‘Death-positive’ mortician Doughty explores attitudes to mortality in her enthralling memoir. Also reviewed: Brandy Schillace’s Death’s Summer Coat and GP Margaret McCartney’s Living With Dying
In Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, there’s a scene in which one of the characters cries out at the futility of life: “They give birth astride of a grave,” he shouts, “the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.” During an unforgettable paragraph in Smoke Gets in Your Eyes the mortician Caitlin Doughty goes further: a visibly pregnant woman attends her funeral home to arrange a cremation for her baby. “That’s a shame about your baby,” a colleague says to her, “but you’re lucky you’re pregnant, and gonna have another child.” He shouldn’t have spoken so soon: it was her unborn baby that needed the funeral.
In what gets called the “natural” world it’s usual to die in infancy, but for human beings, there remains something deeply unacceptable about that truth. Advances in medical care over the last few decades, and the attendant shift in death from home to hospital, now mean that few of us spend time with those who are dying. The unprecedented longevity of many of our grandparents, and the creeping atomisation of communities, have reinforced many people’s alienation from death. It’s become fashionable to complain that as a society we’re out of touch with death, but for the most part, that’s a good thing. We should celebrate our lack of acquaintance with the stench and the agony that, for much of human history, all too often accompanied the last days of life. Still, modern life permits a distance from death and dying that brings its own problems, not least a difficulty in accepting the inevitable, or being able to adequately grieve. Doughty is a trailblazer of a “death positive” movement, beginning in the US but now very much over here, that seeks to normalise the contemplation of mortality with “death cafes” and “death salons”. Her story about the pregnant mother arranging a funeral for her unborn baby is just one of many sobering tales she offers, but her book is not a catalogue of horror; it’s a hilarious, poignant and impassioned plea to revolutionise our attitudes to death.
Related: John Berger's A Fortunate Man: a masterpiece of witness
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