What happens to you when you die? I don’t mean where will your soul or spirit fly to, I mean will your body be buried, cremated, dumped on a rubbish tip, set alight in a Norse longboat… what? In Mark Everett’s autobiography, Things the Grandchildren Should Know, he recalls his father’s request that his body be dumped in the rubbish; a stipulation E’s mother did not have the heart to carry out until long after his father’s death (thankfully she threw out his ashes, not his body). In our largely secular Western society, there is no obvious way of dealing with a dead body; while rituals have always surrounded the dead throughout history, in most religions and cultures, how do we now deal with the dead and dying?
In the past there has always been a script to follow, whether it be a Catholic wake, a Protestant funeral, the preparation of a stone-age barrow filled with the dead persons possessions or a good, old-fashioned Egyptian embalming; the variations are endless. In a society where people have largely lost the belief that death leads to an afterlife or reincarnation, where our bodies are largely destined to become worm food or fertiliser, nobody wants to be reminded that death is an everyday event, largely unimportant to anyone outside the person’s immediate friends and family. Rituals of death are seen as outmoded, outdated or superstitious. Is it hypocritical to have a church service funeral, or a wake, or any kind of death ritual when you believe that your body is simply an empty and used shell once your consciousness has left it? I’ve always liked the idea of being cremated and having my ashes scattered at sea; is this a hopelessly romantic gesture, designed to inflate my dead ego? Or does it help my relatives and loved ones to see me off in style?
The issue isn’t just a lack of religion; it’s a lack of community. The Western world is such a highly populated place to be, and there’s no time to worry about each individual death. The obituary page is seen as the interest of the morbid; nobody else has the time to read about the death of one of the many local butchers, one of the numerous local policemen, etc. Collectively, we only care when one of our favourite celebrities dies; a phenomenon which has nothing to do with the death at all, but which is simply about eulogising over their contribution to our entertainment, and ignoring that they were a recluse for the last five years of their life, living with ill health and largely forgotten. Death is hidden, often in antiseptic hospital wards or behind closed doors. Is this a problem? Do we need death in our lives? My attention was grabbed recently by a Mexico “Death Cult” which is apparently growing in popularity amongst “drug traffickers and criminals.” Of course I don’t think it’s exactly healthy to revere death in such an over the top way; but I certainly think that’s it’s also unhealthy to have death hidden. When someone does have to deal with death the psychological effect might well be extremely damaging, if death has become something that appears in movies and television but never in real life.
It would appear that, perhaps subconsciously, we do have a desire to deal with death and have some manifestation of death in our lives. This appears not only in various visual mediums, such as film and television drama, but also in fashion. While previously only a semi-underground subculture, such as punk or metal, used death imagery in clothing and fashion, it is now a relatively frequent occurrence to come across children, teenagers, young adults and even middle aged people sporting skull and death imagery on t-shirts, bags and jackets. Only today the foster child under my parents care was dressed in a shirt to go to a birthday party; it was only when he took his jumper off that I noticed the skull and crossbones symbol imprinted on the breast. Death has become a cartoon presence in our daily lives, something we are desensitised to; in children’s clothing, it is a shorthand for the “naughtiness” of the child in question; in the clothes of mainstream, “hardworking”, middle class people it shows a mildly banal “alternative” streak to their fashion sensibilities. It’s a fairly common theory that we are desensitised to death in modern society; but does this increasing and almost unconscious wearing of death imagery also show a desire to see and deal with death?
