Faculty of Environmental Studies Amy Lavender Harris
York University PhD Candidate
Please do not use this paper without permission and attribution. Comments welcomed. Amy
Lavender Harris may be contacted at alharris@yorku.ca .
August 2002
Revised May 2004
Comprehensive Paper
Death and Nature in Contemporary North American Culture
1. Introduction
The “lost theme” to be addressed is not quite death itself. These days, in fact, one has the impression, at least in America, that death has been all too much found. Much more elusive is the psychological relationship between the phenomenon of death and the flow of life. (Lifton, 1979: 4)
This comprehensive paper explores how contemporary North American views and practices of death are related to ideas about nature. Nature is an important sub-text in North
American understandings of death, and references to nature and the natural appear recurrently in both scholarly and popular accounts of death. References to nature appear in varied forms, most prominently in discussions of biomedical ethics and the idea that there are ‘natural’ and
‘unnatural’ deaths, in persistent allusions to forms of scientific naturalism, and in discussions about the physical settings and processes associated with death, including preservation, decomposition, and the possibility of regeneration in natural and unnatural settings. However, despite the persistence of these references and allusions, linkages between death and nature receive cursory attention in most commentaries, even in discussions about burial, the role of landscape in parkland cemetery settings, and in medical and ethical debates about natural and unnatural death. For the most part, writers do not closely examine the sort of nature to which they are referring nor exactly what it is that makes a setting or a type of death ‘natural’; nor do they explore why the idea of ‘natural’ death seems practically an obsessive preoccupation.
This paper serves two purposes. First, it reviews the literature on death in North
American culture, beginning with the contradictory claims that contemporary North American
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culture is either obsessed with or denies death. It then moves on to identify factors which have influenced changing behaviours and ideas about death. These include urbanization and secularization, developments in science and scientific understanding (especially in medical science), the increasing regulation of death, and the changing economy of death. The intent of this discussion is to disclose some of the dominant themes in the literature on death in contemporary North American culture, especially in relation to how North Americans treat and dispose of their dead, and to provide a context for the ensuing exploration of death and nature.
On the basis of this context-setting, I develop an argument that nature is the principal metaphor in American deathways because it provides a window onto an otherwise inaccessible experience. Death is terrifying because it engulfs life, cannot be looked upon directly, and is inexorable. Nature, on the other hand, engulfs death. Nature therefore represents a proxy, a foil against which a culture plays out the dialogues it cannot have with death itself, but which perhaps nature can. This paper considers two such dialogues in contemporary North American culture. The first dialogue is about mutability and continuity, which this paper examines through a discussion of cycles of life, death, and regeneration. The second dialogue focuses on contamination and purgation by looking at the environmental politics of death and the effect narratives about environmental crisis have on understandings of death. While other dialogues are possible, including those focusing on autonomy and inevitability (which might consider the sense of freedom or helplessness imputed by various ways of causing or delaying death, especially in medical work on disease and aging), the two dialogues chosen seem to identify two equal but opposite fixations in contemporary North American culture: the yearning for a perpetual natural world -- cycling endlessly through seasons of life, death, and rebirth and offering consolation in the face of individual death -- paired and contrasted with the fear that environmental damage will bring all of nature to an apocalyptic end.
2. A Contextual Complexity: Is there a North American Way of Death?
In this paper it should become clear almost immediately that death is a subject of enduring academic and popular interest, that writers hold widely divergent views about the
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influences on and significance of North American ‘deathways’, and that despite these divergent views, there are distinct, although diverse, patterns of historical change and practices and beliefs about death. An initial problem, however, in preparing this paper has been defining what ‘North
American’ means. This involves, first, considering how to isolate (if such a thing is indeed possible) North American deathways (and the literature on them) from those practices and beliefs present in the rest of the western world; and secondly, piecing together those elements into some sort of coherent argument about death and nature in contemporary North American culture.
Although I set out to research specifically North American death beliefs and practices, in reviewing the literature it quickly became difficult to ignore significant British and French contributions. Four of the most important writers on death, Geoffrey Gorer (1955; 1965), Jessica
Mitford (1963; 1998), Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1969; 1975), and Philippe Ariès (1974; 1981), were not North American, although Mitford and Kübler-Ross ultimately lived in the United
States and wrote extensively on North American deathways (albeit also with significant references to Swiss, European, and English examples). Other important researchers, particularly
Tony Walter (1993; 1994) and Clive Seale (1998) are English and use primarily English case studies, although both write with some interest about differences between American and English deathways. Moreover, the literature written by North Americans frequently cites Kubler-Ross,
Ariés, Mitford, Walter, and others: clearly, North American researchers consider their European forerunners and counterparts important sources, and for this reason alone they are worth including in this paper. At times it has seemed that at best an artificial distinction can be made between contemporary North American and other western views and practices of death. It is also notable that many of the same historical influences (industrialization, urbanization, secularism, and other changes in social organization) are present equally in western Europe, and that many death practices of the urban middle class are similar on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
Given such overlap (and given that I am not a sociologist and the purpose of this paper is not primarily sociological), I shall not seek to distinguish North American attitudes toward death from those of the rest of contemporary western culture, other than to point out certain examples
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in the literature (e.g., Walter, 1993) where an effort is made to single out North American practices. I will instead emphasize the (large and growing) North American literature and examples as a reflection of the primary setting and context of my doctoral work and will refer to
European literature where it seems relevant. In this I take my lead from John D. Morgan (a
Canadian researcher) in his chapter on contemporary ‘North American’ attitudes toward death in
Readings in Thanatology (1997: 11-32). Morgan discusses what he calls the “death culture in
North America” (11), but does not distinguish North American attitudes from those of Western culture as a whole, and cites both North American and European authorities, particularly the
American Robert Kastenbaum and (at length) French historian Philippe Ariés.
