ONE — INTRO.

A parallel concern for sanitation influenced the nature and location of the cemeteries of the Romans, the Jews, the ancient Egyptians, and the Chinese. The Romans and Jews regarded cemeteries as hazardous and so built their graveyards beyond the city walls. Christians, however, erected catacombs, churchyards, and churches as mass graves built into places of worship. Ensuing with the 6th century, overpopulation burdened cities and made many authorities revert to the old secular Roman custom of permitting burial only outside city walls. Church land, however, was not subject to secular sanitary laws and during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, public health suffered as a result. During the early years of the 19th century, the secularization of cemeteries in the Western world came about on a mass scale due to the growing interest in public health and sanitation-related to burials and burial practices [1].

The communication of deleterious chemicals and virulent diseases through contaminated drinking water has been a frequent and well-documented occurrence. Any disease caused by drinking corrupted water can be transmitted through the groundwater if the disease-causing vector reaches the water source in infective doses large enough to cause the specific illness [2].

However, the true role played by cemeteries (the decomposing bodies and the chemical preserving agents) in the pollution of groundwater and subsequently the transmission of hazardous chemical substances and infectious diseases has received scarce academic investigation. Thus, historically, cemeteries have never been perceived as having significant environmental pollution potential [3].

The pollution hazard posted by an incorrectly sited cemetery, however, is as serious (indeed, bacteriologically worse) than that of a poorly sited landfill [4].

TWO — DEATH IN THE WESTERN TRADITION

When one dies, it is a tragedy. When a million die, it is a statistic. — Often attributed to Joseph Stalin

To speak of a single death today is to speak biographically, on an epitaph or in an obituary. In the deaths of others, we find the recognition of our own mortality. Death cultivates the creation of mythos that testify to the quality of life lived as well as to the manner or cause of death itself.

Biographical accounts underscore a modern focus on the individual narrative. To us, death is an abrupt end to an otherwise fulfilling operatic life; death is the thief of the loyal soldier, the respite to a long bout of suffering, the tragic, chance drowning of a child. Modern obituaries function as the briefest of biographies from which we can deduce the structure and meaning of a life [5]. So willing to do anything to give a life meaning, one could say senseless death is modern man’s anathema.

The individuated accounting of death stands decidedly contrasted to earlier traditions in the West. In the philosophical doctrine of the contemptus mundi, or life as rehearsal for death, of the early Christians, or in the danse macabre of medieval and baroque Europe, death remained a collective question of the soul, the nous, the psyche, and of homo sapiens. It served not merely as a finale, but a beginning, an illusion, sometimes a test, and sometimes an immutable edict of nature. It was with the rise of the natural sciences in the late 18th century that matters of life and death became fundamentally organic. In this epistemological divide, a new positivism emerged with biomedicine as the legitimate sentinel of life and sentry against death. The prose of life itself, once the prerogative of philosophy and theology, became an implement of new-age science and rationality. The language of death, on the other hand, emerged as diametrical; its sole function being that of nonfunction. Originating with the abeyance of breath (pneuma and life bore a metaphysical relation), death evolved in definition with concomitant advances in medicine to the arresting of the heart and to the cessation of brain waves [6]. Bodies began to be understood in their failure as the malfunction of mechanical systems.

TWO-AND-A-HALF— THE DEARLY DEPARTED

We may all meet the same biological fate, but we look to our stories, perhaps, for differentiation.

The rise of the individual ideology has been complemented by the creeping disappearance of death from the world of the living. In the advanced nations, dying is now primarily a private and often technical affair. The act and evidence is hidden behind the firmly barred doors of the hospital, the morgue, or the funeral home. It is rife with technicalities and price tags. For most of us, the actual beholding of death will occur infrequently over the course of our lives. The care of the recently deceased is a specialized niche career practiced by few, often in a way occluded from the public sphere. When death does impact us, we find ourselves in the comfortless position of spectator, witnessing the sublimation of the body to the auspices of modern medical and postmortem practices. These private and public rituals of dying, burial, and care for the dead common to earlier eras fade into fragmented stories.

It is the thesis of this piece that the metamorphosis of attitudes or encounters of death and dying in the modern world, accentuated by practically all recent critical works on the history of death in the West [7], has given rise to the stilted attitudes of death we have inherited.

THREE — PHILIPPE ARIES’ DEATH

‘’This life in which death was removed to a prudent distance seems less loving of things and people than the life in which death was the center.’’

The work of French historian Philippe Aries is arguably the best social history of death as has been made available. In Western Attitudes Toward Death and Dying (1974) as well as in the better-known The Hour of Our Death (1981), Aries proposes that from the medieval period onward, death has evolved towards “[an] enormous mass of atomized individuals.” Aries titles four deaths, the “tame (humanized) death,” “one’s own death,” “thy death,” and “forbidden or wild (unhumanized) death.”

