Dealing With Death

Images of death are among our contemporary favourites, and are as present as in a medieval plague drama, baroque apocalypses, Cold War bomb shelters or a 1980s’ AIDS scenario. Death has everything: a drama; a fate; a story; and a message of fear, grief, loss and unending loneliness. Today, death seems more modern than ever. Film, video art and exhibitions showcase death with constantly stretched boundaries. The neurotically productive crime novel genre seems to alleviate death anxiety by fictionalising death. At the same time, the pathologist has been assigned – something that delves into death’s most factual details – a contradictory hero’s role. In the private sphere and the nursery, symbols of death form part of the decoration and games. Toys, wallpaper and t-shirts with skull motifs are bestsellers and Halloween skulls and bones are eaten like sweets in a hilariously pseudo-cannibalistic rite. The boundary between the living and the dead seems to have been breached. A staggering percentage of the Swedish population believe in the spirit world, celebrities testify about meetings with ghosts, and the media reports it eagerly. A few years ago, there was the cult HBO series Six Feet Under about the Fisher family, who were undertakers. Here, the dead body was turned into an unpredictable actor. In the family villa’s basement, corpses were renovated like chipped objects to be repaired and made-up for the emotional encounters of the open-coffin. Death’s threat of the great unknown seemed suspended. Here is the self in the very centre of events. The burial ritual is a celebration just for me. You play my favourite songs, praise me and tenderly caress my cold but well-powdered cheek. And afterwards there is a chance that the memory of me will materialise into flashes, hallucinations or dreams where I return intact and untouched to the living. Dead bodies can thus be presented as open for both our voyeuristic tendencies and our anxiety about decay and oblivion. But they can also – aesthetically exposed or cleaned back to the white skeleton – be accepted as human. Everywhere they appear in public – as in the evocative photos of Andres Serrano (The Morgue) and the art installations of Damien Hirst, in the hyper-realistic autopsy pictures online, or in Mary Roach’s spectacular book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. Dr. Gunther von Hagen’s international sensation Body Worlds – an exhibition concept where dead human bodies are prepared for presentation to the public, has finally reached Sodertalje (shown at Tom Tit’s Experiment until 8 January 2013). The bodies have been emptied of liquid, which is replaced by a plastic mass, which makes them flexible like rubber or wet clay, and then they are split apart and reassembled. The effect is strong: leather skinned, real human bodies, arranged in different poses. Visitors can circulate around them and study every detail of their tremendous nudity. It is claimed that many are willing to donate their bodies to Dr. von Hagen to thus get resurrected after death. If it is true, it is undeniably an illustration that the late modern individual’s conception of visibility – that I exist only if I can be seen – has been carried even into death. If no one has noticed me before, maybe they will when I’m dead. An equally sensational but prettier way to visit the dead body is to go to The Visible Human Project, a web-based anatomical atlas. It uses super-computers able to handle very large visual data sets, and creates a complete, anatomically detailed three-dimensional portrayal of real bodies. The first body that has been prepared in this way belongs (in accordance with a long anatomical tradition) an executed murderer, Joseph Jernigan, who died by lethal injection in 1993 in a Texas prison after donating his body to science. The body was photographed and scanned, frozen in gelatine, and then partitioned in sections and thousands of layers, which were photographed digitally. Obliterated in reality, the body is recreated so magically in the virtual world. Through medical science’s new visualisation techniques, we can also see death – including even our own – in an image that shows a shaded area or changes in an infected brain, lung or uterus. Anders Paulrud’s autobiographical The Butterfly In My Brain (2008) is just one example of how technological images of death are fused with our own eyes. Here is my death. This is just how it looks. As a literary theme, death is everywhere in pathographies (accounts of illness), biographies, fiction, diaries and blogs.

What shall we do with all this visibility? The question is whether it constitutes a separate type of death incantation. To make visible an enemy to neutralise him is a classical psychoanalytic technique. Perhaps the promise of science allows us to dare to expose ourselves to the anxiety. In this great success story, death can also seem possible to defeat. While Frankenstein – made of recycled body parts – never managed to get a full body without seams and joints, modern molecular biology’s DNA-body is a system connected by decipherable codes. This means that it can be repeated. Taken to its extreme, the idea is staggering: a body that can repair, create and renew itself. But perhaps, on the contrary, the visibility is about loss. Modernity’s rationalisation and estrangement of death creates the desire for stories that return it to a concrete and comprehensible dimension. The interesting thing is that one thus returns it to the border zone where it had long been. Today, the border between life and death is absolute. But historically, not even medical science has always presented this boundary as definitive. The dead body has been shown from a double perspective that is simultaneously scientific and humanistic. The worldviews of the Renaissance and Baroque periods spun obsessively right on the boundary between the living and the dead. In the famous illustrations of Andreas Vesalius’ work The Construction of the Human Body (1543), the skeletons and the skinned muscle mannequins are still vulnerable, sentient individuals. They mourn the loss of living existence, read, ponder, or play chess. Dead figures resting in melancholic poses on cushion-sprinkled beds or cold, stone beds. Also in the 1700s’ anatomical textbooks, the dead are depicted as living, such as a skeleton, hungrily reading a book. A humanistic perspective highlights the images’ primary educational purpose (for example to illustrate the hand’s finger joints or the knee’s bending). To the very last, man strives for the coveted knowledge, a kind of surreptitious reading long after the big sleep should have begun. The skeleton evokes tenderness in her voracious clinging to life. Even in the late 1700s, the body on the dissection table was seen as a subject. It is only modern science that redefined the dead body as an object – a piece of biological matter.