An additional complicating question is where Canada fits into a discussion of North
American deathways. In my reading I have come across only a small volume of work on
Canadian death practices. The Canadian sociologist John Morgan edited Readings in
Thanatology (1997), although the collection deals primarily with specific sociological and psychological questions which use Canadian examples only incidentally. The first scholarly book dealing specifically with death in Canada appears to be Northcott and Wilson’s Dying and Death in Canada (2001). Much of the discussion does little to separate Canadian death experiences from those of Americans, nor is this its intent; indeed, the authors provide American examples alongside most of the Canadian ones. Fleming and Balmer (1995: 281-288) write about the
Bereaved Families of Ontario organization, a model which appears fully replicable in other locations. One distinguishing element, though, is evident in descriptions of death in Canadian literature and folklore (to which the authors devote several pages). They also point out the proliferation of deadly Canadian place names, such as Deadmen Valley, the Headless Range, the
Funeral Range, Sunblood Mountain, Broken Skull River, Hell’s Gate, Hell Roaring Creek, and
Headless Creek, all in the Nahanni River region in the Yukon Territory (89).
Northcott and Wilson are not the first to point out the prevalence of themes of death
(especially death that implicates or involves nature) in Canadian literature. In 1972 the Canadian writer and poet Margaret Atwood published Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, written around an extended argument that Nature is portrayed as a monster in Canadian
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literature: “Death by Nature – not to be confused with ‘natural deaths’ such as heart attacks – is an event of startling frequency in Canadian literature .... In Death by Nature, something in the natural environment murders the individual ... ”. (54) Survival details the seemingly endless variety of ways it is possible to die in the gigantic and opaque Canadian wilderness: being eaten by bears, falling over a cliff, drowning in a bog, swamp, or other fetid body of water, being struck by one’s own axe, and bush madness, to name a few. However, Atwood also goes on to comment: “But it is increasingly obvious to some writers that man is now more destructive towards Nature than Nature can be towards man; and furthermore, that the destruction of Nature is equivalent to self-destruction on the part of man.” (60) I take up this theme further in the discussion on pollution and purification, in section 4 of this paper. In writing about the various
‘victim positions’ assumed by literary protagonists in their encounters with Nature, Atwood contrasts the Canadian ‘garrison mentality’ with dominant British and American tropes: in their literature the British portray nature as pastoral and long-tamed, while American characters gallivant heroically across their unfurling frontier.
Other published work on death in Canada tends to be demographic (there are numerous federally commissioned studies on aging, health, and risk) or folkloric or architectural in nature.
Examples of these last two include Nancy Millar’s Once Upon a Tomb: Stories from Canadian
Graveyards (1997), and guides to specific Canadian cemeteries (e.g., McKendry: 1995; Filey,
1999). I have not focused on indigenous literature, as indigenous perspectives (deserving full consideration on their own) lie outside the realm of my doctoral work and in any event do not divide neatly into ‘Canadian’ and ‘American’ categorizations. Other than these, there seems to be no well-developed body of thanatology writing in Canada on any aspect of death, apart from
Canadian literature. The very small volume of work available does not, however, suggest significant variation from the broader themes which are the focus of this paper. It is my hope that my doctoral research will contribute to the development of literature on Canadian deathways in the context of Western attitudes toward death, and where possible in this paper I use Canadian examples.
Even after having marked out a geographical and cultural territory of the appropriate
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scale, there are obvious liabilities associated with claiming that North Americans exhibit a united set of attitudes toward death, or that North American death practices have evolved in a coherent and easily representable manner. The reality is that huge regional, cultural, religious, and historical differences exist, and that these differences almost certainly underlie many of the seemingly contradictory views presented in the literature. Many enquiries into North American death practices focus on a particular regional or historical cultural context; for example, a flamboyant treatise on Jazz funerals (Touchet, 1998), the unexpectedly sympathetic portrayal of drive-through funeral parlours in Florida (Palmer, 1993), and scholarly work on changing funeral customs in central Appalachia (Crissman, 1994).
At the same time, writers consistently exhibit an equally strong desire to broaden these observations by making general statements about American deathways. These include efforts to trace the historical, sociological, and economic development of American attitudes and practices of death; e.g., Charles Shively’s A History of the Conception of Death in America, 1650-1860
(1988), which focuses primarily on New England; Margaret Coffin’s vernacular history, Death in
Early America: The History and Folklore of Customs and Superstitions of Early Medicine,
Funerals, Burials, and Mourning (1976); James Farrell’s excellent interdisciplinary history,
Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830-1920 (1980); and Leroy Bowman’s sociological study, The American Funeral: A Study in Guilt, Extravagance, and Sublimity (1959). Historians of American deathways tend to draw conclusions that certain broad historical trends have produced a distinct set of American deathways with visible contemporary manifestations.
Farrell and Bowman observe that sweeping industrialization, urbanization, and changing social institutions (including religion, community, and family life) are implicated in the establishment of a commodified spectacle of death. This view was originally and most cuttingly stated by Jessica Mitford in her scathing indictment of the American funeral industry’s role in the commercialization of death in The American Way of Death (1963; revised 1998), although at the same time, Farrell acknowledges that even highly commodified funeral spectacles do not entirely obscure earlier traditions. Mitford’s arguments about the commodification of death and the moral and social economy of death are taken up by Mohamid Izarali (2001) who argues that
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it is immoral to seek profit by exploiting the dead. Anthropologists Richard Huntington and Peter
Metcalf, however, observe that similar economic motives are applicable in the case of weddings and other social rituals and do not arouse the same concern: they express the view that the economy of death is part of an American culture of conspicuous consumption (1979: 191-192).
Carla Sofka (1997: 553-574) identities the Internet as an important new source of social support and networking, and points out that as the Internet becomes a dominant source of information about death and dying, moral questions need to be addressed about reliable information, researchers gaining access to (and perhaps using without informed consent) the narratives of the bereaved, and the marketing of death and death services.
It is significant that writers, while acknowledging regional differences related to culture, tradition, religion, and economic factors, purport enough common features to talk about an
American way of death. Toward the end of a detailed cross-cultural argument on death rituals, anthropologists Huntington and Metcalf observe:
Given the myriad variety of death rites throughout the world, and the cultural heterogeneity of American society, the expectation is that funeral practices will vary widely from one region, or social class, or ethnic group, to another. The odd fact is that they do not. The overall form of funerals is remarkably uniform from coast to coast. Its general features include: rapid removal of the corpse to a funeral parlour, embalming, institutionalized
‘viewing,’ and disposal by burial. (1979: 187)
Accordingly, in a provisional acceptance of the above claim that North American deathways are indeed “remarkably uniform”, or at least that an argument may be made around a recurring theme in North American deathways, the following section of this paper describes in detail some of the main features of the North American way of death and some of the factors which have helped produce them. This discussion, which begins with a consideration of the degree to which
North Americans deny or accept death and moves on to an evaluation of the ways contemporary
North American culture treats its dead, provides the context to the subsequent discussion of two
‘dialogues’ of death and nature: cycles of life, death, and regeneration; and the politics of death in relation to pollution and purification.
