Legacy Matters

Death Lite

Mourning in America, a review by Thomas Lynch of "Death's Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve: A Cultural Study" by Sandra M. Gilbert in the New York Times is an exemplary review that adds richness to a book I must get.

"Sex and the dead," William Butler Yeats wrote to Olivia Shakespear nearly 80 years ago, are the only two topics that "can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mind."
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The signature of our species — what separates us from other living, dying beings — is that the dead matter to us. As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman writes in an epigraph to Gilbert's book: "No form of human life . . . has been found that failed to pattern the treatment of the deceased bodies and their posthumous presence in the memory of the descendants. Indeed, the patterning has been found so universal that discovery of graves and cemeteries is generally accepted by the explorers of prehistory as the proof that a humanoid strain whose life was never observed directly had passed the threshold of humanhood.

Lynch applauds Gilbert's book as
the most comprehensive multidisciplinary contemplation of mortality we are likely to get in this generation....It is the rich harvest of her bookish habits that makes "Death's Door" such a superb achievement.
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Gilbert is sensibly wary of the various "therapies" our culture provides in place of the actual experience of dealing with our dead. "Grief 'therapy,' " she writes, "most of it designed to ensure that the bereaved will healthily 'recover,' is now so widely practiced that although its efficacy is dubious, it's become a lucrative industry. . . . Peculiarly cheerful do-it-yourself memorial services focus on 'celebrations of the life' of the 'departed' rather than the pain that his departure caused, while 'New Age' activities, from channeling to past life therapy, retool Victorian spiritualism with 21st-century technology.
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The "changing mythologies of extinction," which are increasingly distanced from our ethnic, religious and community ties, have left us very often ritually adrift, metaphorically impoverished and existentially vexed, approving of the good laugh but embarrassed by the good cry. The postmodern memorial event is too often an exercise in absence rather than presence, avoidance rather than confrontation, the "virtual" instead of the "real." Everyone is welcome but the corpse, which has been disappeared, replaced by a memorial collage or DVD, consigned to a commemorative Web site or turned into a kind of mortuary knickknack.