Death, But Not As We Knew It

On Saturday 21st September, my neighbour collapsed and died while walking the hills of Northumberland. The coroner’s report confirmed only that she had had a heart-attack. She was fifty-one years old.

Little ensued among those living on our short street. No expressions of outrage at how young our neighbour was. No speculation about the reason for her sudden demise. No show of disbelief. No clamour of refusal. No real discussion at all.

As if it is the most natural thing in the world for a fit and healthy woman of fifty-one to collapse and die and for the extraordinary reach of medical science to be unable to explain why.

A couple of weeks later, England lost to Greece in the Nations League football competition. The Greek players marked their victory by holding up the shirt of a teammate who had died in a swimming pool a few days before. My son called my attention to the TV – ‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘You’re interested in young people dying.’

As if it’s a niche thing – like following the Finnish Curling Championship. As if it’s an idiosyncracy, to be interested in young people dying.

Latest research announces that one in two of us will get cancer. Since when? And why? Defibrillators are mounted on the walls of primary schools. For whom? And why? No one’s asking. Or only a very few are asking.

Death is among us now in a strange new way. Ambling through everyday life. Casually. Without any fuss.

Two events took place in July and August of this year, significant in this regard. Each dramatized the same unsettling prospect of death as unremarkable, death as just another side of life.

The first event was a short film, shown previous to the controversial opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games. In this film, three children follow Zinedine Zidane into the Paris subway system, proceeding without him through sodden catacombs, flanked by rats and human skulls. They arrive at a dank waterway as a row boat approaches. The figure inside, darkly hooded and with skeletal hands, helps each child to board and transports them onward into the murk – but not before distributing life-jackets, which the children buckle on with good care.

The second event was a widely reported brief ceasefire – a temporary suspension of the killing of children in Gaza in order to allow for the vaccination of children in Gaza.

In both of these events there was a startling overturn of the age-old tension between life and death. In both, death was presented as compatible with life, life’s friend, even life’s protector.

No more fundamental rearrangement is possible to conceive. What does it mean? And how deep does its meaning go?
What is going on with the curious manner in which death now saunters our streets, woven with life so closely and so companionably that it is hardly possible to tell them apart?

*

In 1983, the German philosopher, Gadamer, delivered a radio broadcast on the theme of death. Gadamer claimed that throughout history and in all cultures death has been abroad equivocally, at once acknowledged and denied, admitted and refused.

In their great variety, religious rituals of death have posited some version of endurance beyond death and have thereby been confrontations with death that have also worked to conceal death.

But secular practices too, the making of wills for example, have constituted an experience of death that has been at once an admission and a denial.

Indeed, so powerful and productive has been the carefully balanced ambiguity of historical experiences of death that it has been the template for ways of life generally, which have derived their defining sense of purpose from the requirement to maintain a holding pattern between admission and refusal of human mortality.

On the one hand, life has got its shape from implicit acknowledgment of death, from which have followed the rise and fall of youth and adulthood and old-age and everything that is proper to them.

On the other, in the seriousness with which life has been pursued and the import with which life has been imbued, there has been implicit denial of the fact that all these projects in which we invest and these people in whom we trust are fated to expire.

The great effort to balance acceptance of death with defiance of death has generated the ways of living that have orientated us and motivated us.

We might consider, then, that any alteration in our experience of death would likely have profound consequences for our ways of living and, for that reason, be worth attending to.

Certainly, this is what prompted Gadamer in the early 1980s to speak publicly on the theme of death. For, what he had noticed was just what we have noticed: a relatively sudden and profound change in the manner in which death was abroad.

Except that the change that Gadamer noticed was not the wholesale admission of death that we are now seeing all around. What Gadamer observed was the opposite: wholesale refusal of death, death’s disappearance from view.

In his broadcast, Gadamer described the erasure of the experience of death from public life, from private life, even from personal life. Elaborate funerals no longer passed through the streets, families rarely hosted their dying or dead relatives in the home, and the use of heavy pain-relief was removing people even from their own passing.

By the early ‘80s, there had been an obliteration of death – people died, of course, but their deaths were almost nowhere to be seen.

Gadamer sought to warn against this change, on the grounds that the experience of death is fundamental to the purposefulness that gives meaning to our lives. Without it, we are entered into an undifferentiated open-plain existence, without shape or rhythm, in which nothing is particularly salient and therefore nothing particularly possible…

…or rather in which salience and possibility are on the open market, up for grabs to the highest bid or the loudest message.

