Living Greener: Modern life has exiled death
Once a loved one is gone, the modern attitude seems to say, everything they loved should go as well.
YOU might recall something your family did that you always thought normal, until you were much older and realised how odd it was.
Maybe you were the only child in your class whose family spoke the Irish at home, or hunted rabbits, or whose family sang along to television commercials.
Something you learned from experience not to share too widely.
Among my aunts and uncles, anyone who reached middle age was jovially presented with a “dirt cake,” a chocolate cake with half a biscuit poking out to look like a tombstone.
We talk about where this or that relative plans to be buried. We e-mail each other about people who died recently – cousins, old friends, celebrities, anyone.
We divide up the belongings of relatives who died and remember them fondly as we hang their old paintings on our walls, wear their old clothes, or use their old appliances.
I still remember the moment I mentioned this among friends, and the look of horror and revulsion on their faces.
Not amusement at someone’s eccentricity, not acceptance of a different culture. Revulsion. The thought of reminding someone of their own death or using a dead person’s forks or neckties or books struck them as sickening.
What do modern people do when someone dies, I thought?
For many people these days, I found, the answer was to throw out everything the deceased owned, all their cherished keepsakes and books and favourite mugs.
Once a loved one is gone, the modern attitude seems to say, everything they loved should go as well.
Not only do we avoid the subject of our own deaths, but once friends and family die, we rarely mention them again, and never comfortably.
Our modern culture conspires to see that as you grow older you become less valued, not more, that you will die as an annoyance, and that when your body gives out your existence will vanish from polite conversation except as a faux pas, like a bad smell.
There is no way to exaggerate how bizarre our modern culture is compared to any traditional one – in almost any area of life, but especially regarding death.
All humans who came before us killed animals to live, defended their families, delivered babies, cradled the dying and buried the dead themselves, rather than outsourcing all these tasks to strangers.
The Irish spent their last days surrounded by loved ones, people who shared most of the same daily memories for decades, the same stories of this place passed down for thousands of years, their souls intertwined into a single living thing.
Together they had delivered, nursed, healed and buried many relatives before them, their joys heightened because they were shared, their grief lessened because they were shared.
When elders grew close to death, friends and neighbours from all around came to visit, people who might have explored birds’ nests together, helped foot the turf, accepted each other’s cheques when the banks closed.
People depended on each other, so a death meant a library of memories gone, a gap in the voices of the choir, an empty pew in church, a vacant seat at the pub.
Only in our modern world do so many people die alone and unremembered.
As death drew nearer the family gathered around the dying in their small rooms, just as other humans did in their huts or yurts or shelters as long as we have been human.
They said the rosary together, prayer after prayer. And sometimes, they tell me, a swelling rose inside them, like a wind filling sails, and their gathered bodies became its instruments, and they lifted their voices together in song.
Today, we can afford to hide death as we once hid sex, but at the cost of the awareness that grants maturity.
Death reminds us that we are not our avatars or online identities, limitless and ever-changing at whim.
Death spurs us to live better, to put away childish things, to quiet our thoughts and feel the snore of a baby in our arms, observe the shafts of green light through treetops, cherish the touch of an aging hand. This is all you will ever have. Make the most of it.
