Revitalizing Death

 

Death, an inevitable phenomenon in life (so far), incites fear among individuals of varying cultures and beliefs all over the world. Those of agnostic identity freely admit to little confidence in the existence of an afterlife while atheists assert that no higher being or cerebral haven waits to welcome us when we quit the Earth. Meanwhile, individuals who subscribe to a religion usually belong to the camp that allows for some version of an after-life or preaches a divine purpose in existing. Despite religious convictions or the lack thereof, death still represents a feared enigma to many. I will provide arguments as to why I believe Americans encounter particular difficulty in accepting death as an inevitable outcome to our earthly journey. Another fascinating aspect of this topic is how sub-cultures in America and other cultures around the world perceive life and death. Why is it that Americans reduce death, a feared event, to a medicalized process instead of celebrating its merits, which for some include an end to physical suffering and to others an excuse for the deceased individual’s social network to gather? 

The video above from New Orleans’s The Times Picayune discusses the traditional Creole funeral rituals that frequently occur in Jackson Square and in other parts of the French Quarter. The “jazz funeral” or “funeral with music” involves a brass band of variable size, family members, friends, and miscellaneous community members who begin marching from the deceased individual’s home or church. They process through the streets of New Orleans toward the cemetery with the band playing sorrowful dirges or church hymns. The mourning ends after the burial in the cemetery. On the return trip, the brass band strikes up ragtime tunes like “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In”. I grew up near New Orleans and witnessed several funeral processions when visiting the French Quarter. African, French, and Caribbean cultures join together to create this beautiful community-wide reaction to death.

In Margaret Lock’s “Living Cadavers and the Calculation of Death”, she discusses the cultural constructions of life and death that predominate in Western medicine contrasted against the beliefs in Japan. She measures our distinctive value system against Japan’s by studying the criteria that both cultures use to determine when life ends. Understanding how brain death affects overall death is an increasingly sensitive matter as Western medicine prioritizes organ procurement and transplantation in its approach. Lock asserts, “knowledge, particularly from the Christian tradition, buttressed by Enlightenment philosophy, contributes to a tacit understanding that makes it appear rational to think of brain-dead bodies as objects that can be commodified” (Lock 144). To legally and ethically justify the extraction of organs from a technologically sustained- but still warm- body, Western medicine developed standards for determining the time of death.  

Courtesy of "Eternal Beauty", this image of a Scottish cemetery depicts a scene representative of death

The individualistic values promoted in America parallels to the commodification of brain-dead bodies in our ICUs. Our capitalist society values individuals who contribute to the economic system by remaining productive. The high probability that a brain-dead individual will not function again as a productive member of society leads to their quick commodification. Western medicine’s emphasis on organ procurement reflects this belief. Medical practitioners developed criteria so that brain-dead patients could qualify as an organ donor, in effect our way of ascertaining that we squeeze the last productive elements from their technologically sustained cadaver.  In Japan, doctors allow respectful space to families of brain-dead patients and never broach the subject of organ procurement unless families inquire about it. Japanese culture, much more community-based than that of American culture, emphasizes “family desires” as well as indigenous medical concepts like “the substance of ki”, and “kokoro as the centre” (Lock 148).

An article from National Geographic discusses another culture that regards death highly, that of the Torajan people in Sulawesi, Indonesia. “Funerals are really the cornerstone of Toraja's social fabric,” the author explains, “bringing together far-flung families and communities” (Hile). To properly honor the dead, Torajans go to great lengths in the planning and execution of lavish funerals that the author likens to American weddings. Ancestors are believed to allow good crops, fertility, and health if their funerals meet expectations. The author offers an astonishing portrayal of their funerals, “A typical ceremony for a farmer's family may have as many as 1,000 guests. Hosting them can saddle the descendants of the deceased with staggering debt that may take as long as 15 years to repay” (Hile). The celebration of life seems possible only through an acknowledgement that death actually occurred, which Americans avoid by fearing it and by increasing longevity through technology.

Eric Krakauer in “To Be Freed from the Infirmity of (the) Age” introduces the life-sustaining technologies of Western medicine like hemodialysis and mechanical ventilation and the ethical dilemmas that they cause. He mentions a concerning dichotomy, “The great gift of this technology brought with it the unforeseen danger of exacerbating suffering” (Krakaur 382). While the fear of death did not serve as the catalyst for innovative medical technology, the ethical dilemmas that are frequently associated with the technology relate back to our inability to process and to accept death as an outcome. Dr. Iva Byock speaks to this unpreparedness by mentioning the increased deaths in nursing homes where elderly are left to die and American ICUs that aggressively intervene until an individual only lives through wires and machine. He adds,

“This is not the way anybody really wants it, but we have never had a cultural conversation about what a healthy last chapter of life looks like, what that would actually look like to be taking the best care possible of one another professionally and socially in a way that is not always seeking to prolong life, and it corporates this notion that dying is going to happen at some point” (Byock).

American society would benefit from the emotional catharsis that the acceptance and welcoming of death allows. The Creole culture invites a wide range of emotion when acknowledging the phenomenon of life and death through a musical parade. The Japanese resist commodification of brain-dead individuals because of their respect for the social connections that keep their cadaver alive. Torajan culture honors the dead in a great show of respect as a matter of necessity for their community’s health and well-being. Mainstream America could learn from these examples.  

 

Bibliography:

Byock, Iva. "Why Are We so Afraid of Death?" Big Think. Big Think, Inc., 28 Mar. 2008. Web.

Hile, Jennifer. "Lavish Funerals on Indonesian Island Spur Tourism, Debate." National Geographic Today 23 Jan. 2002. National Geographic. National Geographic Society. Web.

Krakauer, Eric L. "To Be Freed from the Infirmity of (the) Age." Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations. Joao Biehl, Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman, eds. Berkeley: University of California, 2007. 381-97. Print.

Lock, Margaret. "Living Cadavers and the Calculation of Death." Body and Society. 10 (2-3). 2004. 135-52. Print.