As the shaping effect of the careful acknowledgement of death receded through the latter half of the twentieth century, the form and tempo of our lives came gradually to be defined by an avalanche of products and services of corporate invention and state promotion, accompanied by a manufactured hysteria of trumped-up festivals.

There was still a sense of purpose – even a hyper-sense of purpose – but it arose from a new and uncertain source, the delicately balanced experience of death having been replaced by a wholly other experience with nothing delicate about it: the experience of opportunity.

This new experience was very useful as a means of social control. Because opportunity is the enemy of ways of life, cutting through the purposes that tie us to times and places, to people and things, with the chance to do and be something different.

The things that we would never do, the principles that we would ever uphold, were now fair game. Gotta grab those chances, gotta grasp those opportunities…

We dived without hesitation into the new world-without-limit, in which anything was possible, in which It Could Be You.

But the use-by date of opportunity is a short one, a society’s propensity for wearing out from overstimulated pursuit of synthetic prizes mirroring an individual’s tendency for it.

And so arrived, more quickly than one might have anticipated, the ugly endphase of the game of chance for which we had sacrificed everything meaningful.

Its last gasps play out even still, though it has mostly relinquished its grand rhetoric of You Too Could Be President, exhausting itself as a tawdry game of glocal Bingo.

Buy a MacDonalds Happy Meal and win a fantastic family adventure. Shop at ASDA and save up your rewards points.

Commutah. Strollah. It’s time for some Tombolah.

We clamber jadedly on their jalopy-go-round, and expend our failing energies on their hamster’s wheel of fortune. Because we’ve forgotten any other way. Because we’ve lost sight of the purposes we used to live for in dazzlement at the prizes they made us play for.

So we escape to extraordinary every night, binging with Amazon Prime and Just Eat, and play the odds they give us on the devices they sell us, placing paltry wagers on the outcome of carelessly concocted competitions while piling our ever-craving bellies with poisonous pap from the filthy backpacks of the underclass.

And now, as the last simulations of meaning depart the building, addicted to opportunity and looking only for our next hit, which hardly satisfies even as we scramble for it, vulnerable at every point to apathy and inertia; now, we are confronted everywhere with the very thing to finish us off, the very thing to finally dismantle our ragged and reliant half-sense of purpose, the very thing that had disappeared from view.

Death is back. Big time.

The reentrance was something special. ‘The Covid Pandemic.’ With all opportunities, even the paltry dregs of opportunity on which we had been feeding, on hold, banned, outlawed.

Death was in. Life was out. Nothing equivocal about it.

And we folded. Of course we did. With little of substance left to shape and spur our lives, we surrendered.

The drama subsided in due course. Sort of. Covid ended. Sort of. The world of opportunity opened up again. Sort of.

And we tried to get back in – to reset our sights on the old prizes and drum up the appetite to play for them.

But one foot has stayed in the grave – we work from home, we order in, we Facetime our friends, with the rusting infrastructure of abandoned ways of life toppling all around and the glitter of life-chances growing duller by the day.

And death owns the joint, wandering freely among us without molestation or protestation. Following its corrupting disappearance with its crushing reappearance. Not delicately balanced, not ambiguously mixed with energising defiance. Just brutal.

In public, we are pummelled with accusations of sucking the planet dry, the tenacious narrative of overpopulation simmering just below the surface of global agenda and their governments’ policies.

In private, we are herded into ‘death-training’ sessions, which instruct us on how to harvest our loved ones’ passwords and sell off the contents of their loft.

Most demoralizing of all, there is the creep to death as a personal option, the Assisted Dying Bill even now being debated in the parliament at Westminster as elsewhere across the globe.

And if the world of opportunity and its wholesale suppression of death overstimulated with its production line of false purposes, then the current wholesale promotion of death enervates, eroding our very sense of purpose.

More than eight million people in the UK are taking anti-depressants. No surprise. The opportunities for which we sacrificed fulsome purposes have grown so anaemic that they offer no protection against the rising crescendo of death.

Meanwhile, with so many faltering under an ailing sense of purpose, the population is bookended by more or less total immunity to purpose. Autism and Alzheimer’s are on the increase, conditions of profound remove from even the most rudimentary life projects.

The rise in prevalence of these conditions is appalling in itself. But worse still is its accompaniment by a new and wicked escalation of the over-admission of death.

