Unhealthy Fear of Death: Modern Westerners Don't Understand How We End

A hundred years ago, a dead family member would be at home during and after his or her death. You'd be with the dying loved one, and later would see the body laid out in your parlor, or the best room of your house. Traditionally, you'd watch the body all night. Clocks and mirrors were draped in black. The family wore black for a set period of time. Neighbors and friends filled the kitchen with casseroles and meats that would be easy to prepare, keeping you going during your mourning and feeding the crowds that would come for the wake or remembrance.

We even cared for our beloved dead ourselves then. Women washed and dressed the body, caring for each part of the deceased just as they would when they were alive. They laid the body out, dressing him or her in favorite clothes, ensuring favorite items went into the coffin with them. Today, we fear to even touch the carefully made up dead in the funeral home.

Like birth, death was centered in the home, an integral part of being a family. It was intimate, a guest (welcomed or not) to every family

Today, most people die in hospitals or nursing homes in sterile environments. Their bodies never see their homes again. Instead, they're housed in morgues, then shipped to funeral homes or embalmers. A few are sent to churches for memorial services, but most have visitation arranged with a mortician. From these locations, they travel to their final resting places: the earth, a crypt, a crematorium. Only those reduced to ashes are ever returned home, in the neat sterile confines of a jar.

The families, meanwhile, mourn without that close association with the body they historically had.Without the body, the traditions associated with dying and mourning, sometimes even mourning itself, have fallen away as well. Dying traditions are dying traditions.

A person who mourns his or her loved one makes others uncomfortable. We don't know what to say or do. We are separated from the traditions and manners that once made death familiar, and now treat it like a thing impossible to understand or deny. Death is sterile now.

Worst, no one is willing to discuss death anymore, except in hushed tones of "did you hear that"s. A dying person is uncomfortable discussing his or her end; they're encouraged to hope, not plan. It's not polite to bring up death.

We have developed an artificial fear of death and dying. It makes death less real to us, allowing us to deny the reality and inevitability of the end of life, both in others and in ourselves. It decreases our spirituality, bankrupting us emotionally.

And it makes high death rates among others much less real. What are a million dead in Africa? Or the three thousand dead on 9/11? Face it, most of us were more emotionally impacted by the fall of the towers themselves, if we're really honest.

Moving death into a sterile, controlled environment, where it is more pleasant and possibly more healthful, has also made death seem distant and controllable, though it is not. We already arrogantly insist that we can control everything: weather, other countries, our own selves. We can add death to our list of self-delusions.