3. Death in Contemporary North American Culture
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3 (a) The Denial and Acceptance of Death
“The natural processes of corruption and decay have become disgusting, as disgusting as the natural processes of birth and copulation were a century ago,” writes Geoffrey Gorer in his famous essay, “The Pornography of Death”. “[T]he ugly facts are relentlessly hidden; the art of the embalmers is an art of complete denial.” (1965: 51) Modern western culture denies death, he asserts, because the fading of Christian religious belief in the immortality of the soul means that the finality of death and the loss of the physical body have become too horrible to contemplate; and because of the simultaneous rise of preventive medicine (which has made ‘natural death’ more uncommon) and the domination of mechanical technologies (e.g., technologies of war, cars) which have made certain types of violent, mass, and “unnatural death” more common.
Taking up this argument, Philippe Ariès writes about hospitals as the new space of
“forbidden death”:
Death has been dissected, cut to bits by a series of little steps, which finally makes it impossible to know which step was the real death ....
All these little silent deaths have replaced and erased the great dramatic act of death, and no one any longer has the strength or patience to wait over a period of weeks for a moment which has lost a part of its meaning.
(1974: 88-89)
In The Hour of Our Death (1981) Ariès develops further the argument that death is forbidden in contemporary western culture. He traces this to emerging medicalization during the mid-19th century, which brought with it excessive faith in treatment and “the lie” of silencing and denying death, even to the dying themselves. Death became disgusting because it represented failure of treatment; subsequently, it was hidden away in hospitals and became even more remote. The concealment and quiet removal of the dead from view in hospitals has been repeatedly commented on (e.g., Sudnow, 1967: 44; Quigley, 1996: 308). Upon commencing her research in the mid-1960s, Kübler-Ross recounted encountering medical staff reluctant to admit that there were dying patients present in their hospital (1969: 23). This diffidence persists. Northcott and
Wilson (2001: 65) also indicate that the transition to palliative care may be delayed because medical professionals are reluctant to admit a patient is terminally ill). Public interest in palliative care has increased alongside an aging population and consumer-driven changes in
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health care (ibid: 67), yet the persistence of the ‘curative’ approach and aggressive interventions may extend the dying process without improving its quality. As Nortcott and Wilson point out,
“apparently few trust nature to produce a good death.” (Ibid: 67)
Ariés points out that the distinction between life and death has been obscured by machines that can breathe and circulate and process fluids even when a person is no longer emotionally or intellectually present. He suggests that medical treatment is the most direct intrusion of technology into personal life and death, and adds:
Technology erodes the domain of death until one has the illusion that death has been abolished. The area of the invisible death is also the area of the greatest belief in the power of technology and its ability to transform man and nature. Our modern model of death was born and developed in places that gave birth to two beliefs: first, the belief in a nature that seemed to eliminate death; next, the belief in a technology that would replace nature and eliminate death the more surely. (1981: 595)
It is worth pointing out that the denial of death has not offered any lasting protection or solace.
Ariès observes that “the old savagery” (the ‘primordial’ fear of death tamed by religious doctrines subsequently replaced by technological ones) has merely returned in the mask of medical technology, and that the spectre of death has returned more frighteningly than before.
Mitford describes the absurd attempts made to pretend that the dead are not really dead:
Shrouds no longer exist. Instead, you may patronize a grave-wear couturière who promises “handmade original fashions -- styles from the best in life for the last memory ...” ... For the final, perfect grooming: “Nature-Glo – the ultimate in cosmetic embalming.” (1998: 15)
In the funerals Mitford depicts, the dead are presented as merely sleeping, and appear lifelike enough to leap from their caskets to join in on the hors d’oeuvres or dance a tango. But this euphemistic vision comes at a cost: what happens when we are, inevitably, confronted with the reality of the death of a friend or family member, and with our own mortality? Elisabeth
Kübler-Ross (1969; 1974) points out that denial, and all of the anonymous hospitals and euphemistic grave-side services, cannot not make death actually go away. Indeed, Kübler-Ross argues that denial is merely one stage in a healthy response to death, which moves from denial and isolation through anger, bargaining, depression, and finally toward acceptance and renewed
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hope. Concealing death defers a healthy struggle through grief and loss, and requires a constant, exhausting, struggle to keep death concealed from ourselves and others.
A question raised by all of the above is whether contemporary North American culture is unique in its denial of death. In The Denial of Death (1973), Ernest Becker argues that the fear of death is universal, and that much human activity, and especially the drive toward the heroic (a powerful survival instinct layered with archetypal and psychoanalytic implications), are reflexes against terror of death. It is also easy to read into studies of death in the anthropological literature that the fear of death is pervasive across cultures, although it is manifested in different forms.
Even Ariès, in recounting a thousand years of responses to death in western culture, describes historically evolving rationalizations of death, of which fear and denial are a continuous feature.
The response to the first question, then, seems to be that the denial of death is not unique to contemporary North American culture. But even if the denial of death is not itself unique, the way a particular culture denies death (and its strategies for doing so and their implications) may be of considerable interest.
In The American View of Death: Acceptance or Denial (1972), Dumont and Foss argue that equally sustainable arguments may be made that Americans deny and accept death, and as a result they conclude that Americans both deny and accept death simultaneously. They observe that:
It is not only likely that the cultural paradox should exist, but it may even be a virtual necessity, since the cultural maintenance of a pure or total attitude of either acceptance or denial would be suicidal, both for the culture and for the society. A society’s culture could hardly be viewed as a credible source of values, norms, and beliefs if it embodies only an attitude of death denial. Furthermore, the total and uncompromising denial of death’s reality would render the event of every individual’s death a cause of utter chaos within the society, for its members would know neither how to react nor what to believe, and mass confusion as to the meaning and significance of the phenomenon would result.
