While most of us have witnessed thousands of deaths in films and on television, fewer will have sat with a dying person as they’ve taken their last breath. A mere 15 per cent of Australians die at home, the majority ending their lives in hospitals or aged care facilities.
It’s our unfamiliarity with — and fear of — death that prompted Melbourne University anthropologist Hannah Gould to write A Whole New Way to Talk About Death, a “guidebook to death in the twenty-first century” that begins by inviting readers to contemplate their own deaths and break the taboos by discussing the subject with other people.
Two truisms about human mortality continue to dominate contemporary approaches to its study, Gould says. Fear of death underpins a wide range of social and cultural institutions that enable people to deny death. And taboos surrounding death allow obfuscation, euphemism or silence to substitute for acknowledgement or discussion.
Freud insisted the fear was an instinctual social and psychological mechanism aimed at somehow averting mortality — yet he also claimed, paradoxically, that humans possess an unconscious “death drive.” Ernest Becker’s sociological analysis of death denial, written fifty years later, expanded the concept of taboo into an all-encompassing explanatory device for a wide range of social institutions, including religion, cultural production and political organisation. More recently, “Death Studies” has become a multidisciplinary project exploring the processes of dying and the actions or reactions of the living — from the disposing of the corpse to commemorating the deceased.
Gould’s purpose in writing about death is less grandiose than many of her predecessors. I suspect she is driven at least partly by the knowledge that the vast majority of her students have never seen a person die and are reluctant to ponder their own deaths, which are likely to occur in the distant future. With people today living longer than their ancestors did, most young people haven’t had to deal with deaths in their families.
But many people born in the late 1940s and 1950s have watched a parent or spouse decline and die, especially as hospitals, hospices and nursing homes increasingly encourage and facilitate relatives’ presence at death. And it is precisely this generation that has seen the medicalisation of death and the introduction of choices about palliative treatment, resuscitation and euthanasia.
In Western nations, death was for centuries dealt with in religious terms. Pain and suffering were endured and considered redemptive. Visiting the sick and dying, praying for them and preparing them for their “life hereafter” were both domestic and ecclesiastical matters. Calling for a priest to perform the last rites meant that ordinary people made judgements about death.
But secularisation and the removal of the seriously ill to hospitals has meant that “the religious and cultural traditions people once relied upon to make sense of death and ritualise somebody’s passing have splintered,” Gould observes. Only the medically qualified can assess the imminence or time of death. But there is also an increasing range of ways to consider human mortality, to develop techniques of disposal, and to invent new rituals consonant with contemporary values.
As the baby-boomer generation dies, Australia will experience “peak death,” with a projected doubling of the annual rate by 2040. Gould writes in the context of this “unprecedented era of death from natural causes,” an era in which people have a long time to contemplate, discuss and plan the inevitable.
As a member of this generation, I suspect most people do contemplate and discuss their mortality — but in the form of a denial: “Yes, I shall die. But not yet.” And so, in spite of this extended opportunity for contemplation and discussion, and despite overwhelming agreement that the topic should be discussed, a national study found that less than half of those interviewed had conveyed their plans or wishes to family or friends. Studies also reveal that the word “death” is avoided in contexts where it is imminent or has occurred, even in hospital discharge notes after a person has died. Gould enjoins readers to contemplate and communicate their ideas on their demise without avoiding the word “death.”
I suspect this is already changing. In the past twelve months six people I knew well have died. In each case the email message I received avoided euphemisms like “passed away” or “laid to rest,” which now sound quaint and even slightly ridiculous.
In contemplating death, though, I doubt that many people would imagine their own in the detail set out in Gould’s second chapter, in which she describes what we might witness when an elderly person’s heart or brain has stopped sustaining life. As consciousness fades and organs progressively shut down, death occurs and decomposition begins. It is this process that is perhaps the most macabre, mysterious and confronting. But the putrefaction and “the guts and gore of decomposition,” which begin immediately upon death, are no longer witnessed in domestic settings. Bodies are whisked away to mortuaries and prepared for burial in clinical environments; and for those who want to “view the body of the deceased,” even its deathly pallor might have been replaced by the undertaker with makeup.
Gould acknowledges that longevity and the increased medicalisation of dying are confined to Australia and other wealthy countries. Globally, meanwhile, disparities between rich and poor remain stark. While we might shelter ourselves from the harsh realities of death, our neighbours in countries such as Papua New Guinea cannot; there, the majority of deaths occur at home, of tuberculosis, and without medication to ease suffering.
Gould contends that Australians’ tendency to leave death care to the medical profession not only denies death by removing it from home and community but also prevents people from having a “good death.” Home-based palliative care projects like Compassionate Communities have dramatically widened the options yet, as she notes, aged care in the home often falls to eldest daughters and most young people lack the necessary skills. Outside clinical settings, washing, lifting, feeding or assisting a frail person to dress are intimate acts usually viewed as feminine. When the elderly live in households apart from other members of their families, the infirmities of age and ways of responding to them are unfamiliar and medicalised.
