That Undiscovered Country
Discussing death in the midst of the Pandemic
We have become too comfortable with death. Whether we see it simply as the idea of unbeing, or the skeletal, hooded figure with his scythe, or Charon beckoning you across the Styx, death has become an unwelcome, yet common, bedfellow. What, in recent years, has become a stranger to us, is now on every screen, in every page, at every door and on every tongue. Incomprehensible charts and figures wash over us as death now moves quicker than birth. Bodies pile high in specially dug mass graves as the Ganges grows swollen with the dead. Even before the plague that harries us now death had been reduced to merely an existential hazard. Those without homes freeze to death on the streets of the wealthiest cities while wars still rage in the nations deemed “poorer”, with casualty numbers still climbing. Death, it seems, is an accepted part of life, but rarely an addressed one.
Historically, Death has always been mankind’s familiar, the black cat that followed us to and from our door. Life was, as Hobbes put it, “Nasty, Brutish and Short”, with everyone confronted with the prospect of death everyday, a constant enemy that harried us with plagues, infant death, loss of crops due to the whims of the weather and simple injuries that left untreated would turn septic and lethal. But with this familiarity came acceptance and a need to address our ultimate end. Endings were prepared for, represented in the many ceremonies that endure to this day that celebrate the life of the one who has passed. Death was understood as inevitable and therefore better accepted when it arrived. Consequently life was better appreciated as the gift it is. With the advent of modern medical science, however, though death is still a constant, it has receded from daily life, hidden behind hospital walls and, in a lot of cases, nursed away entirely. In the wealthiest parts of the world death became an expected but distant quality of existence. Unfortunately, in recent times it has returned to haunt us all, wherever we may hide.
As a child and teenager I lost my Grandfather, Grandmother, two pets, my great Aunt, some family friends and, finally, my own father at the age of 20. However, I do not look back on my childhood and see it as being clouded by grief and misery. All these deaths were sad, even though I had varying degrees of familiarity with the deceased, but the deaths were never dismissed or repressed by those closest to me. I never felt like it should “never have happened” or that it “wasn’t fair”. Ironically, it was my father who was most philosophical about it all. An oft repeated phrase by him when weighing up what to do in a given situation was “Life’s too short”. This acknowledgement of, and interaction with, mortality I had growing up meant that, when he died, I did feel better prepared. It was a harrowing, painful and long-winded grieving process but one I managed and coped with better than some people I knew. Looking back I am still proud of how I dealt with such a traumatic event, relying on communication and a support network that I knew were there for me. But the most significant aspect of this was that I had already acknowledged, confronted and accepted death from an early age.
Being confronted with our own existence has a habit of pulling focus. We better understand our priorities when we realise the brevity with which we must achieve them, but such priorities are counterproductive to social structures as they stand. A 2003 study by the Grief Recovery Institute found that the impacts of grief add up to a loss of $75 billion annually. It is more efficient and cost-effective, then, to reduce the impact of death on our society, to “normalise” death as almost a side-effect of living rather than part of the founding desire to enjoy the short time we have been given on this earth. This, sadly, is not hard to do, due to the way our minds balk at the concept of death. Not dying, per se, but death. This is because dying has been eased in modern times. Doctors developed the euphemism of being “made comfortable” as preparation for the dying after all. Death, on the other hand, is the opposite of all we know. To contemplate that hollow void, the Undiscovered Country, is to contemplate what it is we have around us at all times. We can only glimpse a black hole by the shadow it creates and death is the same. Death is the vacant spot in all of our lives that we cannot see beyond but, like that black hole, that light that surrounds it is all the more brilliant, all the more more beautiful, for its contrast. It serves us well to be familiar with death but serves us poorly to be comfortable with it.
After my father died the death rate around me seemed to drop. Years went by without a death close to me but what did change was my perspective on life. I quit my job and got a better one. I began playing the music I enjoyed rather than doing the gigs that paid (poorly). I even moved away to a whole new city and started another life once Dad’s estate and the family’s equilibrium were settled. My father was gone leaving a hole in the world, my family and me but instead of being sucked into that shadow I enjoyed the light that now encompassed it. With each death the person’s absence creates this contrast. Everyday life is brought into sharp relief, the details of being alive pressing in on you at all turns. Though grief coats it all, the new perspective afforded in this shadow helped me develop a keener sense of self and of the world around me. Without this kind of appreciation for, and integration with, death, we would lead much emptier lives. Which brings us to the malady of today.
Spoken of in dry, matter-of-fact tones by disinterested, cold observers, death’s seat at the table goes remarked but undiscussed. The 120,000 deaths in the UK due to Covid-19 goes largely unmentioned on the news in discussion of the pandemic’s impact, whereas the economic casualties are given far more screen time. Airlines and Hoteliers are interviewed en masse to voice their complaints about the ‘death’ of their ‘sector’ but few are the families we hear from struggling to comprehend the death of their relatives and how abandoned they feel. The blisters upon the financial sector are seen as the greater wound upon a national psyche rather than the near universal grief of losing so many to such a gruesome disease. The quote by Lord Farquad from the movie Shrek that became a meme earlier in the pandemic rings truer than ever: “Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make”. This disassociation from one of the ingredients of life that is at the core of what makes us human is only ever going to result in far greater harm. For who would bear
“th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, the pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, the insolence of office and the spurns that patient merit of th’ unworthy takes”
if not out of a fear of that undiscovered country? The truth is we have sailed its waters, we even know its coordinates, but our ships only stay afloat at a distance. We do not know the terrain of that country and, likely, the living never will, but until we are borne there on these curious tides of life we enjoy the journey all the better.
We cannot feel every death that happens today or we would all cease to function but allowing ourselves to feel death at all will help us in the trying times to come. It has certainly helped me.
