The Culture of Death in the United States
Upon listening to a recent episode of This Anthro Life where we meet Lilly White who investigates the culture of coroners, I began to think about the relationship between people in the United States and death. Death has been called the great equalizer but the care before and after death is far less than equal and at times can go against a dead or dying person’s wishes. Anyone who works with sick and dying patients knows that oftentimes the dying person suffers towards the end of their life because they have never expressed any of their wishes to their loved ones. Because death is such a taboo, many people don’t make a plan for their end of life or let anyone know what their wishes are.
This stems from the negative connotation of death that is ever present in our culture in the United States. This is not the case in all parts of the world, there are some cultures that don’t necessarily view death in such a negative light but rather as a cycle, where life and death are viewed as inevitable and natural. The most often cited example of this is the Latin American celebration of Día de los muertos where living people celebrate the lives of their deceased loved ones and oftentimes believe that their loved ones visit them during this time.
The negative image of death in the United States was not always there, it was only in the beginning of the 20th century when more people began to die in hospitals rather than in their own homes that this narrative began to take hold in the public imagination. Instead of your loved ones preparing the body for a funeral and burial, these tasks were outsourced to morticians and funeral homes. This shift created a rift between the dead and the living. Without death being a part of life for everyone it became more mysterious and perhaps thought to be more sinister. Before the 20th century most people took care of the remains of their deceased loved ones, including preparing the body for a funeral which was often done in the family home. This allowed for the family to say their final goodbyes and to see death as a process but because we have outsourced handling of the dead to others, death and dead bodies are seen as disgusting and scary.
This cultural taboo goes much deeper than not taking care of a loved one’s body but this custom of not speaking about how people want to be treated during their end of life care and after they die leads to families not knowing what to do when a loved one is ill or dies unexpectedly. This can cause turmoil in a grieving family or individual if the family doesn’t know if their ill loved ones want to be left on life support for an indefinite amount of time or how they want their remains to be handled after death. Especially after death care can cause emotional and economic hardship on families. When this happens often people are left spending a fortune on funeral arrangements that the deceased perhaps wouldn’t even have wanted while still having to deal with the emotional trauma of the death of a loved one. This can further be exacerbated by the time constraints that are often put on people to have a funeral as soon as possible which is often perpetuated by the cultural taboo surrounding death.
If someone doesn’t decide how they want their funeral to be arranged or how they want their remains to be handled, it is likely that the family will have the remains taken to a funeral home where the body will be washed, embalmed, dressed, and be prepared for a public viewing, especially if the family plans to have an open casket funeral. They will likely then be placed in a metal casket for the funeral and burial where they will be placed in a cemetery where they will get a headstone commemorating their life and death where loved ones and strangers alike can come to visit their grave and hopefully remember them fondly.
This isn’t a bad option, but it can be very expensive and at times impersonal. There are other options but because so few people look into these other options in part because of the taboo surrounding death, loved ones have to make the decision, not knowing if it is the right one. And since this has become the de facto way for remains to be handled after death, loved ones often go along with it.
Despite all of this there are people trying to combat this negative cultural view of death and by making options clear to families, hopefully before death so that the dying person can make these decisions before their families are forced to. There are people who are trying to change this cultural taboo of death in the United States. One example of this is the Order of the Good Death, founded by Caitlin Doughty, a Mortician, author, and YouTuber in 2011 with the hopes of trying to promote the death positivity movement. The Order of the Good Death promotes making their wishes known to their loved ones, natural burials, and overall educating the masses about death and dying bodies.
The way in which death is perceived by the United States is ever changing and with the COVID-19 pandemic taking the life of over 500,000 in the United States and more than 1.3 million people worldwide, death has and will continue to weigh heavily on our minds. Additionally, we are further removed from death than we were before. Because now we can’t even be by the bedside of our dying loved ones death is further being relegated to abstraction in a time when we are reeling for something concrete.
We know that after mass deaths such as pandemics and major conflicts there tends to be a rise in people wanting to connect with their deceased loved ones. We have seen this with mass death in the past, such as the 1918 Influenza Pandemic and the World Wars where many people found comfort in the spiritualism movement, while we cannot be sure how the culture of death will change while we are in the thick of a mass dying we can try to see death less as an abstract scary thing looming in the distance and see it more as as a part of life. Because without death, life would be meaningless.
