Death's Summer Coat

By Brandy Schillace

Death is something we all confront—it touches our families, our homes, our hearts. And yet we have grown used to denying its existence, treating it as an enemy to be beaten back with medical advances.We are living at a unique point in human history. People are living longer than ever, yet the longer we live, the more taboo and alien our mortality becomes. Yet we, and our loved ones, still remain mortal. People today still struggle with this fact, as we have done throughout our entire history. What led us to this point? What drove us to sanitize death and make it foreign and unfamiliar?Schillace shows how talking about death, and the rituals associated with it, can help provide answers. It also brings us closer together—conversation and community are just as important for living as for dying. Some of the stories are strikingly unfamiliar; others are far more familiar than you might suppose. But all reveal much about the present—and about ourselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pegasus Books
• Release date: Jan 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781681770932

Brandy Schillace

Brandy Schillace is a historian of medicine and the critically acclaimed author of Death’s Summer Coat: What Death and Dying Teach Us About Life and Living and Clockwork Futures: The Science of Steampunk. The host of the Peculiar Book Club, a livestream community for authors and their readers, she has appeared on the Travel Channel’s Mysteries at the Museum, NPR’s Here and Now, and FOX’s American Built. Dr. Schillace is a 2018 winner of the Arthur P. Sloan Science Foundation award and serves as editor-in-chief of BMJ’s Medical Humanities Journal.

Book preview

DEATH’S SUMMER COAT

What the History of Death and Dying

Can Tell Us about Life and Living

BRANDY SCHILLACE

CONTENTS

Introduction: Meet the New (Old) Death

Epilogue: Beginning at the End

Notes

Index

Introduction

MEET THE NEW (OLD) DEATH

Why a book like this one, and why now?

The theatre was box-like, crouched behind razor wire off the strip in Los Angeles. Unremarkable, really; a dustcoloured square barely discernible from the others that dotted Beverly Boulevard under a hot October sun. You weren’t going to miss it, though. There were too many people out front, and nearly everyone – whether in evening attire or metal studs – wore black. A funeral? No, though the Grim Reaper was in attendance (with an actual scythe). A concert? An art show? Not quite. Here, not far from Hollywood, were gathered scholars, morticians, curators and an interested public for the first ‘death cabaret’ – part of the first ever Death Salon. The talks and events showcased something most people rarely, if ever, consider: our own mortality.

We die. We know this, in principle, and yet in the Western world we don’t live with the idea of death. We refrain from thinking about it, we avoid reflecting upon it, and death is something most of us simply don’t talk about. Death Salon is an unusual organisation in that it chooses death as a focus for discussion, but it’s part of an emerging ‘death-positive’ movement, one that includes death cafes and death dinners. These gatherings call for the breaking of taboos, a desire to reclaim ground that has been lost – particularly in the West – during a century and a half of sanitisation and silence. Insulated by their relative wealth, health systems and the successes of hygiene and sterilisation, post-industrial nations have the privilege of a protective screen from unmediated images of death. Even so, these advances cannot ultimately protect us from death itself. It’s time to rejoin the conversation.

Jon Underwood, a former British council worker, founded Death Cafe in 2011, inspired by the ideas of Bernard Crettaz, a Swiss sociologist who began a decade ago to encourage people to talk freely about death. Tea, cake and death are the order of the day, and many new death cafes (not run by Underwood) have sprouted up here and there as places to speak about the inevitable. These mortality meetings tend to create a stir, showing up in blog feeds, on Twitter and Facebook, and in news sites such as the Huffington Post and the New York Times. Even more recently, Kate Granger, a thirty-one-year-old British physician with terminal cancer, has committed to live-tweeting her final moments, and comedian Laurie Kilmartin (a writer for the Conan O’Brien show) live-tweeted her father’s last days in hospice care. But these attempts at making death part of the conversation are not without their problems – and detractors. Some commentators question whether making public these personal events is an appropriate use of social media, while others worry that these are novelty encounters which will ultimately lead to a clichéd sense of death rather than true engagement with it. Regardless of what side you take, these platforms suggest an increasing number of us want to explore death – or, at the very least, to broach the subject.