So: the contemporary obsession with death seems to involve a kind of return – but to what? Before modernity, and in all Christian faith, our life on Earth is just a brief moment in the eternal life. Arsmoriendi techniques (the art of dying) and a picturesque and vibrant belief in paradise have been death’s allies. Heaven was a place to look forward to and the death rites a series of coherent ritual actions – washing, dressing, coffin and grave embellishment, burial – which marked the nature of the rite of passage; they portrayed the gradual move to the heavenly realm. Each step was important; washing, shaving and combing served several purposes, primarily symbolic; the dead would be clean in both body and soul in their new life. But the body would also look good at the last Earthly party. One man was dressed in his wedding shirt, a woman in a bridal gown with veil and tiara, and one decorated with streamers or roses of glossy paper. The dead children were decorated with special care, sometimes in the ‘sky’. The dead lay in an open coffin. With the introduction of photographic technology, taking pictures of the dead was the rule for decades into the 1900s. Precisely because the funeral was a rite of passage, it was not democratic. All did not go to heaven. Some – criminals and suicides – were not allowed to be buried in consecrated ground. Burial ‘in silence’ was a humiliation, which meant that no bell ringing/soul ringing was allowed. With the 1800s’ modernisation, and the transition from an agricultural to an industrial society, this social gradation was taken over by secular society. Class differences sharpened the levels in the funeral rites: poor burials, ‘honest’ workers’ funerals (usually outdoors) and the rich man’s funeral (in the church). The time and duration of the bell ringing marked the death’s importance, so too with the hearse; even in the 1950s it could be pulled by horses with blinkers in black and silver, with a driver in a silver-trimmed coat. The dead man’s epitaph – the obituaries – has very much been a marker of class, gender and prominence. At the end of the 1800s, the handling of the dead had also switched from being a local rite to being a paid-for service. The first funeral agencies were started by entrepreneurs, with factory-made coffins and secular services. The commercialised accessories gradually become more and more common: cards with crosses and black borders, black ribbons, mourning veils, the funeral meal, and strict rules for funeral attire. At the same time, a more stringent regulatory system for proper mourning and burial behaviour was devised. Also, the emotions were expected to be disciplined. A man should show restraint, while women should cry discreetly without wailing and a running nose, and children should be kept away. ”Dead bodies are separated so clearly from the living realm”, writes Eva Åhrén in Death, the Body and Modernity (2002). The most visible difference was the simplification, that the rituals became less and less differentiated. The change was partly about a sort of welfare-state equality amongst people. No gaudy differences in burial conditions, mass-produced coffins, standardised shrouds and coffin embellishments; in the cemetery, no vulgar, giant tombstones, but a democratic height of 60 centimetres. When death in modern society is rationalised, sanitised and commercialised, it does not mean decreased respect. The modern funeral rite had meaning in its own way: death as factual, equal and hygienic (no one wishes to return to dead bodies’ smell and decay). But it is also very streamlined, detached. Many cemeteries that were built around the mid-1900s seemed to like to camouflage death by turning them into rigid parks with identical graves in dead straight lines.

This modernisation process ended with welfare. Around the turn of 2000 started what I would call the ‘repossession of death’. This occurs in parallel with the transplant and euthanasia debates, palliative care, and the work of hospices (especially AIDS hospices) that have once again brought us closer to death’s realities. The new death reflects society’s increased differentiation, individualisation and commercialisation, but also ‘existentialisation’. Several signs point to it. Examples of this are the new rituals surrounding the dead body that have emerged in recent years. Today, the dead are transported in growing numbers back to home countries, villages and home soil. The body has taken over the soul’s dream of coming home after death. It is increasingly important where and how we are buried. Adjacent to whom and with whom? With parents, the first wife, the last man or the grandchild who died at birth? Maybe in an officials’ collective grave (which was once common for society’s notables without a family) or in a memorial park? Maybe strewn across a blue ocean or under a dreamy weeping willow? The cemetery is not obviously a strange place, a place of death that does not have anything to do with me. In Per Olov Enquist’s The Story of Blanche and Marie, Marie Curie visits her husband Pierre’s grave. Shockingly, she realises that another casket has been placed on top of his. She will therefore not be able to be chest-to-chest with her husband. ”It was almost obscene … unreasonable, it should not be like this … Another strange body … covered her beloved, so that she would never be able to rest by his side.” It is a scene of great longing. Chest against chest. Almost cheek-to-cheek. But what is this about? Not the reunion of souls after death, but of bodies, albeit decayed to the bone.