Good deaths aside, Gould does think that there are better ways of disposing of bodies and celebrating the lives they lived. Past debates about disposal were largely religious, focused on ideas of bodily resurrection or a concern that the deceased was a sinner who could not be buried in consecrated ground. Now, arguments are increasingly environmental. As cemeteries fill, burial in expensive wooden coffins amid large grave-filled urban spaces is viewed as environmentally wasteful and ecologically irresponsible.
Green methods of disposal can “reframe decay” as a positive alternative to embalming, refrigeration and deep burial in caskets. Some people apparently want their ashes or bodies to nourish saplings, says Gould, though she notes that “the unfortunate reality is that dumping an urn of ashes onto a sapling, or planting a sapling on somebody’s grave, is likely to do more harm than good.” Intrigued, I followed the footnote. Apparently the remains of the human body are highly alkaline and full of sodium, providing an extremely inhospitable environment for trees. But acids and salts can be neutralising in soil, so it’s not entirely false a hope. Indeed, the company Capsula Mundi sells egg-shaped urns (presumably treated with acidic substances) for ashes that can be buried under tree roots.
Ashes can also be transformed into diamonds, and bodies can theoretically be cocooned in mycelium-infused suits to make decomposition speedier and greener. Cardboard or recycled wooden coffins are only a start, but clearly the move to environmentally sensitive disposal of the dead is gaining momentum. At the same time, Gould reports that Australian pragmatism — “Just chuck me in a hole, mate” — is likely to pose problems for the family and friends who want to ensure the body is treated with love and respect.
Australia funerals have increasingly become celebratory. Cultural practices that emphasise loss, grief and the safe passage of the deceased to an afterlife continue to dominate religious services, though they are often missing from secular ceremonies. Special prayers for the dead, ritual sequences and familiar words of grief, intercession and comfort — central for many Christians — still echo in secular rituals, which can also draw on the rites of non-Christian traditions, especially Buddhism. Funeral directors are increasingly flexible in their offerings, although, as Gould observes, in the absence of the deceased’s instructions or a plan, family members or friends can be overwhelmed by choices of location, coffins and floral arrangements in the midst of simply informing others of the death.
“It [is] difficult to sustain the notion that an absence of religion means an absence of meaning,” Gould concludes, “or that ceremonies inspired by nature and science are less powerful than those inspired by afterlives and angels.”
Technology is having an impact too. Gould contends that Microsoft PowerPoint is “perhaps the single most important technological development in Western funeral culture of the twenty-first century.” A new, ubiquitous element in our funeral rites is a slideshow of images of the deceased. Digitised photographs and videos cycle through, accompanied by music usually chosen to reflect the departed’s taste. Where once mourners were stuck with an indifferent organist and a straggly rendition of the 23rd Psalm, now they can hear a superb performance of a Bach chorale or an Elvis Presley song beloved by the deceased. Services can be streamed and recorded, extending them to people who live far away or are incapacitated. Funeral companies provide web pages where people can write tributes, memories and responses to the service.
In her chapter on grief Gould confronts the most difficult part of dealing with death. In recent years I have encountered people who believe that “other cultures do death better than we do.” This idea seems to me to be yet another manifestation of the romanticisation of “other cultures” that permeates modernity. It is also indicative of the magical thinking that allows us to think that if we can just find the right rituals, the correct sequence of mourning, the pain of grief will ease. But sadness, rage and feelings of desolation and misery don’t evaporate because the bereaved adheres to particular mortuary ceremonies.
Gould draws on anthropological literature to explore variations in social responses to death. While some European traditions might reject highly emotional displays of grief, others require mourners to perform the feeling dramatically, tearing their clothing and crying loudly. But grief has social constraints in every culture. Gould rejects the now popular description of grief as “just love with no place to go,” insisting that the complex emotions it draws on are not easily encompassed by love. I found this rather cryptic and remain unconvinced that one would grieve over a person one hated.
Gould’s last chapter is concerned with preparation for death and commemoration of the dead. Here she deals with the need to acknowledge mortality and to reconsider the monuments and mausoleums we use as commemoration. People leave behind reminders of their existence that can also provide dilemmas for those who have to clear the house. An alternative popularised in books and a television series, Swedish Death Cleaning, places responsibility on the older person. This is a way of being less burdensome in death by shedding possessions that have accumulated over a lifetime. It is also a contemplative activity that enables intergenerational communication about the meaning of material objects in life and their irrelevance in death.
As cemeteries fill up, the option of carving a name in stone to record a life is shrinking. Cremation is more common, and the imaginative uses of ashes — in tattoos for example, or strategically placed QR codes — can replace engraved headstones.
Informative and thought provoking, Gould’s book is written conversationally, with anecdotes and jokes alongside serious discussion of social changes and existential questions that affect everyone. Each chapter concludes with useful suggestions. Although she promises “a whole new way to talk about death,” I wasn’t entirely convinced that talking about death can ever hold much novelty. But Gould doesn’t argue for a “positive” approach — she recognises that it can hold horror and sadness for the dying and for the those left to bury them — and instead places great value on an acceptance of the transience of life and the inevitability of death. •
A Whole New Way to Talk About Death: How to Die in the 21st Century
By Hannah Gould | Thames and Hudson | $34.99 | 240 pages