Similarly, a total cultural commitment to an attitude of death acceptance would also invite disaster, since [as Marcuse asserts] “it would lead either to mass suicide (since for the greater part of mankind life is such a burden that the terror of death is probably an important factor in keeping it going) or to dissolution of all law and order ...” (98)
They list some positive belief associated with death, including relief from suffering, undisturbed rest, reunion with lost loved ones, and rebirth, as well as negative ones, such as separation, loss,
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trauma and pain, and individual and mass destruction (98). These connotations are not mutually exclusive; for example, a person may grieve at the death of an ill parent while being relieved of the burden of their care. They also suggest, interestingly, that the silence resulting from the taboo of death may also reflect uncertainty and ambivalence about its contradictory implications. This may be the most important point of all: what really matters is that death is an issue to all of us, and rather than categorizing responses to death into acceptance or denial, we might be better served by investigating the full range of the various ways we struggle with death.
3 (b) North American Ways of Death: Spaces of the Dead
In the introduction to this paper I referred to a set of highly interrelated historical conditions which writers habitually catalogue as having produced contemporary North American ways of death, and which include urbanization and secularization, the increasing regulation of death, developments in technology and scientific understanding (especially in medical science), and the changing economy of death. In this section I propose to refocus these themes by looking at how contemporary North American culture treats its dead, and particularly the ways it disposes of them, with a view toward linking these observations with some of the questions about nature and the natural which are the ultimate focus of this paper. I do so through an exploration of spaces of the dead.
Bowman (1959: 112-128) offers the most comprehensive description of the effects of urbanization on death practices. He begins with the comment that urbanization affects not only cities, but small towns and the rural countryside as well, especially given the other factors associated with urbanization: industrialization and technological advancement, new economic structures, and, above all, broad changes in communication patterns and social organization.
Bowman points out that the populations of cities have always been relatively transient in comparison with agrarian societies, and that working for hire in factories, stores, and offices has resulted in the dissipation of close family ties and alteration of many community rituals, especially those associated with births, marriages, and deaths. Families have become dispersed across wide areas and the difficulty of coordinating work schedules and travel plans means that gatherings and reunions have become smaller and less frequent. High-density dwelling
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arrangements meant that by the early twentieth century funerals at home were less common, and in any event, people were starting to die in hospitals. Professional morticians assumed the responsibility of preparing the dead for burial. Funerals became smaller affairs, and the dead were buried in cemeteries with fewer and fewer visitors. Urban life rushed on, and many cemeteries have become as transient as the lives memorialized in them. Without visitors, without dedicated upkeep, cemeteries fall into disuse and may be redeveloped for other uses.
Cities put lie to the notion of perpetual rest. Increasing urban real estate values encourage church councils, municipalities, and incorporated organizations holding title to cemetery properties (especially those in which there have been no recent interments) to reconsider their commitments to the dead. Old cemeteries are expensive to maintain, and in cities they are often located adjacent to central business districts where there is immense pressure to develop land in accordance with the urban planning principle of ‘highest and best’ use. As Jackson and Vergara
(1989) observe,
Although private investors covet cemetery acres for obvious financial reasons, city planners and other government officials are sometimes equally contemptuous of the use of these spaces for burial. They regard graveyards as costly, useless, wasteful, and ugly, as places that take away scarce space from the living, as fields filled with repetitive kitsch objects.
(106-107)
Jackson and Vergara go on to cite the US Department of Housing and Development as counselling that vacant space near highway overpasses and landfills be used for cemeteries
(107). The ultimate extension of this view can be seen in the popular early 1980s horror film
“Poltergeist”, whose premise was that a suburban housing development built on a disused graveyard (from which the bodies had not been removed) awakened an angry and vengeful spirit.
One lesson which might be gleaned from this cautionary tale about careless suburban sprawl is that both nature and the dead may have their revenge when bulldozed by the unwary.
Eckdish Knack (1990) points out that most cities no longer plan for cemeteries. New cemeteries tend to be the speculative brainchild of agents in the lucrative funeral and death care industry (reflecting a shift from religious, institutional, and community-run cemeteries), and are usually located at the undeveloped fringe of cities, sometimes built in concert with residential subdivisions intended for the living. In part because of proximity to residential areas, conditions of planning approval may include restrictions on monument size, style, and density and the
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requirement that mausoleums and other structures be concealed from view (13). Cemeteries may represent valuable green space, but contemporary urban culture seems to want to be protected from exposure to their actual purpose. The old urban cemeteries exemplify this contradiction.
Those quietly decaying in disuse (including those which have been full for half a century or more) may be valued by their immediate neighbours as pockets of greenery, despite their concomitant attractiveness to vandals and the living homeless. If the title holders of these cemeteries (often churches unable or unwilling to pay to maintain them) can work around the historic preservationists and wandering taphophiles (as cemetery aficionados call themselves), however, they may succeed in having the tombstones removed and entombed in concrete berms at the edge of the property, thus reducing maintenance costs (15). Alternatively, tombstones may be quietly tipped into a convenient ravine until the land is more park than cemetery, and development is easier still (personal observation, Toronto area).
