No way to grieve
We have such an easy life that we don't know how to deal with death: David Lovibond mourns the passing of widow's weeds and black-edged notepaper Like most things (well, apart from dentistry), sex and death were done better in the past. You saw someone who caught your fancy in church, a couple of months a-wooing and come springtime she was yours. There would be a few years of getting-to-know-you sex, and before anyone had time to get bored she'd die in childbirth or you'd be carried off by consumption. Your family would mourn and then shrug. Perfect. No one lived too long, sex and death were routine and unremarkable.
These days, we seem confused about both. As far as sex is concerned, we are increasingly self-indulgent, unwilling to get married, looking for ever cheaper, or younger, thrills. We are more likely to see the last of our first spouse in the divorce court than the graveyard. And death has become a subject people find embarrassing, almost taboo. We love machine-gun massacres in movies, but death from old age seems somehow unnatural and horrifying — so we pack our parents off to die in homes and grieve over the undemanding demise of celebrities, cats and fictional characters from long-running soap operas. The modern Anglo-Saxon, however prolix he usually is, will find nothing to say when faced with wretched sadness, muttering 'Sony for your loss', like Andy Sipowicz in NYPD Blue as he heads for the exit. Robbed of time and afflicted with the attention span of a puppy, we are only interested in hearing the headlines of death: how, when and any memorable last words. More than a reprise or two of fond reminiscences, and boredom sets in,
Part of the difficulty of 21st-century death is that there is no longer any 'form'. There is no longer a socially required period of mourning, or an acknowledged time to begin dating again. The High Victorians were just as sentimental as we are, but at least they had established guidelines. 'After Albert died in 1861, Queen Victoria never came out of mourning, and the proper response to death became codified,' says Suzanne Fagence Cooper, a research fellow at the V&A. 'Women would wear absolute black for a year or two, then gradually introduce deep purple and then grey. Complete time for mourning would be five years — and it was thought very inappropriate to court anyone during those years.' There was even, I am assured, a depart
ment store entirely given over to widows' weeds, black-edged notepaper and the paraphernalia of death. 'It was quite useful to have visible mourning dress,' says Ms Fagence Cooper. 'People meeting the bereaved would know how to behave.'
Then came August 1914, and the advent of killing on an industrial scale rendered the elaborate mourning of individuals impractical and insensitive. When virtually every family shared a collective sorrow, what need of colour codes to show your neighbours you were grieving? By the end of the second world war the country had perhaps exhausted its capacity for mourning.
So now we find ourselves in a culture unused to hardship, when most of us lead long, pain-free lives and the sudden visceral sorrow of young death is like the barbarian in Rome, an uncouth wrecker of proper behaviour. Preoccupied with shallow pleasures, untested by war and spiritually illiterate, we find the tears of the bereaved embarrassing. Without a continuing tradition of organised mourning, we have lost the knack of seemliness — most evident in the forgotten art of writing the letter of sympathy. Our grandparents understood the value of plain, comfortable words; the reassurance contained in old formulaic phrases that the world would not end, there would be light at the end of tunnels. If we send letters at all now (emails are still beyond the pale) they ooze with negative capability, a therapy-induced compulsion to share the pain and provide windy comparisons with the writer's own suffering. Mostly, though, death halts our hands, ties our tongues and persuades us to avoid the company of the grief-struck. Professor Colin Murray Parkes, president of Cruse Bereavement Care, the country's largest bereavement support charity, says 'the bereaved often feel rejected when people move away from them out of awkwardness. In this laissez-faire society there's no official guidance on how to behave.' As for the mourners, says Professor Murray Parkes, 'there's a lack of social models to show them how to meet their continuing obligation to the dead while picking up their lives again. People are left to make their own way.'
The most bizarre manifestation of this new approach to mourning is the ritual of the flowers: the attaching of bouquets, and in some cases miniature teddy bears, to lampposts and railings to mark where someone has died. Public sentiment has evolved its own crude form — bouquets are left in their cellophane to show they were shop-bought, not humble cut flowers. This un-English sentimentality dates, of course, to the mass hysteria that followed Diana's death, when Kensington Palace was turned into a charnel house of putrescent daffs — but it is becoming increasingly common on both pavements and rural verges. It's as if, as the Church's influence dwindles, we are reverting to paganism.
There are magazine articles and selfhelp books by the hundred, night-school classes too, I suppose, urging us on to better sex lives or more rewarding careers, but we approach the consequences of death uniquely untutored and Dr Murray Parkes thinks the state should accept a duty to accustom us to the fact of death. 'Young people should be taught how to talk about death,' he says. 'They are given lessons in citizenship and sex education, so why not death education? Children need to think and learn about death so that they will be prepared to deal with bereavement.'
Actually, they are already taught about death, not that they seem to learn anything useful. In the words of the Department for Education: 'Bereavement, along with divorce and separation, is covered within the subject area of Personal, Social and Health Education. PSHE is taught within the Department's non-statutory framework which schools should have regard to in developing schemes of work. Within this framework, Key Stage Three pupils should be taught to recognise the stages of emotions associated with loss and change caused by death.' Perhaps it is this very curriculum that is responsible for the modern attitude to death, a glutinous sentimentality that is curiously lacking in sentiment.
It's not as if children are instinctively afraid to confront death. Many years ago, my then wife was in the back garden with my three-year-old son Rupert when they came upon a dead bird lying on the lawn. 'Don't touch,' said my wife. 'He's dead.' My son looked down at the crumpled rook, concentrating hard. 'Hello dead,' said Rupert.
Previous page
