fn

These things always start with a phone call.[1]

[1] This, of course, is an historically inaccurate statement. Death, and the imperative to transmit and circulate information about someone’s passing, obviously precedes the invention of the telephone in the late 19th c. Can we imagine though what this was like in the time before telephones? When word came by way of a solemn face standing at the entrance to one’s home, perhaps an unexpected knock on the door. When news of death was delivered by handwritten letter or all caps telegraph, no voice only letters forming sentient words on a page? And what of these melancholy but necessary transmissions in the digital age?

Just as death and dying (funerals, last rites/farewells, mourning) have always involved ritual, so too has the circulation of such news engaged its own set of rituals.

See especially the foundational work of Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975) and his influential The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes Toward Death over the Last One Thousand Years (New York: Vintage Books, 1982). For example, it is interesting to note that until the early 20th century, funerals were invitation-only affairs. Such an invitation would arrive in the same letter that delivered news of the passing. Even before opening the envelope, the recipient was alerted to the gravity of the message within as the envelope itself was edged in black. So too was the letter itself.

In earliest times, death was often not a surprise as people suffered from long illnesses. One of the early announcements or alerts of someone’s passing was the “soul bell” or the “passing bell.” Originating in Tudor England (1486–1603), this bell would be rung to announce a death in a village community, even though the exact identity of the deceased could not be known through such a method. “The cultural trait” of the bell had its local specificities. One town might ring the bell several times, while another locale might choose to ring the bell a few times followed by a pause and then a few times again. As part of these townships, it was one’s duty to recognize the toll for worship, the toll for gathering, and the toll for death. A shared knowledge, a community code.

The bell traveled with colonists to early America and according to James K. and Mary A. Chrissman in Death and Dying in Central Appalachia (Urbana, Il.: University of Illinois Press, 1994), remained part of life in Central Appalachia and other rural locales along the eastern seaboard well into the 19th century.

So too do the bells remind us of the sonic nature delivering news of death. Not simply the voice of family or community member or chaplain or doctor or high ranking military officer who first announces the passing. But also the knock on the door, the peal of the bell and, in the long 20th century, the telephone. In 1885, Alexander Graham Bell created American Telephone and Telegraph to manage a long distance network and convey information across vast distances. But even before that, when Bell transmitted the first complete sentence, “Watson, come here, I want you,” the invention portended death. That sentence, a call, a request, announced that the time before the telephone had passed.

When telephones found their way into everyday homes, the sound was alarming in its shrill newness. As philosopher and cultural theorist Walter Benjamin avers, the new household addition disrupted previous patterns of daily living. (See “The Telephone,” in Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, Michael Jennings, Brigid Doherty and Thomas Y. Levin, editors [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008]). How long before that sound — the ring, the anticipation, the startle, the insertion of the disembodied — became the voice of a new normal, of the aftermath of an utterly transformative event? One might say that the origins of this emergence still manifest in our ongoing relationship with the “telephone.”

One of the most significant aspects of the telephone in the history of death and dying is that it’s advent and usage coincided with the move from death as a public or communal/community information to death as a private and familial knowledge. New media scholars have begun to argue that the emergence of social networking, especially facebook, and youtube have helped return death to its more public history. (see Malkowski, Jennifer Malkowski, “Dying in Full Detail”: Mortality and Duration in Digital Documentary, PhD dissertation, UC-Berkeley, 2011).

But these are beginnings of a different kind. Older, more important, more world-historical for certain, to which this beginning, my beginning is only an anecdote, a footnote.