Why, someone asked recently, are events like Death Salon happening in Europe and the US? Why not elsewhere? To begin with, they are happening elsewhere; death cafes have been held in Hong Kong and in India. In an article entitled ‘Care to Talk About Death Over Coffee?’ the Times of India asked people what they thought of the concept. One respondent, Soma Mukherjee, replied: ‘I don’t know if it will really work here [because] death is discussed from the time the first pet or grand-uncle dies.’ In cultures where death already has a place, where it already appears as a normal and approachable subject, there need be no taboo-breaking. It’s only where we have lost the ability to discuss these subjects openly that we need new perspective.

Of course, in some ways, we are talking. The overwhelming popularity of Mary Roach’s humorous look at what happens after death, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, is a good example. Roach proves that we can learn a lot by studying the hidden, or at least less familiar, practices of the body after death – from bodysnatching to ‘medical’ cannibalism. The dead body, the cadaver, may reveal a lot about anatomy and the functions of the body. The history of those bodies can tell us a great deal about how perspectives have changed. But death in the abstract is a very different thing from death closer to home; it touches our families, our homes, our hearts. Death is a balancing act: we know it will happen to us, to those we love, and yet we live in denial. That denial often leaves us entirely unprepared for the other element of death: grief.

Most of us remember ‘the sex talk’. I got mine early, after catching the neighbours at it. I was five, and met my mother at the door when she got home, demanding to know ‘how it was done’. (I was horrified by the explanation, as most of us probably were.) It has long served as a kind of cultural touchstone in Western society: frequently referred to as ‘the birds and the bees’ or, more ominously, ‘the talk’. But how many of us recall any similar kind of conversation on the subject of death? Or grief? Hospice care provides one means of readying the dying and their families, but more often the mortally sick go to a hospital, where they remain until death. Their bodies are transported from that sterile room to a funeral home, where they are prepared without our knowledge and often without our input. It’s little wonder that discussion of death is taboo. My best friend’s mother, a breast cancer patient, tried repeatedly to talk about the looming possibility of her own death, only to be told that she should not speak of it. It is a strange irony: the last thing we are supposed (or allowed) to do when preparing to meet death is talk about death. Can you imagine the inverse? We would not plan for the birth of a child without addressing the subject of labour. Major events demand adequate preparation – more than that, they require solemnity, significance. These make up our cultural rituals, and rituals have enormous power.

We find ourselves today in a culture of opposites: bent on living forever, but committed to the disposable nature of absolutely everything else. Looking to find meaning isn’t an arbitrary quest: it is the human condition, and rituals are human events that help us find that meaning. While the word itself suggests imagery from religious practice, ritual really refers to behaviour – actions performed with intention and significance. They may be as simple as a handshake or as complex as a rite of passage, but they stand for so much more. Rituals are the fabric of our cultural identities and they enable us to proceed through life’s great moments.

Has something happened to our rituals for death? For dying and for grieving? The silence that currently surrounds mortality is actually comparatively recent. In the death announcements of eighteenth-century Britain and the US, people did not ‘pass on’; they died. Euphemisms were used, too, but not often. Someone might, on occasion, ‘kick the bucket’ (an expression that probably refers to the process of slaughtering hogs) – and in the case of hanged criminals, they might ‘swing home’. But the real push towards euphemisms for death happened later, mainly in the mid to late nineteenth century. This shift can be seen even in the American funeral announcements shown here, which changed the wording in death notices from ‘moulders here’ to ‘slumbers here’ in the space of a decade. References to decay are removed for the more esoteric image of sleep; but why? What changed in Western culture? Fast-forward to the twenty-first century, and our language is even less able to confront the reality of death. We avoid using the word itself, talk in metaphors about ‘brave battles’ and shy away from anything that might remind us of our own mortality. What drove us to sanitise death, and in so doing, make it foreign and unfamiliar?

Death notice from the nineteenth century.

Death notice from the twentieth century.

Eternal or disposable?

