Legacy Matters

A Poet Laments Modern Dying

From Elegy on Death, a review of Death's Door in the Washington Post

But what of the more immediate, personal death, the death in the family, the loss we can, indeed must, address directly? As Sandra M. Gilbert amply illustrates in her comprehensive new study of how death is encountered in the modern era, even then our natural urge to grieve may be stonewalled by silence.

"We live in a culture where grief is frequently experienced as at the least an embarrassment and sometimes even as a sort of illness," Gilbert writes, recalling the moment in 1991 when the surgeon who had "successfully" operated on her husband's prostate informed her of his subsequent death. A representative of the hospital's Office of Decedent Services handed her a Bereavement Packet. "Lacking traditional strategies for solace," she observes, "we're so dumbfounded by death that we'd rather leave the pain to professionals."

"Death's Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve: A Cultural Study" (Sandra M. Gilbert)

"Contemporary verse resists the repression of death as determinedly as the great modernists resisted the repression of sex," she finds. For what is left to us now but to bear witness? Web sites serve as digital funeral urns. Spontaneous shrines spring up at the sites of traffic accidents. In the "new order of industrialized violence," Gilbert writes, "only an act of witnessing . . . can constitute a properly elegiac tribute to the slaughtered multitudes."