Editorial

Dissecting death

Perhaps more than in any society in human history, Americans have become increasingly disassociated from the experience of death and dying.

Consider how we've distanced ourselves from dead bodies. Not so long ago, American families held wakes for their departed loved ones in their own homes, and washed and dressed the bodies themselves. It was a multigenerational affair. Now we leave the handling of the corpse to the experts: the coroner, the health department and the funeral home. Many children grow up without ever having seen a dead body.

That distancing has been accompanied by a drop in traditional mourning practices. We no longer wear black. At burials, we leave the gravesite without shoveling dirt onto the coffin, the act of ultimate closure.

We're also insulated from the death of the animals that end up -- via neatly cellophaned packages -- on our dining tables. So we're especially horrified, as we recently were, to see images of stumbling cows being pushed to the slaughter by forklift.

Ironically, in the age of the 24-hour news cycle, we cannot escape news of death: 4,000 dead American soldiers in Iraq, hundreds of thousands killed in natural disasters, countless local stories of school shootings, gang killings, family murders.

And in like no other society before, we're exposed to death and scenes of dying in television entertainment, movies and violent video games.

But the exposure serves mostly to make death an even more theoretical construct for us. We've supplanted a real experience of death and dying -- and from within the community support of families -- with a virtual reality. Especially for young people, death has lost any valuable meaning.

Therein may lie an explanation for the huge popularity of traveling shows of corpses like the "Bodies" exhibits (see Page 5). The fascination with viewing actual dead bodies, which are preserved by "plastination" into lifelike poses and various degrees of dissection, cannot be explained simply by morbid curiosity or a sort of "death pornography."

Some attend the exhibits to marvel at the miracle of life and the intricate mechanics of the human body. But the degree of general fascination points to something broader: Americans cannot escape the sense that there must be something more to death than is offered at face value.

Viewing the lifeless shell -- and contents -- of what was once a human person, they stare and ask: Surely there has to be something more? Something that would explain life's origin and destiny?

Putting aside moral questions raised by the treatment of these bodies, it's a safe bet that in an earlier era, when the experience of death was a natural part of life, this sort of exhibit would hold no interest. It would be redundant.

We modern Americans have lost something important. There's a good reason why philosophers and spiritual writers have long used meditation on death as a way of unlocking the meaning of life.

In this Easter season, we're celebrating Christ's victory over death and his resurrection from the dead. Without death, and an experience of death, the Resurrection is meaningless. There's a paradoxical lesson here for us, too. To pursue joyful, meaningful lives, we must keep our own inevitable death constantly in view.