Death Chatter
HALPER, THOMAS
Perspectives DEATH CHATTER BY THOMAS HALPER "D and D is definitely in this year," a friend of mine told me recently. Confessing my ignorance, I asked what "d and d" was. "Death and dying," she...
...there was the gnawing anxiety about suffering and separation from loved ones...
...A Boston University theologian declares in appropriately sonorous tones, "In trust and gratitude we...
...To be sure, this romanticization of death and dying has historical precedents...
...Rage, rage against the dying of the light...
...We tend to think that every problem has a solution, that we need only find the right technological key...
...Dylan Thomas expressed it with an eloquent belligerence in a poem to his dying father: Do not go gentle into that good night...
...Death and dying," she explained...
...The assumption behind this recent barrage of "deathspeak" is that facing the certainty of our own demise is good for us...
...some people insist it is responsible for our greatest works of art...
...And that, too, is cause for mourning...
...Earnest talk on the most serious of topics can still be insipid when the speaker has nothing to say...
...Pop culture examines the phenomenon with the myopic enthusiasm of a squirrel inspecting a nut, as evidenced by such recent books as Elizabeth Kubler-Ross' On Death and Dying and Ralph A. Moody Jr.'s Life After Life...
...All that because, as Joe Louis observed, "Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die...
...In a way, though, theirs is a normal American reaction...
...The arbiters of fashion discuss death and dying with such endless and superficial vigor that it has become a staple subject of TV talk shows and Sunday newspaper supplements...
...Thomas Halper, a new contributor, chairs the department of political science at New York's Baruch College...
...celebrate the reality and mystery of death...
...It has proved of enormous survival value to the whole species...
...Death and dying, however, is not that sort of problem...
...Like evil, death in the modern age has become banal...
...Nothing could be more natural...
...One remembers, for example, Shelley's flatulent discovery, "How wonderful is Death, Death and his brother sleep...
...In the most vital and lively society on earth, one which so venerates youth that for a while adolescence was considered the highest achievement, in a country bursting with ambition, hope and inexhaustible energy, in America, "d and d is definitely in...
...Hence, the language of death-and, after all, whatever we know of death, we know only through language, not experience-has been transformed into a roster of cliches that must compete for our attention with football, fad diets, Watergate memoirs, and other transient cosmic debris...
...To speak of it in such terms is not merely false and misleading: It trivializes and sentimentalizes life's supreme and most terrifying mystery...
...The eminent sociologists, Talcott Parsons and Victor Lidz, write of death like lawyers defending a well-meaning, misunderstood client: "Death is now understood to be an important mechanism enhancing the adaptive flexibility of the species, through the sacrifice of individuals...
...Moreover, as the perceptive psychoanalyst Leslie Farber has asked, if we ought not to be afraid of death, what ought we to be afraid of...
...Yet what is happening today is different...
...At a bookstore, I see Gramp, a volume of photographs and text detailing the last days of an enfeebled old man, complete with pictures of him defecating and lying dead, mouth and eyes ajar-this in the name of proclaiming his dignity...
...In principle this may well be true, but not in reality: The fear of death-that ultimate unknown entailing at the very least a negation of our corporeal existence-is neither silly nor irrational...
...Indeed, those who would lay this natural and functional emotion to rest, believing that death can be "solved" by being talked about openly, as if it were halitosis or venereal disease, reveal an unmistakable arrogance...
...There were those euphemisms-passed away," "departed," "met his Maker"-as numerous as flowers at a gangster's funeral...
...Of course...
...I recall how in the old America death was viewed with a comfortable, familiar fear and hostility...
...But now d and d is in and raging is out...
Vol. 60 • November 1977 • No. 22
