emerges. "The salvation of a person's soul was now to be determined by the act of death rather than the acts of life. Dying a good death became the key to salvation." (Moller, 1996) According to this concept, a good death was when a person died while praying and if during the dying process if the dying person was tempted by the devil his death was to be damned. The main different between the two concepts then becomes the difference between universal salvation and individual judgment. During the sixteenth century, the plague happened and people realized that death could come at any time without them knowing it. Thus, at this time it became more important to do whatever a person had set out to achieve in life, so that when death does actually knock on the person's door, he has no regrets. This led people to develop calmness about death. The concept of death was evolving as was the physical aspect of death. The dead body had two important values: as a source of macabre eroticism and as a means of furthering scientific knowledge about life (Moller, 1996). Dissections started to be performed on the dead to know what was inside the human body and to figure out how it worked. In the nineteenth century, the concept of death was romanticized with literature. The politeness of the society was threatened by the taboos of sex and pleasure. Death was removed from the pleasurable and was defined as sentimental. The friends and family that surrounded the dying person's deathbed was reduced because of the industrial revolution. The pain of dying for the family was intensified because of the close bond that now existed. On the other hand, the cemeteries were elegantly designed and the tombstones were artistic. The twentieth century, brought the shunning of death and relevant topics. It was not something that was supposed to be discussed openly. One very famous story on death and dying by Tolstoy illustrates a theme, 'the way one dies is the reflection of the way one lives.' Today mourning should not be outwardly shown in any way; people should be rational about the subject. The topic of death is treated the same way the topic of sex was treated in the Victorian era. From the history we now know that how the topic of death evolved to be a taboo subject. The way people respond to death today is not the same as they responded to it many years ago. In every era, people had their own theory on death and they followed it with all their heart. Throughout these centuries religion was always present as one of the main factors which helped maintain tranquility. One reason of death becoming a social taboo is that it is a source of terror. There are four major trends responsible for death to develop as a taboo: the abdication of community to a pervasive sense of individualism; the replacement of a predominantly religious worldview with one that is secular; the sweeping power that materialism holds on the values, interests, and behaviors in modern society; and the influential place of science and technology in daily life. (Encyclopedia of Death and Dying) By taboo we mean something that is forbidden or prohibited, thus according to Freud's theory we are denying the death of a loved one by not being able to talk about. Although, our reasons may be different here, we may not want to talk about it because it will cause us sadness and sorrow. Whenever somebody dies, we do perform a funeral ritual but it is very basic and minimal. According to some theorists, if we do not handle the mourning process properly, it might result in psychological problems for the individual. 'The pornography of death': a society that refuses to talk of death personally becomes obsessed with horror comics, war movies, and disasters. (Gorer, 1955 from Walter) According to Gorer and Aries, two famous writer of death, the subject has become a taboo subject after the First World War. They think that death should be tamed in modern society so that the individual is not left naked in front of its obscenity. Personal expression is coming back, even if ritual isn't. Along with this the women's and the green movement have affected the concept of dying and the way society perceives it today. The taboo plus coda thesis explains the demand from bereaved parents for 'proper' funerals for stillbirths and late terminations that began as a trickle in the early 1970s but which by the late 1980s had succeeded in transforming hospital policy. (Walter) It is said that not all people take death as a taboo; it is only those people who grew up before the 1960's. The people, who grew up during or after this time, want to express their feelings concerning death. There has also been an increase in the amount of material available on the subject since then. Everybody's behavior is not following a set pattern, as some people realize the subject of death as taboo others move away form this thinking and adopt other theories. Thus it not only varies with culture but also with the individual. The Asians practice a more extravagant funeral ritual than the Westerners. The Western concept of a funeral is thought of a model of how to grieve and are attended by family and friends, thus to