The French anthropologist Louis-Vicent Thomas pointed out that death is an individual and social fact. Although we assume our own death alone, it is also a sociocultural reality. Until the middle of the 18th century in Europe the idea persisted, or rather the demand, that the dying person should feel surrounded by others. Madame de Montepan, the ‘official’ favorite of Louis XIV -with whom she had 7 children-, feared death less than the fact of dying alone.
When a viaticum was brought to a sick person, anyone, even strangers to the family, could enter the house and go to the room of the dying person. Despite the complaints of the doctors – of the unhygienic nature of a crowd invading the room of a dying man – and the ecclesiastical prohibitions against too many people gathering around him, he died in public . “When a death occurred, especially if it was an adult, the neighbors offered their services to the mourning family. They lent themselves to dressing the dead and watching over him in shifts all night. They went to warn relatives in neighboring towns and even far away, when necessary. On those occasions there were no enemies. All animosities and grudges were suspended . It was the truce of life” explained the German-French folklorist Arnold van Gennep in 1948. Although not everyone had that public: many people lived alone and in misery and, when the priest had left, they died as they could.
This solidarity in the face of death has disappeared nowadays and there is talk of the era of hidden death , which reflects a striking and contradictory fact: it is present every day in the news, on our television screens, but we hide it when we have it close, to the point that in Spanish funeral homes, if there are children in the room, the curtain that separates the room from the dead person must be drawn: infants must not see a corpse. The underlying idea is obvious: “Instead of perceiving death, suffering and pain as more intense spurs to embrace life, the individual is impelled to shed the feeling of death as if it were a scandal,” he says. Italian anthropologist Alfonso di Nola. Death, in Western culture, is a scandal.
Throughout the history of humanity, death has been a social fact and although this model still subsists marginally in some places, modern society has expelled it from its bosom, it no longer feels the need to pause its activities. The disappearance of an individual has ceased to alter the normal course of life, except in the case of the death of state or public figures, where tradition is recovered only by simple etiquette.
the business of death
But it is also that, in addition, death no longer belongs to the family since it is managed by hospitals and funeral homes , which treat it as an event that must be avoided in any way: it is “let them take care of it”. We no longer care for our dead because we have decided to hand over that responsibility to a stranger. The United States is the extreme example of a trend that is spreading throughout the rest of Western societies : funeral homes take the deceased from the family and place them at the beginning of a chain that goes through embalming and reconstruction -if there has been some visible deterioration-, the purchase of specific clothing for corpses -from shoes to underwear- and ends with the exhibition in a chapel or a decorated room while inane music plays.
The disappearance of American funeral customs was denounced in the middle of the last century by the British-born journalist and activist Jessica Milford. His book The American way of death (1963) -a bestseller- denounced how mercantilism had taken charge of death, with abusive practices and imposing outrageous fees for its “services”. Something that is still valid even in Spain, where consumer associations often report abuses, opacity of information and, sometimes, scams both in the funeral sector and in hospitals and nursing homes, the main places where Spaniards die.
die alone
This is the fundamental novelty of modernity; We have changed the place where we die . We no longer do it at home but in the hospital, where the isolation is total and distressing. An extreme case of this has been the death of covid patients . Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a Swiss psychiatrist who spent most of her life caring for the dying, wrote in 1969: “ Dying becomes bleak and impersonal, because the patient is often uprooted from his or her familiar environment and rushed to a hospital. […] When a patient is seriously ill, he is often treated as if he has no right to have his own opinions … he ceases to be a person … he may wish that one person alone stop to ask him one question, but he will have a dozen extremely busy people around him, concerned about his heart rate, his pulse, his EKG or his lung function, but not about him as a human being.”
Although the situation has improved since these lines were written, it has not done much. The sociologist at the University of California at Berkeley, Robert Blauner, rightly pointed out that the same evil that haunts the human condition hangs over death: “ Modern societies control death through bureaucratization . Today it is the hospital that takes care of the patient who is about to die and manages the crisis of his death; meanwhile, the funeral industry prepares the body for burial […] Its special role consists of containing, thanks to isolation, and mitigating, following methodical procedures, the disorder and rupture associated with the crisis of death. […] Hospitals are prepared to hide the facts related to death and dying from the eyes of both patients and visitors.”
References
di Nola, AF (2006) The black lady, Barcelona
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1971) On death and the dying, Barcelona
Robert B. (1969) Death and social structure en R. L. Coser, ed., Life-Cycle and Achievement in America, Londres
