Death and Lament: Part 2, Historical Forces

In the last post I described how modernity has affected our existential relationship with death. Death is now experienced as accidental and shocking, like a random bolt from the blue. Which raises the question: How has something so intrinsic, inevitable, and obvious about human existence become so hidden?

In my book The Slavery of Death I tell the story of three historical forces that pushed death out of modern consciousness and daily awareness. What follows comes from the book:

First, changes occurred in our relationship to our food. In agrarian and herding cultures there was a close association between death and food. People literally killed their own food—killed it, bled it, skinned it, prepared it, cooked it, and ate it, often with only a few minutes separating each step. The association between death and food couldn’t have been any closer. Moreover, the food was full of reminders that it was once a living thing—bones, for example. Compare that life and that bony food with the experience of eating, say, a Chicken McNugget. 

In our age, death has become radically disassociated with our food consumption. We don’t personally kill the animals we eat. Death occurs somewhere else—out of sight, out of awareness. Food just magically appears, disconnected from life and death. Further, when we do eat meat, as with the Chicken McNugget example, we have few signs that it was once a chicken, a living animal. In short, our relationship with our food has been radically emptied of all death-reminders.

Second, changes have also occurred in how and where we die. In the past, family members cared for the sick, doctors made house visits (though they couldn’t do much to help), and the ill, injured, and elderly died at home. People witnessed mothers and babies dying tragically in childbirth. Death, in short, was a routine part of family life and regularly found and encountered in the home.

In addition, after death families prepared the body and buried their loved ones in family or church plots. Consequently, by the time people reached their own deaths, they had already personally cared for, handled, and buried many lifeless bodies. Every residence was both a hospital and funeral home. Just about every female child had served as a hospice nurse. Just about every male child had helped dig a grave.

All this changed with the rise of the modern hospital. With the advent of modern technological medicine, death was taken out of the home and moved into hospitals. In the face of this change the funeral industry began to create “funeral homes”; thus the burial process was also removed from households and the daily lives of families. “Specialists” started to handle sickness, hospice care, and death. And with funeral services no longer taking place in the parlor of the home, magazines of this era began to propose that the parlor be reclaimed from the dead and returned to the living. To signal this, to erase the memory of the dead, parlors became “living rooms.” Yes, parlors still exist today, but mainly in funeral homes.

A third change, one also associated with the rise of the funeral industry, involved the relocation of cemeteries. In times past the dead were buried on family land or in cemeteries adjacent to churches that doubled as schools and public gathering spaces—an arrangement that still exists in some historic sites. In short, people lived next door to cemeteries. The home, the church, the school, and the public square were all a stone’s throw away from the dead. Again, death was a constant companion. But with the rise of the modern funeral industry, cemeteries were gradually distanced from homes, churches, schools, and public squares. They moved from the center of life to the periphery—physically, culturally, and psychologically. Death was effectively banished from our field of view. 

All of these cultural changes minimized our encounter with death in daily life. But these cultural shifts pale in comparison to how our affluence and the power of modern medicine have been steadily increasing life expectancy. Over a hundred years ago the leading causes of death were communicable diseases and infections, but today, in the industrialized world, the leading causes of death are degenerative diseases of old age like heart disease and cancer. This shift has profoundly altered our experience of death.

Basically, we’ve come to expect to live to a ripe old age. Given this expectation, when death comes sooner we experience a radical disruption, as if something has gone wrong. Despite the fact that we know we are biological creatures and that death is inevitable, death comes as a shock to us, whereas it rarely, if ever, shocked our forebears. And this shock is a symptom of our neurotic relationship with death.