A couple of nights ago, I spent two hours instant messaging a good friend whose brother was murdered a few weeks prior. That was the first time we had spoken since she broke the news to me.
I wanted, in some minute way, to console her, maybe make her laugh. She’s a college student, so she was catching up on missed homework, studying for belated midterms.
Her brother was buried that day, too.
Not hours after a funeral, she was already back on the grind, once again a normal student, like everyone else in the University of Houston’s library. Although the work, the normalcy, comforted her, I was dumbstruck by the juxtaposition of “homework” and “buried my brother today.” It seems an American notion to compartmentalize death and urge a return to routine life as soon as possible.
Certainly, we’re a culture of condolences—hugs and kisses, apologies and Halmark cards—equipped with counselors and therapists galore to aid in the grieving process, but it sometimes feels like American culture doesn’t have a space for death and mourning like other cultures.
In lieu of Halloween’s silliness and the addictive scares of horror movies, we, as a culture, try to distance thoughts of our mortality with two extremes: transforming our fears into cartoonish costumes, caricatures or watching bloody spectacles far removed from our reality.
Cathartic, yes, but not exactly helpful.
I write this column on El Dia de Los Muertos, The Day of the Dead, a holiday most associated with Mexico, but similar traditions exist all over the world. It’s a fusion of indigenous folk belief and Catholic practices assigned to All Saint’s Day and All Souls’ Day. The day fascinated me for years; its iconography of sugar skulls and elaborate flower arrangements, and the gestures of washing gravestones, singing and offering food to deceased ancestors.
It’s a celebration of life as much as a respectful observation of death, and while it is no joyous replacement for mourning, there is no referent in American culture, no space to reflect upon mortality or honor the dead. It’s all on our own time.
This may be the influence of our Anglo heritage, tending toward restraint and self-control, or our Puritan strain demanding we work despite the pain, retreat into dignified, private mourning. Of course, this is only a general understanding of American mourning; there are vast differences from region to region and between groups of people.
Collectively, however, we can be markedly different from other cultures in how we handle death and grieving. In Southeast Asia and portions of Africa, there is wailing, coating oneself in ashes, communities of people in the throes of utmost agony.
Even animals are susceptible to display grief. Elephants are reported to perform “funerals,” gathering around carcasses, touching the bones with their trunks, bellowing and shaking their heads.
There are days in this country where we need the rawness, the reflection and the space to mourn properly. To look death in the face.
We’re not only a culture not well equipped to handle death, but we’re uncomfortable with aging and illness. This is a consumer culture of youth, sex appeal and vanity to an extent—always the diets, the skinny jeans, the beautiful people.
I can’t think of a successful television show since The Golden Girls focused on characters not under 30 (played by actors pretending to be under 30). The Golden Girls may have been exaggerated but a show like that would never last now: Who wants to hear jokes about retirement homes and weathered libidos over cheesecake?
And unless we’re campaigning for a charity, wearing a yellow bracelet or pinning a pink ribbon, we don’t like to discuss illnesses. People are always fighting for recognition and respect.
Still this isn’t a distinctly American problem; it’s a human one. We’re designed to fear death and anything associated with it like old age and sickness. It’s horrible to grieve, relive the pain of losing a loved one.
But in returning to everyday life, learning to live with a void, we can’t shun death completely. It’s as important to recognize life, to witness life, in its rambunctious glory, as it is to witness death, and its silence.
Derrick Austin can be reached at daustin@ut.edu.