A radio advertisement for an Alzheimer’s charity features the voice of a young man who tells us that ‘Mum died for the first time’ when she couldn’t remember how to make a roast dinner and that ‘Mum died for the second time’ when she couldn’t remember his name and that ‘Mum died for the last time’ on the date of her passing.

Did they really just say that? Did they really just describe a whole cohort of living people as already dead?
Zombies – the walking dead – has been a dominant trope of our times. Like all of the output of the cultural-industrial complex, it has been about much more than entertainment, embedding the register within which living people are experienced, and experience themselves, as dead men walking, for whom death is not a reversal but a most natural, a most unobjectionable, fulfillment.

And beware. Autism and Alzheimer’s are only the poster scenarios in this regard. Their susceptibility to being dismissed as alive-but-not-living is rolling out more subtly as a condition of us all.

More and more frequently, life is promoted to us as a process of making memories. And we have fallen for it, availing ourselves of their devices and their platforms so as to arrange and then record our lives in the image of unnuanced key concepts: #familytime, #datenight, #daddays, and the like.

As we busy ourselves with producing generic life-content, we do not notice that we are living life as if it is over, that we are living in the mode of what will have been, that we are folding death into life itself.

Take Your Opportunities replaced fulsome life-purposes with synthetic life-chances, dispersing the vitality of communities into short susceptible bursts of atomised hyper-energy. But Make Your Memories is more devastating still, upturning the forward-orientedness of purpose itself, sapping us of all lifeforce.

We live now in the mode of having lived. And everything turns to ashes and to dust.

We are being reframed. As the walking dead. Beings with far too unequivocal an affinity with death. For whom death is fruition. For whom death is life.

*

Covid was about many things, one of the most important of which was its rebranding of death, its rearrangement of the relation between death and life.

Its launch-pad was the decades of disappearance of death that Gadamer observed in the 1980s and that was, by 2020, utterly entrenched. Just reporting unremarkable daily mortality rates was enough to provoke widespread terror in a population with no experience of death.

Save Lives. Surely no campaign in history more effortlessly carried the day.

But in the beguiling simplicity of that slogan lay the seeds of a fatal irony: the reappearance of death as acceptable collatoral of the project of saving lives.

People who were doing every inhumane thing that was asked of them in order to make death disappear again grew strangely defensive of death as a cost of protecting life. If you mentioned the numbers dying from misuse of ventilation treatment, you were castigated as against life. If you whispered the side-effects of the Covid ‘vaccines,’ you were ostracised as against life.

Death had become admissable as a side-effect of saving life.

Then, as we exited Covid intensity, there dawned a next phase in the rebranding of death, not even as acceptable collatoral of saving life but as itself a saviour of life.

The ever-more brazen narrative of depopulation – at meetings of the World Economic Forum, heads of state listen with equanimity to suggestions that optimal global population might be as little as five-hundred million – this extinction narrative is presented as life-saving, for the benefit of the planet.

Puchasing corporate packages to save your family the trouble of your funeral is advertised as the healthy option, and death-training is just being sensible.

As for the prospect of assisted dying, that is advancing on the strength of its great respect for human lives, which are so precious that we must help them to extinguish themselves if they wish to, or – as former MP, Matthew Parris, is on record as saying – if they ought to.

Little wonder that death is depicted in the act of passing around life-jackets, or that genocide is paused for immunisation against disease. The relation between life and death has been scrambled so completely that death is set to become the lifestyle of choice.

*

No word passed along our street of funeral arrangements for our neighbour. As far as I know, no one living here attended a ceremony. I am not certain that there was any.

Funerals are often regarded as overkill here in the UK. Protesting too much.

Even the flimsy wicker coffin used in crematoria is resented as overdoing it – a group of friends recently expressed outrage that corpses are not emptied onto the pyre so that the coffin can be reused.

They proceeded to commend someone they knew who had stipulated the use of a cardboard coffin for their cremation. Was that too to be recycled?

Better still: ‘Britain’s most popular funeral package’ offers to relieve family of the stress of all arrangements for the dead body of their relative – even cardboard arrangements.

‘No Fuss’ is the tagline of Pure Cremation. Just ‘personal delivery’ of the ashes at your convenience.
Amazon Prime style.

Did Somebody Say, Just Death?

Sinéad Murphy is author of Effective History (2010), The Art Kettle (2012), and Zombie University (2017), and co-editor of Pandemic Response and the Cost of Lockdowns (2022).

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