A (very) Short
History of Death
The living’s relation to the dead has changed dramatically over the last few centuries- first and foremost because we live longer now. The circumstances of your average death have shifted from the home to the hospital. What was once constant, grim, and uncompromisingly visible, became a taboo conversation topic and private familial affair.
When we do not see death, our customs around it change. Once, when mourning the loss of a close family member, one was expected to wear black for an entire year. This symbol carried cultural weight. The process of dying was shared, but living longer had changed something in the culture:
A century ago, death was a public event with the deathbed acting as one of the central features of community life. "People basically saw a death as a social gathering in which the person dying was supported by the community, and the community basically got some type of closure from the dying person," says [Dr. JoQuim Madrenas, professor of Microbiology, Immunology and Medicine at the University of Western Ontario].
But, with modern medical advances death, according to Madrenas, "stops being a social event. It becomes a very private event between you and your doctor, maybe your immediate family and group of friends. People die more and more alone."
"Death, which had been common and familiar, became unfamiliar, remote, invisible and expected only in old age," says Madrenas.
One of the game-changers in how we discuss this topic now is the Kübler-Ross model- the 5 stages of grief- proposed in her 1969 On Death and Dying. There are, of course, other models to consider now- such as William Worden’s 1992 Four Tasks of Mourning in Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy. That is to say, we now have a cultural acceptance that this is a process, and it is private in the sense that no two people grieve the exact same way, for the same amount of time, or even with the same “steps”.
We’re coming full circle and once again seem to be contending with death in public discourse.
There now exist social movements on transparency and information on the death process, the idea of Dying Well, destigmatizing complicated topics so that they may be reasonably discussed, (physician assisted suicide for example,) and an immediacy in communication blanketing it all. On the ground this means new social nuances around mass-communication, private communication, and developing opinions on digital relics, their maintenance, and how we attribute value to them.