All Saints’ weekend’s memorial candle tradition has become part of our ritual year. We salute the dead. We give them light, warmth and closeness. Many have experienced the warmth of the cemetery’s special All Saints’ evening: shadowy movements in the dark, low voices, an anonymous community amongst the memorial park’s sea of ??flames. All wrapped in a diffuse sense of purpose. In an individualised culture, the individual death must become more visible. It could be a personalised burial and grave embellishment. The burial site could be changed. Applications to disseminate relatives’ ashes at sea have multiplied, as well as various forms of memorial grave (combinations between an urn burial and a memorial). The interest in cemetery walks and cemetery tourism is growing. (Personally, I always liked cemeteries, and have stood by the graves of Proust, Camus, Brecht, Chopin, Piaf, Jim Morrison and many others, sometimes pinching the occasional flower.) Future burial sites are planned in a new way – not as a place just for the dead, but also for the living, with meandering bike paths and open spaces for picnics, yoga, and play. This trend, says a landscape architect, is to make the cemetery a lighter, more enjoyable and eventful place; they should not be surrounded by walls, but feel inviting (and even, for example, the popular Stampen cemetery in Gothenburg, on a hot summer’s day is more like a place for naked sunbathers than the dead). The traditional funeral has also changed. The burial ritual is now more personal, with bold choices of music (it has killed the ‘favourites’) and artistically designed coffins. Today, there are coffin motifs such as ‘sea’, ‘greenery’, ‘classical’ and ‘gourd’. Even more personal choices have been the coffin in AIK’s colours and emblems, and another in the patented colour Ferrari Red. Another possible choice is the ‘Angelbox’ coffin in pink with silver angel wings. This model is also available in white and black with wings of gold and was launched as ”a hopeful alternative to the coffin”, a casket that reflects the personality of the deceased. The Swedish Funeral Directors’ Association has now extended the concept under the title Never Ending Story, which emphasises that not everything has to be ”black as night with the funerals to do. We think it should be perfectly ok to have one last party (perhaps even the first, the beginning of something new)”. The new ‘Angelbox Gold’ has been launched, and it is even more luxurious than the previous models and offers full custom funeral kits according to the personality of the deceased, such as ‘globetrotter’, ‘athlete’, ‘gourmet’, ‘engine buff’ or ‘life seeker’. The offer includes coffin (Angelbox), urn (Angel Dust), tombstone (Angel Heart) and symbol- and text suggestions for the obituary. It is a design concept based on the popular cultural clichés, the unabashed exploitation of life-after-death myths, but also a kind of retention: you have left us, but you still exist. The internet has, in the same way, created an expanding space for death. With web addresses such as fuckyoudeath or lifeafterdeath, the number of blogs has exploded about individual deaths and individual dying – emotional posts that are ‘liked’, commented on and answered with a river of empathy. Death again becomes an existential drama that requires others’ compassion, that makes contact and that, beyond the commercialisation, insists on community, meaning and context.

The trend can also be seen in the opened, or at least loosened, boundaries between the living and the dead. Modernity’s rationalisation seems to pull back. (But there are also reports of hyper-rationalisation: relatives worriedly browsing overcrowded calendars to find a funeral date they can make, preferably a Friday.) All the risqué tales about urns stored and transported recklessly and hilariously seem to belong to the 1900s. The body is becoming ever more important when dead. In fact, it is a logical consequence of its general upgrade. Identity and body coincide. I am my body. The body is me. Massive disasters such as the Estonia, the tsunami and the discotheque fire in Gothenburg have undoubtedly strengthened our relationship with the dead body. The Estonia and tsunami tragedies have especially highlighted the ancient principle that has to do with belonging. It was partly about the right to rest on home ground, and partly about the families’ right to ‘bring home’, ‘take home’ their dead. The heated debate illustrated that ‘at home’ almost always involves questions of identity and belonging. Home is not just a place, but also a context and a habitat; to repatriate the dead is to return them to their community. Homelessness, not belonging, is the most disturbing thing we can imagine. To bring the dead home is the consolation of the living. We seem no longer to naturally think of death as an abrupt separation. The 1900s’ rational approach is being challenged by something new that is linked to the transition and the incorporation of rites. Then, in the heyday of modernisation, the old traditions were replaced by distancing: the fastest possible removal of the corpse to the mortuary cold room and the last management assigned to an anonymous funeral director. Exit. If death – especially when unexpected and young – shakes a social order, and the purpose of rituals is to establish a new meaningful order, the ways in which we treat it always say something about the culture and society in which we live. ”Thanks to all of you”, he writes just before dying in his last blog post. ”Now you be careful out there and take care of each other. And do not forget: Carpe Diem.”