“Post-modern” Death and Bereavement

American sociologist Talcott Parsons explored the nature of the American experience of death in a society that valued science, medicine, and progress. According to Parsons, death is a matter of medical failure and resignation in the geriatric; the experience of dying is removed. Death is not in Heidegger’s sense, defined by Existenz, or the possibility of “my” impossibility, but it is the failure of medicine: the cessation of a heartbeat, or the end of brain-wave motion. Overwhelmingly, the cultural experience of death and the funeral is one of fantasy; it is one of euphemisms ultimately pointing to a denial of mortality. Americans replace the word “died” with “passed away,” or “is in a better place.” The removal of a corpse happens away from the bereaved—they only see the body again after it has been altered. It is common and appropriate (and even expected) for visitors to the funeral home and those attending the funeral to comment, “How good the body looks.” Embalming prevents the confrontation of the mourners with the putrescence of the corpse. Funeral practices in other cultures attempt to hasten the process of decomposition, but American processes try to impede or halt decomposition. Coffins are padded with cushions to further deny the reality of the dead body that has no sensation.

Compared to other demographics, people live longer in white upper and middle-class culture due to advances in medicine and nutrition, and white upper and middle-class culture’s low-risk lifestyles and environments. White-flight has removed members of this dominant culture into the suburbs, away from crime, poorer health facilities, and other higher-risk living conditions.

Death is removed, largely, from the dominant white-hegemonic culture. Yet in a culture in which death is seen largely as medical failure, and which denies death to keep it removed from view, why is it that crime shows and gory movies are so popular? Furthermore, how might an unhealthy relationship with death relate to the Thanatos urge of contemporary foreign policy?

MIT anthropologist Hugh Gusterson suggests that Americans’ relationship with nuclear warfare and forms of violence are emboldened by a removed victim identity since September 11^th that does not question or show sensitivity to the realities of suffering, but rather the victim identity justifies the infliction of suffering in others. Countless anthropologists outline this as mimetic violence, which can be illustrated across cultures. Whitehead has explored how terrorism like the September 11^th attacks is also mimetic in the sense that it involves post-colonial actors’ response to colonial takeovers.

What is interesting in the American case is the distance at which suffering is both experienced and then inflicted. As French theorist Luc Boltanski illustrates, this hyper-reality of violence is still to some extent “enjoyed” as spectacle in American society. But this denies a certain intimacy with “real” death. Death is experienced voyeuristically through media consumption, but when it comes close, it is still prevented at all costs medically, and mourners are surrounded by the halo of taboo and contamination. It is fearlessly explored and sensationalized in postmodern media, but at the same time, euphemisms for death are aplenty in funeral parlors. Death is both invisible and visible. As a nation we export terrorist actions abroad in the name of bringing Enlightenment values and humanitarian aid (Noam Chomsky calls this the “new military humanism”), and we imprison and possibly torture terrorist suspects in enemy territory. But we cannot comfort the widow and, further still, we place the power of death’s presence or absence in those whom we worship on television: heroes who conquer the mystery of death, preserving life or solving crimes as in the doctors on ER or House, or the forensic scientists on CSI and Law and Order. Death is aesthetic power.

As illustrated in the response to September 11^th, death’s value is filtered through not its mortal reality, but in civic religion. A popular image that circulated during the time after September 11^th is one of Jesus receiving the victims of the “Twin Towers into Heaven.” It appeared in folk art and at a Memorial Garden in Brooklyn.

This is a new version of civic religion,

Page 153

perhaps suggested in the root of Americans’ understanding of September 11^th. The deaths of Americans in the Twin Towers were political and religious. It is an old medieval archetype of evil: Arab Muslims waging jihad against innocent American Christian victims, who are in turn received by Jesus. The ascent of martyred heroes is a theme renewed in the September 11^th attacks. However, the private grief of Everyman is discounted: it is less important and it is not a solidifier, nor does it offer an opportunity for mass recognition and reinforcement of identity.

While cultural anthropologists and sociologists largely attribute the “denial of death” to modes of secularization, a National Opinion Research Council’s study following the attacks of September 11^th found that Americans’ confidence in religious institutions actually increased after the September 11^th attacks. This simple pairing of secularization and denial of death is not sufficient; a deeper analysis is needed.

With the attack on New York, the entire country responded within a secondary victim role. Gusterson again illustrated how students at college campuses now make justifications for re-bombing Hiroshima in World War II or murderous medical testing in third world countries: “we’re justified in defending ourselves; or they were going to die anyway of starvation.” A strategic term of death denial in Iraq War vocabulary is “collateral damage” which describes the countless anonymous deaths of innocents. Death is seen as hyper-real from a distance; it is not of our concern.

When we hear of the heroics of troops lost in Iraq, we do not see their coffins, but hear only their names, as abstract strangers. The recognition of our vulnerability is put aside for the vengeful justifications precipitated by the status of victimhood. Religious detachment from the state’s exercise of power has been put aside as the president claims to have God on our side. Patriotism is equated with godliness because, of course, the victims were victims of jihad, or a religious war. Patriotism has become God’s cause; this fuels our derealization of the actual dimensions of our vulnerability. To show feeling of sadness at loss, or call for the troops to come home in acknowledgment of vulnerability would not “support our troops” as mothers who support the Iraq War stated in Time Magazine in August 2005. But when death comes home, we do not see the coffins. Victimhood still remains a commodity, however: death is an item of distant fascination. We gaze at the mysterious fetish. On the Internet, one can find downloadable “clip art” of the Twin Towers burning to the ground.

So many members of the support groups I interviewed described how in their home or community, death was a taboo topic. Bereaved mothers who lost infants to SIDS repeatedly mentioned being “infectious risks” to their friends. Widows are sequestered at weddings and other family or church events. Suffering is too close in this context; death is too close, and grief is contagious. The psychosocial consequence of this is the marginalization of the bereaved and the complication of grief.

Those attending support groups focusing specifically on loss constitute an artificial community based on select interest or experience. The relations between group members are both thick in some ways, in that they intimately explore each other’s emotional lives, but thin at the same time: Each group member has little contextual knowledge of or shared experience with others. It is truly a social service compensating for a lack of other more natural/durable contexts of community. Jean Baudrillard might describe this kind of falsely intimate/non-familiar community as hyper-real simulacrum: Its presence is indicative of absence. The simulacrum, or this desire and attendance of the support group as an intimate yet not intimate group marks an absence of sufficient (outside) communities of empathy.

However, there is a risk to the “model community.” Multiplicity of experiences breaks out of grief models. As scholar Therese Rando observes, grief is more chaotic than ever: it breaks psychological modeling. The model becomes more of a source of modern form of social control (and anxiety): modern grief models replace traditional mourning models. But social experience transcends modern psychological models, especially in the cultural frameworks of death denial. This is a characteristic of what I borrow from Derrida’s concept of différance, and the psychological literature must be attentive to the political dimensions of this condition. The question of the grief

Page 154

process then is more than just a topic for therapists and psychologists; it is also a cultural debate on production of meaning in the location of the simulacrum as the real or not. The hospice movement may be a corrective to this societal dysfunction, but the political consequences of death in the hyperreal are simply too horrific to ignore in wider socio-cultural debates.

Page 155