On the politicisation of death
by Sebastian Millbank, The Critic:
Those who live public lives also die public deaths. When a famous or infamous person dies, it is inevitable that their life is held up to public judgement, that final praises are offered, last insults hurled. Whether or not this is a dignified spectacle, it is an inevitable one, and it would be better to concentrate our minds on how to do it well and justly, than chase after the sometimes mythical idea of the private dignity of grief.
It is understandable and laudable that when someone is grieving a loss, that we wish to offer them respect and understanding, that we give them space to mourn. This admirable instinct is in practice confused in our minds and actions with the modern recoiling from death and dying. We cover death in euphemisms and mumble sympathetically about “passing on”; just perhaps we are relieved by the social conventions that draw us back from the side of the coffin.
Like birth and so much else in our society, the end of our lives has become privatised and individualised. The truism “we all die alone” is the very opposite of the Biblical perspective — “For none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself” (Romans 14:7).
Public rituals around dying were just that — structures and liturgies with strict rules and bounds. They are still familiar in memory or habit: customs like wearing black armbands, removing your hat as a coffin passes, sitting with the body of the deceased until the time of burial.
The question that complicates mourning and remembering the dead today is that of which community participates in grief. Family? Friends? The neighbourhood? The school? The general public reading a sad story online? Who is united in the solidarity of sorrow, who is a prurient interloper?
The loss of shared rituals makes it harder for the person caught on the boundary of tragedy to know how and whether to act, to express sympathy without intruding on the intimacy of a death. This quandy only becomes harder in relation to the very saddest cases: those who become public figures through their violent or unexpected death.
I had not wanted to write this piece and am hesitant even as I write it, because it concerns a death that I believe should never have been subject to the scrutiny or debate that it has received. I’m writing about it now only because it has been so widely debated that I judge I will do more good than harm by further discussing it.
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