Aries investigates why death eventually became, in his terms, untamed. “On the surface,’’ Mr. Aries writes of the medieval past, “things … remain very much as they were… more bones and skeletons than ever in the churches, the same obligation to make one’s will’’ and so forth. But beneath this veneer, Aries believes a new attitude begins to appear — the subconscious devaluation of ancient attitudes. Anxieties about death begin to propagate on eulogies, elegies, and on tombstones, so different from the concreteness of death in older, traditional society.

Aries’ fourfold division centers directly on how people experience and perceive death. As such, it stands as a peculiar history, one of indiscernible shifts present in literature, art, sacrament, burial practices, and wills. It is characterized by the use or assumption of mentalités (attitudes) that characterize particular epochs or periods of time [6].

“The vile and ugly death of the Middle Ages is not the only sudden and absurd death, it is also the secret death without witness or ceremony; the death of the traveler on the road, or the man who drowns in a river, or the stranger whose body is found at the edge of a field, or even the neighbor who is struck down for no reason. It makes no difference that he was innocent, his sudden death marks him with malediction. (P. 11). In the mirror of his own death, each man . . . discover[ed] the secret of his own individuality. And this relationship — which Greco-Roman Antiquity and especially Epicureanism had glimpsed briefly and had lost — has from that time on never ceased to make an impression on our Western civilization. (P. 52).

With both the act and evidence of death removed from public view, it was not long before the dying themselves were repositioned behind the opaque facade of hospitals, nursing homes, and morgues. According to Aries, by the middle of the 20th century, death had become invisible. Or worse, in the words of English anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer [9], it had become pornographic. This thesis of “forbidden death” is arguably at the heart of the resurgence in the scholarship.

A burgeoning fascination with death ensued with the removal of the dead from churchyard cemeteries located within cities. Urban death, including the remembrance provided by town cemeteries, succumbed as burial places and practices became themselves calamities of the looming concern over public hygiene, disease, and sanitation. In Britain and France, from ~1750 to ~1850, the dead were disinterred and relocated to burial locations outside cities. This relocation, however, was coupled with an emerging cult of the dead. People would sojourn to secular and familial tombs where one could visit the dead, as well as progressively erotic representations of dead bodies (especially in the depiction of saints), which Aries (1981) refers to as “[the] confusion between death and pleasure.”

In Aries’ estimation, these schisms were also part of a larger shift in the Western perspective, where death had receded from visibility, and the highly stylized rites and rituals of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages toward an increasingly private, individuated, and culturally inchoate event [8]. Death had become unspeakable and unknowable.

With brevity, Mr. Aries concludes,

“This life in which death was removed to a prudent distance seems less loving of things and people than the life in which death was the center.’’

In concluding chapters on the 19th century, Aries recounts the rationalization of death in thought and technology. Meanwhile, death was subject to romanticism, with idiosyncratic mourning rites not easily comprehended in our time. To die gracefully in a novel, poem, or an opera was clearly an idée fixe of the 19th century, and life tends to follow art. As is tangible from letters, accounts, and other expositions of the time, the unpleasant facets of the deathbed are relegated to oblivion, and we are left to read only of the love, sympathy, vindication, and joy shared by all parties amid weeping, smiling, and the holding of hands.

All told, it is a bleak picture Aries portrays of the 20th century. The ancient rites persist in the West, but with these appears “an absolutely new [kind of] dying,’’ especially in urban areas. The essence of this “new’’ death is inconspicuousness and namelessness, a desire for death to be confined to family surrogates we call hospitals and hospices. Death was obscene in polite company as sex was in the Victorian age. But it was covered in a deluge of books, articles and television documentaries. “Death shown out through the front door will inevitably return through the window,” Mr. Aries writes of the direction of this trend. He reflects on the impact of novel medical technologies slowly being revealed in the law courts, and the resulting conferences on bioethics, in churches, and in newspaper columns. We are taken through funeral “parlors’’ and “homes’’ and other repositories, physical and psychological, of the dying and the dead. The twentieth-century — has become steadily “wilder;” the primal “savagery’’ of death has returned — death in this age is untamed.

Mr. Aries’s most conspicuous flaw is his self-acknowledged commitment to the grandiose scope, purpose, and analytical techniques of psychohistory. The evidence, where adduced, is thin. His argument leaves little that is wholly agreeable. However, to tackle, in Aries’ words “[that which is] stirring in the depths of the collective unconscious,’’ and to find the present day attitude toward death and dying “a violent and underhanded — a fearful — savagery’’ is no stretch. Aries provides a terrific historical documentation of ceremonies, observances, rites, and rituals, that for a thousand years have depicted death in the West.

FOUR — A NEW ACCEPTANCE?

In recent decades, a “back-to-death” campaign has confronted our growing separation from death. The hospice movement in the U.S. and Britain grew as a humane response to the depersonalization of death in hospitals and nursing homes. Public awareness of death, aided by Kübler-Ross’ On Death and Dying (1969), increased awareness of the medical profession’s duty to the process, and heightened the importance of the ministrations of psychologists, other professionals, and researchers. Such endeavors, Mr. Aries draws, are undertakings to tame death.