Our medical establishment is primarily concerned with prolonging life, not with preparing us for death. Death has become the enemy of medicine, to be fought at all costs, regardless of the situation. This is evident from the various debates about assisted suicide and enforced life support, and legal cases such as that of Terri Schiavo, a woman in a vegetative state whose feeding tube was removed only after seven years, fourteen appeals, five suits in federal district court and a Supreme Court decision. Major companies are investing in ways to prevent the ageing process – Google recently got in on the act with Calico, its biotech subsidiary aiming to ‘cure death’. Ray Kurzweil, an engineer, philosopher and inventor described by Forbes as ‘the ultimate thinking machine’, suggests that advances in nanotechnology will allow humans to live forever. While this sounds far-fetched, it is essentially the ultimate mission of Western medical and scientific research: replacement parts, better genes and the end of all diseases. We have not moved towards the acceptance of death, but rather the erasure of it.

But, as my grandmother was fond of saying, everything dies. Though separated by culture, context and chronicity, all humans must face the coming of death in a way distinct from our nearest mammal cousins. When we witness death, we must grapple with its finality, but also with our own mortality and the knowledge that one day we too will die. Whereas once this was understood as the natural order of things, we now find ourselves conflicted and less willing to see death as ‘natural’. If anything, death breaks into our lives as an unexpected surprise.

Our disavowal of death’s naturalness makes it harder to grieve properly. The Victorians had incredibly complex mourning rituals, including mourning jewellery, photographs of the recently dead (memento mori photography) and the public wearing of mourning clothing. Like birth, death was a social event that drew communities together. In a large city, scarcely a day would go by without some sign of bereavement being visible. Compare this with today, when illness and death are either hidden away in hospitals or sensationalised through popular culture, and when prolonged grief is likely to be medicated as abnormal rather than openly acknowledged as an inevitable part of life. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a Swiss-American psychiatrist, developed her theory of the five stages of grief in 1969 as a response to the lack of information on death and dying in the curriculum of medical schools – but even these stages hardly cover the enormous range of emotions that accompany death, and they certainly weren’t a plan for how to go about the process of grieving.

Religious service and practice once provided a universal framework for dealing with and understanding death; they still do, of course, but for many people today, these traditions don’t reflect their beliefs and experience, and little has replaced them. In a 2011 article for Prospect magazine (‘Death Becomes Us’), Sarah Murray addresses the plight of her atheist father; he believed fervently that humans were but organic matter, but nonetheless wanted his ashes to be spread in a churchyard. His desire was not a return to belief, but rather, as the author writes, recognition that ‘dismissing the significance of organic matter is not that easy’. We long for a permanence of ‘things’ and places to grieve. This is just as true in the wake of great tragedies such as the 2005 London bombings, the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight M-17 or the collapse of the Twin Towers. Our need to grieve can become explosive if kept inside us. It needs an outlet. Otherwise, where are we to put all that sadness? Or – to put it another way – what are we to do with ourselves?

In the relentless rush and hurry of modern life, too often death comes like an unplanned interruption. But the world keeps moving on, swift in its course, and often the experience of death whips past us in a series of distorted scenes we hardly recall and decisions we scarcely remember making. This is especially true if death comes suddenly, or if the dead person made no explicit plans for their passing. However, when my grandfather died, things happened slowly enough for me to take some notice. My cousin officiated the ceremony – the funeral parlour was a quiet house not far from the family cemetery. We had coffee upstairs in the faux-brick kitchen, and I had time to think about death as something – almost a someone – to be approached intimately. To me, this was new. But it isn’t new. It is old – nearly as old as history. Rather than continuing to avoid death, or to fear it, what if we changed our perception? Might we conceive of death, instead, as the winding down of life’s frantic clock – and dying as a means of coming to terms with our identities, our loved ones, ourselves?

We do still have rituals. Why aren’t they helping? It is hard to examine something when you are too near to see it properly, and without engagement, reflection and sometimes reinvention, rituals can lose their meaning. It is often easier to understand one’s own country by looking outward. The mediation of distance is important, not because it prevents us from facing death, but because it is only from a distance that we can appreciate the vast complexity surrounding it. We’ll start by looking at certain grief rituals and death practices of cultures different from the West, from sky burial to mummification, and then consider how they compare with the history of the Western approach to death and dying. If knowledge is power, then greater knowledge about how death is viewed elsewhere and in times gone past is a powerful tool to help us think about whether we can do better in the here and now. Looking for ways of approaching our mortality isn’t foolish – it is a war on fear and misinformation, and on that vacuum of silence.