If older gothic-style urban graveyards represent wasted real estate and their inhabitants obstacles to development, the sprawling park cemeteries established at the urban fringe may pose an ongoing actual risk to health in the form of subsurface pollutants, particularly embalming chemicals, leaking from new graves into the groundwater and therefore posing a significant environmental risk (Ontario, 1992). In this respect they are an interesting environmental contradiction. A ‘rural’ cemetery movement (although historically located just outside the boundaries of cities, many were subsequently surrounded by urban growth; e.g., Toronto’s
Mount Pleasant Cemetery, meaning they are no longer ‘rural’) emerged in the United States after about 1830 (Schuyler, 1986: 38), largely in response to the unhygienic and unpleasantly crowded conditions of contemporary churchyards, and also in response to the view that city life was associated with broader moral decline which could be offset by exposure to pastoral environments. Harris (1977) offers the following description:
Rural cemeteries were to be places of beauty and tranquillity, secluded spots where bereaved relatives and friends could combine affectional respect with a love of nature. ... The rural cemetery was envisioned as an open-air church where nature’s hand alone would dominate. (104)
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Visitors were (and are) encouraged not only to attend at the graves of loved ones, but also to explore the park settings and their carefully constructed ‘natural’ landscapes. Schuyler comments on the ‘didactic’ landscapes of these cemeteries. The rural landscape, its designers averred, offered a “melancholy pleasure” and exercised an “important moral influence” over visitors: “at the cemetery the visitor could leave behind some of the cares of urban life, revel in the natural beauty of the scenery, and learn the moral lessons of the landscape and its monuments.” (1986:
53; 54). Harris adds, “some of the cemeteries became so lovely that critics warned about excessive beauty; it was wrong to hide all the painful realities of death.” (Ibid: 106)
But the painful realities of death were already being concealed. The new science of professional embalming emerged at the same time as rural cemeteries became the dominant mode of cemetery design, and the ‘moral lessons’ about inevitable death as part of nature’s processes were replaced with an increasingly euphemistic version of death, in which the sleep of the dead was not merely metaphorical but literal. Laderman observes:
The corpse began to be understood as a source of pollution and hygienic danger; the movement toward rural cemeteries, which capitalized on the public’s nostalgia for pastoral settings and pious, moral instruction, became a popular middle-class answer to the horrors of bodily disintegration and putrefaction. (1996: 9)
In truth, rural cemeteries were carefully constructed representations of an imagined romantic pastoral landscape, its curving sweep subtly curtailed by ordered pathways, trimmed shrubbery and tended plants, statues, fountains, and cherubs. Similarly, the version of death emerging out of this movement was equally euphemistic: the corpse slept; it was not seen to rot; it was not even seen to be dead. The ‘rural’ cemetery movement has dominated for well over a century.
These cemeteries (old and new) continue to be lovingly maintained above the ground, willows trimmed, statuary scrubbed. Yet, below the ground, they may become mires of pollution, not so much from the ordinary processes of decay but from the chemicals used to forestall it. In these cases ‘rural’ cemeteries may be more dangerous than the mouldering, overcrowded churchyards they were designed to replace.
Contemporary North American cemeteries are generally designed along the lines of the
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nineteenth century rural cemeteries, although they provide even more disciplined representations of the natural world. Regulations restricting grave-side offerings are standard, as wires from wreaths might damage the large ride-on mowers that tend the well-ordered monuments. The monuments in turn are often required to be of uniform size and shape. Cemeteries enforce rigid aesthetic standards on the dead and their families, although in contrast the cemetery corporations are not averse to planting billboards amid the shrubbery and statuary with appropriate uplifting and advertising messages (see Jackson and Vergara, 1989: 98), a practice which would seem to undermine their capacity to arbitrate aesthetics.
Indeed, advertising provides some of the most telling documentation of the role and meaning of contemporary cemeteries. The Mount Pleasant Group of Cemeteries in Toronto, for example, bases nearly all of its current advertising on allusions to the natural world. One newspaper advertisement asserts: “A part of Scarborough, home to over 17,500 souls. And those are just the trees.” The photograph in the advertisement depicts an immaculate lawn with a windless forest in the background. A similar advertisement introduces the new (in 1998) Mount
Pleasant Crematorium Gardens with the invitation: “you can have your ashes placed in a niche, in the rose gardens. Commemorated with a plaque beside tranquil reflecting ponds. Buried in a peaceful woodland setting.” (personal collection) Somewhat in contrast, an advertisement for
Batesville caskets in The Director (the official publication of the US-based National Funeral
Directors Association) intones that “families never lose the need to protect their loved ones”, and cites a “recent nationwide study [which found that] two-thirds of families felt that one of the most important purposes of a casket is to protect their loved ones from outside elements.” (1997:
31). Without speculating too closely into the nature of the “outside elements” these families fear
(given that anaerobic decomposition occurring within the casket is probably the most physically disgusting thing that could happen to the corpse), it is clear that North American culture demonstrates an ambivalence toward the natural settings and processes into which the dead are ostensibly released.
In “Dust Not Ashes: The American Preference for Burial” (1993), Tony Walter provides a further example of this ambivalence in observing that Americans are nearly unique among
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western industrialized countries in their preference for burying the dead rather than cremating them. According to Walter this preference is not explained by the availability of cheap, plentiful land (Canadians, for example, cremate far more than Americans despite having similar levels of access to cheap land). Instead, Walter makes an intriguing argument that this preference is related to a peculiar American concept of nature, rooted in a strongly nationalist affinity to homeland and soil. The twist to this affinity, however, is that while the dead are buried in the national soil, they are protected from direct contact with it. Walter observes,
[The American dead are afforded] a most extraordinary protection from the soil itself. ... American lawn cemeteries are immaculately maintained, a nature kept firmly under control. ... The casket is the one American product built far more solidly than is necessary. ... The American funeral uses technology to manufacture a symbolic nature. Formalin (embalming fluid) makes the dead appear alive, while excavators costing thousands of dollars, lowering equipment, tents, and plastic grass enable the funeral director to bury the deceased in an American soil that the mourners need never touch, nor even see. ... [P]utting a corpse in contact with real soil, like actually experiencing the hazards of the wilderness, would threaten the ordered, insulated-from-nature culture that comprises American civilization.
(Walter, 1993: 46-48)
This above example may help explain the unusual public controversy that swirls around two additional ways contemporary North American culture disposes of the dead: woodland burials and cremation. Perhaps it because woodland burials acknowledge and celebrate the release of the body into the natural environment and into natural processes, and because cremation speeds up the process of corporeal dissolution. Walter (1994) argues that Americans have an aversion to cremation, at least compared with other western industrial countries.
Certainly both Canada and the United States trail far behind countries like the UK and Japan, although the rates of cremation across North America seem to be increasing (36% in Canada in
1994; and about 22% in the United States in 1996; Prothero, 2001: 164; Northcott and Wilson,
2001: 75). Admittedly, the UK and Japan both have much higher population densities than the
United States or Canada, and this may account for some of the difference. Nonetheless, Walter’s argument carries significant resonance, particularly when the statistically significant differences in cremation rates between Canada and the US are considered.
