HW 48 - Family Perspectives on the Care of the Dead

I interviewed two of my aunts, M and F.

Me and my aunt M discussed how death is portrayed in popular culture. She said: "In pop culture, death is scary and cold, full of ghouls, ghosts, and dread. In our culture, children are screened from any exposure to it, not taken to funerals, not seeing frail elderly people at all in their lives, and generally not wanting to. I'm convinced that we 20th century Americans do everything possible to avoid being close to dying or old people. We go to hospitals to die in sterile impersonal surroundings. We send our frail elderly to nursing homes to be cared for by strangers. I was brought up thinking that this was correct and desirable."

Her idea about how death is hidden from normal life reminded me of when this was discussed in the illness and dying unit, and how everyone came to the conclusion that people shouldn't have to die in a hospital hooked up to machines, and should instead get to die at home. I thought that what she said certainly aligned itself with my experience - although I wasn't really sheltered from death (I just didn't ever know anyone who died), it certainly wasn't shoved in my face. However, it seems natural to want to avoid talking about death, because that would involve facing the fact that it's going to happen, and there are enough unpleasant things to think about in one's life aside from the fact that it is going to end one day. But I understood what she was trying to say: it is good to question the idea that we should send dying people away to hospitals, because this makes death seem like something scary instead of something natural.

I also asked her about ways of caring for the dead that she has seen. She said: "I have attended traditional Catholic funerals and wakes with lots of kneeling prayers and crying sobs, but much storytelling and riotous memories. And I've been to very still formal funerals with open caskets and impersonal words. And I've been to memorial services with singing and dancing, and sweet hugs." The general sense I got from her descriptions was that the more formal funerals, where people's feelings are suppressed and everyone is composed, aren't as meaningful as the ones where people are sharing stories and letting feelings show. This made me wonder what it would be like if funerals were always happy occasions, if anyone would question this and wonder why people celebrated someone being gone.

When I interviewed my other aunt, F, she talked about how she decided to become an organ donor because she liked the "idea of the person who died being able to continue to help the living." This was something I forgot about in my initial thoughts, probably because it isn't really a dominant practice in the U.S., although I know that in some countries it is - everyone is automatically an organ donor unless they opt out of it. I was thinking that maybe I should be an organ donor, but then I thought no, what if someone awful gets to stay alive because they have my kidney or something? I could never live with myself if I allowed that to happen.

F also mentioned that at memorial services she likes talking with others about the deceased person, because she gets to hear stories that help her remember them, and she gets to meet other people who knew the person well. I liked this idea, that someone could meet people and make friends in the wake of a death, that the event would help someone forge connections they wouldn't have made otherwise.

I realize that I've gone on too much about my own thoughts and reactions to my family member's thoughts, and that this is starting to sound too much like my journey of self discovery instead of analysis. However, I can't really do too much analysis, as my two aunts are sisters and very close, and basically agree on everything. I will say that their way of approaching death is certainly contradictory to the cultural norm, or at the very least contradictory to what I know the cultural norm to be. I've also learned that my aunts outright refuse to be sad about anything, even the one thing that you would think people would agree is something to be sad about.