them the rituals performed by the Asians seen different and very expressive, which is not acceptable to them. Today's individual in unsure of what to do; he himself is tied up with work and geographically immobile at times. This leads him to let the arrangements of the funeral and the burial in the hands of the hospital and the funeral director. As we all know, it is more difficult to loose someone who is young than to loose someone who has lived a full life. When you loose someone young, it seems that life is not fair and that it only happens to you. You later realize that there are many people who have gone through the same pain and desolation that you have gone through. The limited taboo thesis argues that it is not modem society per se, but particular key occupational groups within it, that find death peculiarly difficult to handle. (Walter, n.d). Doctors are assigned a task to cure the sick and enable them to live longer. When a person dies, they feel that they have failed in carrying out their assigned task properly. In the Chicago hospital where in the 1960s Kubler-Ross first attempted to gain permission to interview dying patients, she was blocked by doctors claiming that the patients could not cope with such conversations. In the event, she found all three hundred patients were relieved and delighted to be able to talk. The nurses on the wards relented first, while the doctors took longest to accept they had been wrong (Kubler-Ross, 1970) (Walter, n.d). From the above paragraph, we notice that it is not the fault of the people who are dying or the society's fault but rather it is the fault of the people involved in the dying process, such as the doctors, nurses and funeral directors that have caused the subject to become a taboo. According to the same author, patients do not want to discuss their dying process and how they are feeling with the doctors because they know how uncomfortable it makes the doctor feel. Thus, they avoid the subject all together; it is not because of some psychological or psychoanalytic problem or theory. The media plays a vital role in how we perceive death. They way that they portray dying scenes can change or alter the way people in our society think. They can glamorize it, or they can make it look disgusting and repulsive. To the media people, death is an embarrassment that they do not want to face. The media then acts the same way the doctors and people involved in the medical profession do. These two institutions have helped form it as a taboo subject not to be discussed in public and with other people. The type of society that has evolved over the years in the United States is an individualistic society. In such a society, people have not developed a common language in which they can discuss or even mention death. The rituals that are performed are not communal as they ought to be. Another explanation for the taboo of death is given by Becker, "denial of death is not the modern condition, but the human condition. The fear of the id, for Becker, is not the fear of sex but the fear of death, and the human personality is a process of repressing this knowledge. For Becker, then, all societies are premised on the denial of death. This then would account for both the death-denying aspects of modern culture, and the possibility that death is not uniquely problematic for modernity." (Walter, n.d) In the old days our children were told about death and the rituals that went with it. Today, the mention of the word death is horrifying for the parent or the adult who hears it from the child. We prefer to sweeten the dying description when describing it to a child. We have come to acknowledge the basic facts but do not want to discuss them or mention them in public. The thought of death horrifies us. Then we can say that our culture has moved from a death-denying, to death-defying, to a death-deriding culture. "Our society has moved from death-denying, to death-defying, to death-deriding in its view of the end of life. This is a far cry from Easter's biblical tomb with the stone rolled aside. The true Christian attitude toward mortality requires that we neither run away with the soldiers who were guarding Christ's body nor rush inside the sepulchers of medicine, make up, or make believe to hide from the reality of death. Our concentration is not about living eternally for ourselves here on earth, but rather about loving God and our neighbor each day before we die. Then we shall rise again to live for all eternity, in joy, with the resurrected Lord." (Pagliari, n.d) Bibliography 1. FATHER BOB PAGLIARI, From a Death-Denying to a Death-Defying to a Death- Deriding Society,(2004) Catholic New York Online http://www.cny.org/archive/pg/pg040104.htm 2. David Wendell Moller, Confronting Death-Values, Institutions and Human Mortality (1996) Oxford University Press 3. Medicinenet.com, http://www.medterms.com/script/main/art.asparticlekey=33438 4. Geoffrey Gorer , The Pornography of Death 5. Taboos and Social Stigma, Encyclopedia of Death and Dying, http://www.deathreference.com/Sy-Vi/Taboos-and-Social-Stigma.html 6. Tony Walter, Modern Death: Taboo or not Taboo (Vol 25) Read More