Integrating “The New Death: Mortality and Death Care in the Twenty-First Century”
I read a lot, and mostly focus on texts that others seem to overlook or undervalue.
When a book moves into my head, rattles around shaking up some too fixed ideas, and shores up some emerging, if still wobbly notions, it seems to me that is an important text to credit and to highlight for others, who might find it as transformative as I did.
So, this won’t be a proper “book review” but an opportunity to thank a group of authors and researchers whose work did something to me, and to share with them how their writing will likely impact my work, and those who engage with me through a four month workshop I facilitate several times a year called Circling the Drain: Living Intentionally with Mortality.
The text I want to highlight here is The New Death: Mortality and Death Care in the Twenty First Century , edited by Shannon Lee Dawdy and Tamara Kneese, a collection of fourteen or so essays exploring the shifting notions of death, funereal practices, temporality, liminality and our continued relationship to the dead as it manifests religiously, politically, economically, culturally including our tactile relationship to the corpses of our loved ones prior to internment or cremation.
The first two essays ( the first by Abou Farman and the second by Jenny Huberman) focus on narratives of death-denial, or perhaps more properly, the aspirations of forestalling death and death-eradication in the tranhumanist, techno-futuristic, and long-termer schemas that have emerged from and around the Silicon Valley tech and billionaire classes, and the understated supremacist and eugenic themes about who exactly is worthy of such technological life-extension.
Tamara Kneese explores the relationship between wearable technology, the life insurance industry, and the intensifying narratives of economic obligation to live and die responsibly maintaining health, forestalling death, while leaving ample economic resources behind for those who have survived you. In Circling the Drain, we talk extensively about how our ideas of “a good death” and care-taking of the dying are shaped by class, race and economic status, and Kneese’s language around “responsible death” will be a valuable contribution to these discussions.
Having spent several years professionally supporting a medical mission focused on HIV/AIDS in eSwatini, I found Casey Golomski’s “Deathnograpy: Writing Reading, and Radical Mourning” both moving and enlightening as it explores how Swazi culture speaks, writes, names and cannot name the extraordinarily tragic toll that AIDS has wrought among friends, family, neighbors and throughout the nation.
The final essay in Part One, “’For the One Life We Have’: Temporalities of the Humanist Funeral in Britain” by Matthew Engelke explores atheist, agnostic, and secular humanist notions of going-on-being after death via legacy, memory, genetics, or atomic repurposing.
In Circling the Drain, we talk about all the various narratives we create “believe in” and play with, some materialistic, rational, scientific, and social – while others are religious, magical, and wishful – and how we often hold many contradictory notions of “being after death” simultaneously, and this essay is a clear example of the ways that alternate materialist and narrative notions of continuation after death remains a powerful archetype in non-religious communities.
LaShaya Howie’s work in “Loss in/of the Business of Black Funerals” will prove to be a powerful contribution to the workshop’s exploration of racism, xenophobia, and mortality. She writes movingly of the Black community funeral practices, centered around family business which become essential social hubs, spaces to confront, mourn, and organize around the violent and premature death, and the disruption of these hubs as large corporate funeral home chains move into the market.
One of the most transformative aspects of this essay collection is the extensive and wide-ranging discussion of our treatment and relationship – emotional, economic, and physical – to the bodies of those who are dying or dead. Essays on this theme are authored by Stephanie Schiavenato, Margaret Schwartz, Shannon Lee Dawdy, Phillip R. Olson, Huwy-min Lucia Liu, and Ruth E. Toluson. These utterly enlightening essays range from the unintrusive cooling technologies that allow parents to spend extended time with stillborn infants — the rising death doula movement and notions of “personal touch” versus the antiseptic touch of the funeral profession — magic, mummification and the archetypes of embalming — recent attempts to reclaim home funerals and the institutional and cultural resistances to family care of bodies — to the increasing professionalization of death work in China, and finally an evocative and moving description of one funeral parlor in Singapore marketing a new death ritual, The Shower of Love, which invites the family to participate in the facilitated bathing, dressing, and preparing the body of their loved one as part of their mourning practice.
Although talking about our ideas of burial/cremation and funeral practices are a theme that emerges throughout the workshop, these remarkable essays have made me think much more deeply about our avoidance of and the lost opportunities for intimacy with the bodies of our dead. I usually ask workshop members if they have ever been in the presence of or have seen a dead body, and each round, it has been a steady minority who have ever encountered, let alone touched or bathed or held a corpse. I think it might be important to add an additional session, not only on American funeral practices, but to our embodiment and tactile interactions with the dying and the dead, and post-mortem liminality in the bardo-like space between life and burial/cremation/disposal.
So, this is an opportunity to credit these editors and authors and hold up their work. Their research and analyses have seeped into and converged, diverged, and reshaped my own thoughts and perceptions – making this one of the most impactful books I read in 2022. I thank them all for their contributions and for deepening my own work and my own journey toward living more intentionally with mortality.
