Why death is too grave to talk about
WHEN I was visiting a terminally ill friend, she joked about how between hospital appointments and complementary therapies, dying is a full-time job. Yet it’s not a job we are keen to think about, never mind talk about, despite its inevitability. Every day, 155,000 people die — that’s more than 50m a year. Yet, in Western culture, death is not part of life. It is removed, outsourced, sanitised, peripheral. It is what Hamlet called the “undiscover’d country.”
So a book called A Brief History of Death is intriguing. Its author, William Spellman, is professor of history at the University of North Carolina, and is not afraid of huge topics and vast time spans. Spellman defines death as “a permanent loss of neural activity or brain function and the irreversible cessation of biological processes”, or, as they say in Florida, “terminally inconvenienced”. What happens to us when we are dead fascinates and frightens us. Spellman says we have three standpoints. The first is we cease to be. The end. Kaput. Game over. “A relatively small number of people have concluded that death is the negation of being, the end of life, plain and simple,” he writes. From the Greek philosopher, Epicurus, to the modern American humanist, Corliss Lamont, “recognising extinction as our common destiny” has freed us from what Lamont called “the dual terrorism of priests and gods”. When we die, we die.