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Woodland burials are increasingly popular in the UK, based in part on the lobbying efforts of the Natural Death Centre, founded in 1991. Woodland burials are one feature of the
‘natural death’ movement, which encompasses a considerable variety of views and practices, including reducing medical intervention (e.g., abandoning heroic measures to keep patients alive; allowing passive euthanasia), and spatially relocating death from hospitals and mortuaries to hospices and homes. In a woodland burial, an unembalmed body is buried in the ground, wrapped in a cotton shroud, or a cardboard or plain wooden coffin, in a parkland setting set up as a nature preserve. Headstones are unusual, although a tree may be planted as a memorial. The concept has gained media support in North America, although I know of only one ‘organized’ woodland burial site in North America, a nature preserve located in North Carolina, which is in the process of being established by a for-profit company called Memorial Ecosystems (see www.memorialecosystems.com ). The company proposes natural and back-country burials, and prohibits durable coffins and embalmed bodies. Stone monuments are permitted. Given the large amount of land theoretically available for woodland burials in both Canada and the United
States, and the propensity in both countries for establishing natural preserves, it is perhaps surprising that the concept has not enjoyed the same popularity has in the UK (where there are around 100 woodland burial preserves (Potter, 2000; Albery and Wienrich, 2001: 310).
3 (c) ‘Good’ Deaths and ‘Natural Deaths’
An additional matter I would like to raise before moving onto the discussions of the dialogues North Americans have about death and nature is the idea of the “good” death. The idea that there are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ deaths is a recurring preoccupation in contemporary North
American culture, and is closely related to the idea that there are natural and unnatural deaths, although in many cases a ‘good’ death may be viewed as very unnatural (for example, if a terminally ill person commits assisted suicide), and a ‘bad’ death may be entirely natural (for example, being eaten by a bear). However, the idea of ‘natural death’ is complicated by medical advances and an statistical approach which codifies all deaths by their specific cause 1 . In short,
1 See Prior (1997) for a discussion on actuarial approaches to the deaths of individuals, and Leslie
(1996) for a depressing probabilistic forecast of the extinction of humankind.
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there are competing views on what ‘natural’ means when we speak of death.
Historian James Farrell traces changes in Americans’ understandings of death during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to the influence of scientific naturalism on the medical sciences:
In the context of scientific naturalism, the meaning and management of death changed. Naturalists redefined death as a natural process. Strict naturalists discarded the deist idea of God as First Cause of the cosmos and as the ultimate cause of death. Instead they attributed death solely to natural causes. ... some naturalists even asked “Is There Such a Thing As a
Natural Death?” By 1910, hopes were high that death could finally be conquered.(1980: 51)
The “natural causes” to which Farrell refers are those which scientists believed they could discern, observe, understand, and (perhaps) ultimately overcome. (Scientific) naturalism is the view that phenomena are “governed by causal laws, with the possible addition of functional explanations, and relations of succession, conjunction, and concatenation” (Wood, 2000: 211). In naturalism, all things are considered natural entities and are explainable through scientific methods (Audi, 1999: 596). As a ‘natural process’, death became potentially accessible to explanation.
In seeking to understand death, scientists began to categorize death in new ways. Indeed, categorizing death has become a significant part of actuarial science. Lindsay Prior (1997) points out that ‘old age’ is not listed among the numerous potential causes of death in the World Health
Organization’s actuarial tables. Prior’s research is quite interesting: she observes that five Rules of death may be discerned in actuarial calculations of the causes of death:
Rule 1. Death is a product of pathology.
That is to say, that cause of death will always be a disease process which is in some way evident in the deceased person’s body. It might take the form of a diseased artery, a carcinoma, or a respiratory infection – but for every death there will be a pathology.
Rule 2. Death is a physical event.
Consequently, a cause of death can always be located in some anatomical site or other.
Rule 3. A cause of death is a visible thing, susceptible (in theory at least) to detection by sense-data.
That is to say, that one ought to be able to see the diseased anatomy
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at post-mortem. (Though post-mortem dissection may not be considered appropriate in every case.)
Rule 4. A cause of death is always a singular event, (though it might exist as part of a sequence).
Causes of death are always singular and sequential through time. It is always possible to cite one disease process which either precedes or determines the sequence of other such processes.
Rule 5. A pertinent cause of death is usually one which is proximate to the event.
That is to say that primary causes of death are never distant, and are always present at the moment of death. (1997: 188)
She goes on to note that “in the modern world, the explanation of death (one of the great imponderables of life) in terms of a set of distinct and limited number of disease forms helps to generate the illusion that death can somehow be controlled.” (Ibid: 188). This has produced a public health discourse that death may be delayed or even overcome, and that this ability lies within the hands of individuals. She concludes: “So death and misfortune can [according to public health edicts] be avoided if people behave properly – eat the right things, exercise properly, stop smoking, and so on ... despite the fact that the mortality rates of those who are careless with their health and those who are fastidious remains stubbornly similar”. (189)
Prior’s observations point to the possibility that actuarial approaches to death may mask an avoidance of some essentially unknowable or uncontrollable aspect of death. There are limits to naturalistic approaches, particularly when qualitative assessments such as whether a death is
‘good’ or ‘bad’ come into play. In an age defined by scientific naturalism, death is always
‘natural’ in the sense that it may be categorized and perhaps understood, but to mortal individuals, a natural death may mean something entirely different. In The Good Death, Marilyn
Webb describes a ‘good’ death as one in which the wishes and needs of the individual are respected, and where good communication is paramount (1997: 397-399). To Webb, categorizing the cause of death is far less important than listening to the person who is dying.
Other writers (e.g., Beriman, 1991; contributors to Anderson, 1996), describe a view that
‘natural’ death is any death occurring in the absence of violence or heroic medical and technological intervention, especially where a patient is already terminally ill. To these writers, a
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‘natural’ death is a death by natural processes, even if it is not fully understood, and a ‘natural’ death in which care for the dying (in respect of the dying person’s wishes) is paramount may also become a ‘good’ death.
4. Two Dialogues About Death and Nature
And the secret of human life, the universal secret, the root secret from which all other secrets spring, is the longing for more life, the furious and insatiable desire to be everything else without ever ceasing to be our- selves, to take possession of the entire universe without letting the universe take possession of us and absorb us; it is the desire to be someone else without ceasing to be myself, and continue being myself at the same time I am someone else.... (Mark Strand, “The Monument”: 4)
In concluding that Americans simultaneously deny and accept death, Dumont and Foss
(1972) do not point out that accepting death is not the same as liking it. Nor may understanding the mechanisms associated with death, through medical or actuarial science, be equated with understanding death itself. The most salient likelihood is that North American views about death may in truth be found somewhere jumbled amid Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ stages of grief, perhaps with the acknowledgement that throughout our lives we continuously deny, bargain with, rage at, accept, and express hope for our own future and that of the cosmos. Like other cultures, North
Americans struggle with death in an effort to understand what it means, but perhaps our struggle would be easier if we acknowledge that we are not likely to ever really know. A very dated quote from Puckle is instructive: “Asked by a missionary what were the gods he worshipped, a savage replied: “We know that someone walks among the trees at night – but we never mention it.”
