Why We Don't Do Death
Reflections on Ancestors, Culture, and Relating with the Dead
My friend lost both of her parents within the last two weeks. One after the other. Both gone.
They say things like this happen occasionally. Long term partners can’t bear the loss of their other half, and something in them decides to join their beloved in the spirit world. It's utterly shattering for those of us left on earth. For the dead, I imagine it's quite different.
I count myself extremely lucky to have not been dealt any cards such as these yet. I pray that this cold hand is a long way off, and that the dealer keeps me and those I hold dear flush and in the game for as long as possible. I pray for a good long life of faces cards, aces, family and friends.
Most of my deep collisions with grief came in the form of heartbreak, or emerged out of witnessing the heartbreaking complexities that pervade the experience of being alive, both in the human sphere and beyond. But I can hardly begin to articulate this right now.
This autumn has been a season of reckoning with death. My cousin, and two close childhood friends, all gone before 40, now grace part of my altar. I’ve been doing my best to actively provide them with candles and libations. In fact, on Halloween, the two shots of rum I poured out for them disappeared in the night. I felt properly perplexed and mystified in a way that now seems all too rare an occurrence for our species.
I think it would do us all well to receive a heavy dose of spook every now and then.
And while it feels very “on brand” for this time of year, sitting with death is still such a foreign undertaking in our culture that one cannot help but feel like they are paddling upstream, face into the rain, and careening into the abyss when undertaking such a reckoning. It feels like an alienated and alienating pursuit in a culture that manically avoids such discussions. I can only imagine what it feels like for my friend.
But here’s my question: how much of this alienation towards death is unique to modern, Western culture?
I hesitate to venture down the road of “indigenous cultures did it so much better than us,” as I am often wont to do. As I said in the introduction to my book, indigenous cultures are not a means to an end for the Western world to figure out its problems. I’ve experienced first hand the sincere fears, taboos, and protocols that many indigenous cultures place on death. To my modern eyes, sometimes it almost seems to border on phobia. But they always have their reasons.
During my time in Aboriginal Australia, I learned that it was taboo to speak the name of the dead, or for a loved one to see their image. If one did so, they believed, the spirit of the deceased could not move on from this world. This cultural protocol became increasingly problematic as technology encroached into their world, with its ability to preserve the names, visages, and voices of the departed far beyond the living human sphere of oral and traditional culture.