Death’s summer coat

For many centuries, death was an expected part of life, but in the past 150 years, our approach to death in the West has changed markedly. For the most part, we aren’t aware of this change – but if we don’t know where we’ve come from, we aren’t likely to know where we’re heading. Through the help of ‘weird’ science, history, literature and a number of previously unpublished photos, this book reimagines the journey the West has taken – and takes a closer look at our final destination. Once we meet death and keep it near, it ceases to threaten us, ceases to be alien. Death, when embraced, can be the means to healing and to progressing through grief for the living. It can also be our greatest means of connection. The chapters that follow are about ‘putting on’ rituals, wearing them as the vestal garments often used in ceremony. Wrapped up in these, in death’s ‘summer coat’, we find it easier to approach our common end.

As a medical-humanities scholar, I have lived my professional life at the intersection of several fields: history, literature, medicine, anthropology. Intersections are valuable. The inroad that another person’s belief makes as it comes into contact with my own is not an invasion so much as an invitation. Sharing our stories provides hope and community, so that none of us needs to face death alone in the silent dark. Learning about other practices is enticing partly because the unfamiliar looks so new; that unfamiliarity encourages us to engage with every aspect, to ask questions, to wonder and to reconsider our own ways of doing things in turn. We do not need to agree with a cultural tradition or religious belief in order to acknowledge its value and its power.

The title of this book is not intended to put a rosy hue on what is hard and unfathomable. It is not an attempt to make palatable a bitter pill. To me, the phrase ‘death’s summer coat’ is recognition that all things ephemeral are made lovely in their brevity. We long for spring or summer despite – or perhaps because of – the seasons being fleeting: a glimpse of life’s bud, followed by autumn and the long, dark winter. We ritualise the coming of the warmer months by cleaning our houses, planning reading lists and summer holidays, celebrating Easter or any of the other holidays that rejoice in the thaw. We shed our layers and put on new clothes like a new skin. Death’s summer coat is life’s unexpected beauty, and when each of us passes ultimately into that last winter, I believe it, too, will be followed by a new spring. What that spring will be like, I don’t know. Many religions describe it. Many who are not religious nonetheless see continuity in our return to the earth, and our part in the life cycle and the seasons.

It’s time to meet the new (old) death.

Chapter 1

DEAD AND KNOWING IT

What to expect when you’re expecting death

‘A wake,’ my mother said. ‘To sit with the dead.’

We were on our way to West Virginia, to an unremarkable two-storey colonial where my grandfather’s remains had been washed and laid out for viewing. It had been raining all night, but apparently no one in this homey funeral parlour had been sleeping. They’d been sitting up with the body. Sitting up – with the body – all night.

There are no good adjectives to describe my initial feelings about this. I was seventeen and grieving, but as I thought about it I realised I wasn’t horrified. Shocked, yes, but the idea was strangely enticing, even fascinating. Really? We do that? This wasn’t my first funeral, but it was the first time I’d encountered the intimacy of a ritual like this one. My West Virginian relatives had traditions I had not encountered before, traditions that still exist around the country even if only in pockets or among particular denominations. The wake struck me with its unfamiliarity, and helped me to look at the buzzing activity that surrounds the newly dead in new ways. I asked myself what seemed like suddenly obvious questions – why wash a body before putting it in the dirt? Why sit awake with someone now permanently asleep? Even the practice of embalming the body (which prevents decay) before interring it in the ground (where it is supposed to decay) struck me as a very strange thing to do. With only a minor leap of morbid imagination, care of the newly dead began to resemble care of the newly born. And sharing this, I knew, was going to upset people.

Death and birth are not, strictly speaking, as divergent as you might expect. In my work for the Dittrick Medical History Center in Cleveland, Ohio, I curate exhibits on the history of childbirth and midwifery. The Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus was found at El-Lahun, Egypt (Faiyum, Kahun, ) by Flinders Petrie in 1889. It is one of the oldest surviving medical texts and concerns aspects of pregnancy and birth, as well as various associated diseases, around 1800 BC. A