(1926: 15).
At the beginning of this paper I surmised that narratives about nature provide a window into the otherwise inaccessible phenomenon of death. Although death engulfs the lives of individuals, the natural world may represent something larger, may serve as some context or backdrop against which some sense may be made of death. In the final section of this paper I consider how narratives of nature might illuminate two preoccupations evident in contemporary
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North American culture’s treatment of death: questions of mutability and continuity, and issues of pollution and purification. In this paper I have deliberately avoided questions of spirituality for a number of reasons, one being that considerations of spirituality could easily fill a comprehensive paper on their own. Because my doctoral research is ultimately ontological rather than theological, I have chosen to focus on questions that strike me as foundational to individual and cultural understandings of death in contemporary North American culture (even if they may also illuminate spiritual considerations).
4 (a) Mutability and Continuity
Yet the so-called “problem of man’s immortality” - which includes the “problem of man’s survival” - cannot be dismissed with a stroke of the pen. To begin with, man’s longing for survival and/or immortality is not a mere whim of his, or, if it is, it is such an obdurate whim that it has all the appearance of an obsession.” (Mora, 1965: 204)
If we cannot live on forever as individuals, perhaps nature will persist forever and will carry something of our bodies and souls with it. This yearning is not new; it is persistent in the traditions of mythology, religion, and science that produce our culture, and we are comforted by similar myths in other cultures. A fable attributed to the Malagash people of Madagascar explains death as the result of a decision made by the first people: offered the choice of the moon’s immortality, interrupted by dark phases, or the tree’s death which is compensated by living seeds, they chose to die and be reborn through their children (CBC, 1985: Palmer, 1993).
Ecclesiastes stated: “To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under the heaven; A time to be born and a time to die” (quoted in Jackson and Vergara, 1989: 2 and repeated daily at grave-side services). In literature, the seasonal cycle is an archetype of life and death: in “As I Walked Out One Evening” the poet W.H. Auden observed, “Into many a green valley/ Drifts the appalling snow;/ Time breaks the threaded dances/ And the diver’s brilliant bow.” (Auden, 1940). The Egyptian belief in rebirth was based on cyclical rebirth in nature; in particular, kings were believed to control the forces of nature through a link with Re, the sun god. During life the king ensured that the days and seasons produced life and a successful harvest, and after death, the king was reborn, thus ensuring the rebirth of all living things
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(Turner, 1976: 33-34). Greek mythology relates the seasons and the life cycle through the story of Demeter and Persephone: Persephone is obliged to spend several months of the year in the
Underworld in punishment for having eaten from a forbidden pomegranate while captive there; during her absence, winter prevails as Demeter (her mother, representing fertility and the harvest) mourns her absent daughter (ibid: 19). Practitioners in the Wiccan tradition celebrate
Lammas (a celebration of birth and fertility) at the time of the first harvest. In natural science, the
Pacific salmon and the black widow spider are often cited as evidence that death is a necessity of the continuance of life: the old give way to the new, perhaps sacrificing their corporeal selves to sustain the young. Grof and Halifax (1977) acknowledge that little work has focused on these cycles in contemporary western culture, although they cite anthropologist Arnold van Gennep and others as suggesting that the absence or dilution of rites of passage may contribute to the broad “social psychopathology” observed in contemporary society (195). They also observe that
“the wide historical and geographical distribution of transformative rituals focusing on death and rebirth and their psychological relevance for individuals, groups, and entire cultures suggest that they must reflect important basic needs inherent in human nature.” (202)
Robert Jay Lifton (1979) identifies five modes of symbolic immortality: the biological, theological, creative, natural, and experiential transcendence. He acknowledges that awareness of these modes may vary tremendously, that they operate interdependently, and that one mode may be more powerful or present than others. Lifton focuses on the fifth mode, experiential transcendence, suggesting that it has the greatest significance as the evocative source and result of the other four modes. I do not take issue with Lifton’s ordering of the modes (their psychoanalytic basis is beyond the scope of this paper), but wish to focus on the fourth one, the natural. The natural, in my view, must be the physical counterpart to experiential transcendence: transcendence is meaningless without an object. I also believe that the biological and natural modes are inherently connected, and are in fact different expressions of the same thing. Lifton describes the biological mode as being based on family continuity through one’s descendants; I would argue that it is artificial to separate this from the sorts of continuity observable in the natural world. I will also suggest that the theological and creative modes are ways cultures find
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to explore and express both natural/biological and experiential transcendence.
Lifton makes one point close to the centre of my own research: “while I cannot imagine my own nonexistence, I can very well imagine a world in which “I” do not exist. That imaginative capacity is the basis for our theory of symbolic immortality.” (8) In doing so, Lifton suggests that our understanding of individual identity must be reformulated in the face of the powerful and deeply held belief that the self lives on, not in the form of the same self who lived and loved as an individual person, but as “part of a human flow that absorbs and recreates” (8), through biological reproduction and intellectual and creative acts. This belief is, however, neither easily held nor expressed, and acknowledging the inevitability and reality of our own death is an enormous obstacle: it is, perhaps, the central existential problem. Lifton observes:
Our resistance to the fact that we die – the numbed side of our middle knowledge – interferes considerably with our symbolizing process. We, in fact, require symbolization of continuity – imaginative forms of death – in order to confront genuinely the fact that we die.
