Dossier, Volume 13 #4

Severed from Life, Death's a Freak Show

--George MacDonald, The Golden Key

We attend a lot of funerals. Living in a small town with an aging population, we are always having to pay our respects to the dearly departed. It doesn't matter whether we knew the person or not. In a small town, death is as much a part of the social fabric as baptisms and marriages.

Funerals have become second nature to my two young daughters. They like the ritual observances: stashing pocketfuls of red and white striped candies from the crystal dish at the funeral parlour, waiting anxiously for the "parties" afterwards when they can have their fill of pickles and Nanaimo bars. They also take their turn kneeling to pray amid the flowers in front of the coffin, peering at the waxily reposed figures with a mixture of curiosity and bewilderment.

The rituals of the wake, the funeral and the gathering for finger-roll sandwiches afterwards play an important role in the grieving process. There is something very healing about the familiarity of the funeral routine. Whether death comes after a long, faltering sickness or as a chance event, perhaps speed and miscalculation on a lonely northern highway, the routine never seems to waver. It begins with the laying out of the body at the funeral home. It ends the following day over lunch at the Golden Age Club or in the home of a relative. In between, the emotions of loss are intermingled with the joy of reuniting people who otherwise have lost contact. Out of the pain of death, seeds always spring.

This is death as it should be. Death is rarely a welcomed visitor but it is, of course, inevitable. It is as much a part of the human condition as birth, love and sorrow. Cultures throughout history have created rituals, myths and stories to explain and accommodate death. The symbolism of death has been intricately tied to the notion of rebirth. Christianity has been defined by the great saga of Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Both are equally important; neither makes sense without the other. This symbiotic relationship of death and rebirth echoes through other cultures with harvest rituals and spring celebrations.

What people have traditionally accepted, giving death its due, our culture unfortunately resists. Perhaps this is because ours is the first culture to live outside of nature. We are infatuated with our potential for control--we manage nature, we control birthing, we tinker with genetics. This infatuation has caused us to stray further and further from our place in a cycle that is at once fecund and spent, that is both Alpha and Omega.

We fear death precisely because it resists management. It comes like a thief in the night, denying the ideology of a materialistic culture. It shows us that no matter how powerful or how in command we are, the road to death can reduce us to the most basic of desires--the need for a glass of water, the touch of a warm hand, the dependence on others for our most basic bodily functions.

For the long line of spectators, the Bernardo trial conjures up the symbolism of a culture that has lost the ability to understand death. Paul Bernardo and his camcorder speak to something very deep in our cultural obsession with death.

When death comes suddenly, it reminds us that we are fragile. A young executive with a promising future drowns on a fishing expedition; a child chokes on a sandwich. It doesn't take much for the human body to give up the ghost. A head striking the windshield is enough to end a lifetime of hope and plans.

And so when death comes it appears as a threat. The small-town rituals of waking and grieving are giving way to more managed notions of how to deal with death. Our children are shielded from the distasteful knowledge of seeing the body. We tell the little ones that the dead are merely sleeping, or that they have gone away. Many people feel that the traditional rituals around death are somehow morbid. Better to have it left in the hands of professionals.

No one can attend a funeral or look at death without seeing themselves. It reminds us of our mortality. In denying the rituals of death, we are compelled to deny the foreshadowing of death in our lives. It is no coincidence that our culture is spending increasing amounts of money on excessive medical intervention, anti-aging creams, body mutilations, anything that will help us resist the natural evidence of age and spent youth. Inevitably these attempts to resist the natural order fail, and as failures we carry an odd sense of shame about us. Our bodies let us down. Sickness, death: they are ugly and we must hide them.

But death has to be given its due. While moving away from a concept of death as a natural part of the life cycle, our culture has replaced it with a notion of death that is severed from life and hence unavoidably perverse.

Real death is fragile and moving. but death as we have reconstructed it in movies and books has become the great mega-event. Die Hard was the title of one blockbuster extravaganza, complete with the hero who can't be killed and the villains who kill countless extras. Death, like sex, no longer seems to be able to stand on its own merits, and it must be embellished with a myriad of debauched details and outrageous proportions. In real life you can die only once, but Die Hard has given way to sequels such as Die Harder and Die Hard with a Vengeance.

What we are engaging in are new rituals of death. Severed from the life process, these rituals inevitably turn into necrophilia. A clear example of this fixation is the sensation surrounding the trials of O.J. Simpson and Paul Bernardo. Both trials have become an ugly sideshow of media excess, feeding on the public's seemingly insatiable appetite for bloody details.

Cultures throughout history have created rituals, myths and stories to explain and accommodate death. The symbolism of death has been intricately tied to the notion of rebirth. Christianity has been defined by the great saga of Good Friday and Easter Sunday; neither makes sense without the other.

The Bernardo trial has spawned some very interesting discussion in the media about the long lineups of people who wait every day for the privilege of eavesdropping on the grisly details. One psychologist interviewed on the radio explained that this lurid fascination for tidbits from the trial was in fact very healthy--it helps us go through the grieving process. One woman who lined up outside the Bernardo trial explained to the press that it was important to be present for the testimony because she was taking part in "a theatre of the extreme." The deaths of three teenagers and the suffering of the families have become a stage and a plot, and the mourners an audience.

Bernardo's victims died hard, and now through the media feeding frenzy they are dying hard with a vengeance. For the long line of spectators at the trial, the Bernardo trial conjures up the symbolism of a culture that has lost the ability to understand death. Paul Bernardo comes to us as the ultimate tinkerer with life, the master bureaucrat and the necrovoyeur. Paul Bernardo and his camcorder speak to something very deep in our cultural obsession with death. Unable to look real death in the face, we look at it obsessively, like a prude at a porn shop. The grieving process has been supplanted by the modern equivalent of the freak show.

Each spring at home my daughters await the birth of the baby goats. Each year kids are born and each year at least one is lost. Some have been runts, others just too accident-prone. My daughters have hosted funerals for these animals that mimic the funerals they attend in town. Death is a familiar in our home. It is given its due and has a place in the cycle. These are the rituals that need to be strengthened.

Brit Griffin is publisher of HighGrader Magazine. She lives in Cobalt, Ontario.