Content Warning: Human Remains, Death, Human Decomposition (NO IMAGES) When spooky season (a.k.a. October) arrives, it’s accompanied by an enormous increase in advertisements and other media featuring human beings in various stages of death and decay. Have you ever noticed this trend? It reflects the American attitude that dead people, and death generally, are to be feared if not avoided entirely. Death is arguably the most natural part of our lives, so why are we so afraid of death and dying? In particular, why do we find human remains so frightening? In the United States, this can be partially explained by the way that the funeral industry works. At some point in our lives, most of us will be responsible for post-death care for a loved one, but I’ll summarize it here for those of you who aren’t familiar with this process. Upon a person’s death, medical staff typically take the person’s body to a morgue or other holding location (if death happens at home, this usually occurs after 9-1-1 is called). The person is later transported to a funeral home, where a mortician or other specialist prepares the person’s body for viewing by friends and family. Often this includes embalming, as well as applying copious amounts of makeup to make the person look... well, less dead. Then the viewing and funeral or cremation occur. Notice that as part of the standard practices of caring for and preparing the body for burial, the deceased’s loved ones are not involved in the process. Practically speaking, when our friends and family members die, we often don’t see them again until their viewing or funeral, at which point they will have been dead for several days (at least) and will look different because of normal postmortem changes within the body. Now, tack that onto the fact that most people die in the hospital or in hospice these days. This means that we aren’t heavily involved in our loved ones’ end-of-life experiences OR their post-life experiences. As a result of this system, Americans have exceptionally little exposure to the dying and dead human body. You may be familiar with the following phrase: We fear what we do not understand. American death and burial practices weren’t always like this, of course. Before modern embalming practices were invented and widely adopted, families prepared their loved ones’ bodies for burial themselves, and typically also buried them themselves. This would have had to happen all within a few days, since without embalming the body experienced normal rates of decomposition. Embalming did not become popularized until after the death of Abraham Lincoln, whose body was embalmed with the specific reasoning that then it could travel the country by train so that he could be mourned by the entire country. Yes, that really happened. An illustrated depiction of a scene of Lincoln lying in state. (Source) If you’re familiar with the concept of a "wake," this is a leftover term from when family members stayed awake all night with the body of the deceased after their death. These people were the ones responsible for washing and dressing the dead for their visitation and funeral - and, by the way, visitations (what we now tend to call "viewings") were held in the home of the deceased. I mention this to point out that it used to be completely normal, and even expected, for family members and/or close friends to spend time near dead people, and even to physically interact with them. The normalization of hospice care, embalming, and other aspects of the funeral industry have effectively removed the need for family and friends to directly care for their dying and deceased loved ones. The first time I ever went to a funeral, I was 10 years old, and it was the first time I had ever seen a dead person. I didn’t think the person looked "normal," but I wasn’t sure why. Turns out people naturally change after their deaths, and so of course they look different in death than they did in life - but no one had ever talked to me about that as a child, so I didn’t know. I was terrified of dead people as a kid, which is super ironic since I turned out to be an osteologist, or someone who studies human skeletal remains. Because we aren’t forced to interact with the dying or the dead, we avoid even talking about it. How does this impact our familiarity with and understanding of the processes of death and dying? It makes us afraid, because we are so unfamiliar with them. I want to make a special note here that "recently" deceased people are not usually used in horror tropes. This is because these are the dead people that we are most familiar with. When you think about classic horror scenarios involving the dead, are they usually fully intact individuals who look (mostly) like they did when they were alive? Nope - usually these people are partially decomposed, like zombies, or completely decomposed, like undead skeletons. These are the dead that we typically have even less familiarity with, because most of us have never seen a decomposed dead person in real life - so they are even scarier than "normal" dead people. Skyrim's Draugr are some of the most recognizable video game undead. (Source) In the field of archaeology, some of us work regularly with the dead. Usually this is in the form of people who have been dead for a very long time, so they are completely skeletonized, although some archaeologists work in places like Egypt or Peru where mummies are common. More than once, I’ve told someone that my job involved handling skeletons, and was met with a response that my work was "creepy." We don’t need to view the dead as "scary" or "creepy" just because they’re unfamiliar to us. After all, they’re people, too. In popular media, like movies, books, and video games, the dead are often represented as bad guys or are used to create some sort of frightening atmosphere. By incorporating the "dead people (and animals) are scary, which means they are bad" trope into popular representations of death and dying, we reinforce our terror of being in the position of dying or being dead. Frankly, there’s also a huge problem in archaeological media with "othering" (which one of our guest bloggers for this month also discusses in her post here). Often, the "bad," "scary," or "dangerous" dead are those dead whose danger explicitly comes from other cultures. Consider the Orientalism associated with the title villain in "The Mummy;" American horror’s obsession with zombies (whose whitewashed origins actually come from the Voodoo religion); the Indian burial ground trope in Pet Sematary; I could go on for a long, long time. Of course, there is an equally weird (although less common) American fascination with the dead, at least by some. Mortician Caitlin Doughty has amassed a huge following in the U.S. for her death-focused lectures and books like Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?, and every once in a while there’s a news story like the one where a New Orleans woman illegally stole human bones from a cemetery for witchcraft purposes. This uncanny interest in death and the dead is likely due to the same problem as America’s fear of death: we simply don’t have enough exposure to understand what we’re dealing with. In the grand scheme of things, our avoidance of death is partially a matter of convenience. It’s certainly easier, in a sense, when we don’t have to handle all the particularities of postmortem treatment and funeral arrangements on our own. But it seems to be taking an interesting toll on the American psyche, in that it’s resulted in a full-stop terror of our own deceased loved ones. My advice is to remember that we’re all human in the end, and that for the most part, I don’t think the dead are out to get us. Additional References:
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