A sense of immortality, then, is by no means mere denial of death, though denial and numbing are rarely absent. Rather, it is a corollary of the knowledge of death itself, and reflects a compelling and universal inner quest for continuous symbolic relationship to what has gone before and what will continue after our finite individual lives. That quest is central to the human project, to man as cultural animal and to his creation of culture and history. The struggle toward, or experience of, a sense of immortality is in itself neither compensatory nor “irrational”, but an appropriate symbolism of our biological and historical connectedness. (17)
Lifton does not suggest that symbolizing immortality and continuity provides any answer to death or removes any anxiety about it. Rather, it is an expression of our concern about mortality and existence and our connections with others in time and space; our anxiety (especially when viewed in an existential sense), may have important ontological implications. To anticipate the work I will submit on Heidegger and death, this is remarkably similar to Heidegger’s propositions in Being and Time that “death, in the widest sense, is a phenomenon of life;” (290) that death is part of Dasein’s [literally ‘being-there’, but referring to the sort of Being that humans possess] “ownmost potentiality for Being,” (294) and that the anticipation of death
“reveals to Dasein its lostness in the they-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility of
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being itself ... in an impassioned freedom towards death – a freedom which has been released from the illusions of the “they”, and which is factical, certain of itself, and anxious.” (311)
The above reading suggests that death is both an obstacle to and the basis of our connection with others and the cosmos. My interpretation of Lifton is that using nature as a metaphor may help illuminate our connections to one another and to the living world as a whole.
The natural world is an exemplar of our own physical lives and deaths, as well as of our physical and spiritual connection to others (dead, alive, and yet unborn). Metaphors of nature that are foundational to contemporary North American deathways may be seen as an expression of efforts to come to terms with finitude. This includes attempts (as seen in medical science in particular) to conceal, deny, or defeat death, which as the above sections of this paper have shown, are based in part on efforts to understand and control a vision of nature which was believed to be within the reach of scientific understanding. Embalmed corpses that appear to sleep and cemeteries that are manicured artificial constructions of natural settings are both manifestations of what Lifton calls “the numbed side of our middle knowledge” and our resistance to the fact that we die (17). The denial of death is perhaps a pathology in this sense, but it is the particular expressions of denial that are unique to contemporary North American culture rather than the denial itself.
I do not hold the view that contemporary North American culture pathologically denies death, although it is clear that our deathways are currently more suggestive of denial than they are of acceptance. The symbolism of nature in death rituals, even a carefully controlled nature in the form of cut flowers, plastic grass at the grave-side, and lifelike corpses, alludes to an acknowledgement, however hesitant and cringing, that we are connected with the physical world and its processes. Whether this sense of connection becomes the basis for a renewed spirituality or a better existential awareness is a separate consideration, but certainly a sense of connection with others may offer a path beyond the frightening prospect that our death is our extinction.
4 (b) Pollution and Purification
In the preceding section I do not intend to suggest that symbolic immortality and the
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consolation of natural cycles of continuity make up entirely for the loss and anguish associated with individual death. Denial and fear of death are not entirely irrational, and any discussion of death must consider narratives of pollution and purification. Dead things putrefy and decay; inert corpses do not remain still, but rather creep and flow before becoming skeletal and silent once again. The dead pollute, symbolically as well as literally, and rituals of purification are deeply bound up in customs of death. Although beliefs and rituals associated with death, pollution, and purification are complex and diverse (and are accordingly a main focus of anthropological accounts of death; e.g., Huntington and Metcalf, 1979 2 ; Quigley, 1996; Grainger, 1998), one recurring feature is the contrasting of the putrescence and destruction induced by the dead body with the absorbent, cleansing, and regenerative properties of the natural environment. As the earlier discussion on Americans’ propensity to be buried in but not in direct contact with the soil shows, however, an inversion of this view exists. In this case, the natural environment is perceived as the source of pollution and chaos: keeping the body separate from nature helps maintain the illusion that it is not actually dead. As Michael Ignatieff has pointed out, tellingly,
“cultures that live by the values of self-realisation and self-mastery are not especially good at dying, at submitting to those experiences where freedom ends and biological fate begins.”
(quoted in Albery and Wienrich, 2000: 12).
Such an inversion may also have an explanation in concerns about environmental crisis and the possibility of human extinction as a result of pollution and technological violence and destruction. If we have polluted the earth to the extent that Rachel Carson’s predictions about ecological crisis have started to come true, then narratives of symbolic immortality referring to the natural world start to falter, since the polluted dead can no longer be cleansed by the eternal and enfolding earth, and the consolations of living on through biological reproduction and creative monuments become hollow and unreal. Lifton, whose arguments about immortality and nature are as relevant in the second dialogue as in the first, observes:
Insofar as we imagine the destruction of nature, we snuff out life-imagery
2 who trace their anthropology of mortuary ritual to the sociological work of Hertz and Van
Gennep and especially the latter’s work on rites of passage and liminality
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of the most fundamental kind and leave ourselves inundated by equally absolute imagery of death.
There is a very special symbolism around the defiling of nature, whether by bomb tests, insecticides, “smog”, or even ugly billboards and buildings and ever-encroaching highways. We have yet to recognise the extent to which we feel ourselves, our relationship to the life process, to be defiled no less than our environment. We sense ourselves to be poisoning the source of our most profound imagery of vitality and rebirth, the mode of immortality which, so to speak, “houses” all of the others.
(1979:344)
The very real possibility of collective crisis turns the crisis of individual death into an unbearable cataclysm. In this paper I have already shown that absolute denial of death is unsustainable, and that technology and scientific rationalism are inadequate masters of nature and death, which is why nature itself remains a main referent of our struggles to come to terms with death. We may yearn as individuals to live forever, and may be incapable of imagining our own deaths except as a confusing and frightening black box, but are still able to extract some meaning and consolation through the use of natural metaphors, especially those which contemplate continued collective existence (even if we no longer persist as individuals). In the absence of these natural metaphors, especially the compelling ones about immortality, death becomes the sole referent and the absolute image.
5. Conclusion
In this paper I have explored linkages between death and nature in contemporary North
American culture, with a particular focus on ideas about ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ death and assertions that the culture either denies or is preoccupied with death. Following a discussion about some of the sources and characteristics of North American deathways, I considered ways in which nature is used as a metaphor in attempts to understand and come to terms with death.
This paper is the first of three comprehensive papers I am submitting as part of my doctoral work. The second paper is titled “Heidegger, Death, Dwelling, and Continuity”, and the third paper will focus on ecological phenomenology.
My doctoral work explores the environmental crisis in relation to the crisis of death evident in contemporary North American culture. I am particularly interested in the ways we use narratives to come to terms to death, and in the sorts of possibilities these narratives offer for
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ethical behaviour toward others and the environment, especially in the sense of Heidegger’s concept of ‘dwelling’.
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