I am in a death class and my dog just died so here ya go....
1. “Death is not the passage of a line without thickness. Rather
death is visualized as part of along transformative process.” Discuss.
“It
just so happens that your friend here is only mostly dead. There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all
dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there’s
usually only one thing you can do.” These words spoken by Miracle Max about
Wesley in the movie The Princess Bride
(Reiner 1987) may seem outrageous and a little ridiculous, but they do indeed
illustrate a truth about death. Very few things, if any, are discrete in the
existence of humans. From skin color to languages to clothing styles there are frequent
continuums. Death is the same way. Death is not an isolated event that happens
in an instant. It is a process, a transition from one state to another. Both
culturally and biologically, death occurs over time. The span of time between
life and death serves a number of functions: to provide closure to the
bereaved, to heal the wounds of society that death has created, and to provide
safe passage for the deceased to the afterlife.
The
Olo Ngaju people of Indonesia have an extreme display of dying and passing from
life to death. The nature of their funerary practices illustrates the thickness
of the line that separates life and death. Robert Hertz writes, “it is not the
custom to take the body to its final burial place; this move can only be made
after a more or less long period of time” (1960: 29). Before that can happen, a
series of temporary burial places and practices occur so that the deceased may
experience safe passage to the next world. This long wait is partly so that the
family and community can gather the materials and goods for the feast, partly
because “the right thing to do is to wait for the corpse to have completely
decomposed till only the bones remain” (1960:31), and partly because “death
itself goes on till the performance of the last rites” (1960:50). In order to
say the final farewell to the deceased, that individual must become
skeletonized and the final feast must be performed, otherwise “the fear
inspired by the proximity of death” will remain in the community (1960:50). “Death
must be given its due” in the form of time and rituals “if it is not to
continue its ravages within the group” (1960:51).
Just
as the body is not immediately laid to rest, the Olo Ngaju believe that the
spirit of the individual “stays on earth in the proximity of the body,
wandering in the forest or frequenting the places it inhabited while it was
alive” (1960:34). This is because the soul does not immediately have a firm
grasp on its place in the afterlife. It is only after the completion of the
second funeral and a special ceremony that it will continue on to the “land of
the dead” and hold a secure place there (1960:34). The series of funerals and
celebrations are performed until the deceased’s soul can “provide for itself
and taste fully the joys that the land of the dead have to offer” (1960:35-6).
Thus even after biological death, the presence is still felt and very much
alive in the community. It is only after the months and sometimes years of
rituals and celebrations that the individual truly “dies” in the community. This cultural behavior suggests
something primordial we all sense about death and departure from among the
living.
Cultural
death is not the only aspect of death that expands across long spaces of time. Even
while the legal definition of death includes brain death, there are cases where
that does not mean saying good-bye and burying the person in the ground. It is
easy to think of death as happening in an instant when the individual stops
breathing or their brain ceases to function but that is not the case. Those
occurrences are not always the point at which they die and loved ones say
good-bye. The thickness of this particular part of the line can be observed in
beating-heart cadavers and brain dead patients.
Mary
Roach explores the concept of living “dead” patients who are kept alive for
their organs in her book Stiff (2003).
While at a hospital researching for the book, Roach meets H: “H is unique in
that she is both a dead person and a
patient on the way to surgery. She is what’s known as a “beating-heart
cadaver”, alive and well everywhere but her brain… H the person is certifiably
dead. But H the organs and tissues is very much alive” (Roach 2003:167-8).
Despite parts of her being dead, she has not been drawn into the irreversible
process of death because the doctors are keeping her organs and tissues alive
for others in need. Before the advent
of artificial respirators and the “use of patients who had what they determined
was irreversible brain damage as a source of human organs” (Locke 1996:580) H
could be both living and dead until nature took its course and she lost her
grasp on life to become “all dead” as Miracle Max says. Now, even with the
definition of death they have a foot in each door so that others might benefit
from the life that remains.
Roach
also discusses the claims that even after the organs are harvested some part of
the donor remains alive in the recipients. “If the heart of a brain-dead heart
donor does contain something loftier than tissue and blood, some vestige of
spirit, then one could imagine that this vestige might travel along with the
heart and set up housekeeping in the person who receives it” (Roach 2003:189). There
are accounts of recipients experiencing “some sort of contact with the
consciousness” of the donor (Roach 2003:189). Is the donor truly alive in that
person although they are clearly dead and buried or cremated? Can a person be both living and
dead? Does survival of the organ
associated with romance and sentiment (the heart) beyond the death of the donor
raise a fundamental contradiction of the definition of death? It becomes
difficult for families to decide to donate their deceased’s organs when there is
not a defined point of death (Roach 2003:188) and when there is a possibility
that part of their loved one may continue to live on with the donated organs. If
they agree to allow the doctors to harvest organs are they, the family,
responsible for the actual death? Will their loved one still exist, affecting
the feelings and emotions of the recipient? Once again the definition of death
raises troubling questions.
Beating-heart
cadavers and brain dead patients present a dilemma concerning the blurred lines
surrounding death. “The confusion people feel over beating-heart cadavers
reflects centuries of confusion over how, exactly, to define death, to
pin-point the precise moment when the spirit—the soul, the chi, whatever you
wish to call it—has ceased to exist and all that remains is a corpse” (Roach
2003:170). Margaret Locke also studied when death truly occurs with the
technological advances of the day. If “a patient who is brain dead usually
appears as though sleeping, the body is warm, skin color is normal, hair and
nails continue to grow, [and] babies have been delivered from brain dead
pregnant women” (Locke 1996:588) are they still “dead”? How can we call someone
dead when they are still growing? Isn’t that a contradiction? Heart transplant
surgeon Mehmet Oz says, “There’s no question that the heart without a brain is
of no value. But life and death is not a binary system…In between life and
death is a state of near-death, pseudo-life. And most people don’t want what’s
in between” (Roach 2003:188-9). These individuals dwell in both the realm of
the living and the realm of the dead. They have a foot in each door. Just how
thick is that line between life and death? Far wider than we initially
imagined.
In
similar circumstances as H, Jahi McMath is brain dead and on life support.
Marlise Muñoz was brain dead but on life support until the end of January of
this year. Thirteen-year-old Jahi is clinically and legally considered dead,
but her parents have decided to keep her on life support (Huxtable 2014). Marlise
was 33-years old and pregnant. Her doctors were legally “required to provide
life-sustaining treatment” despite her family’s wishes that she be removed from
life support (Huxtable 2014). How is it that Jahi’s doctors see her as dead but
her family sees her as alive? How is it that Marlise’s doctors insisted she be
alive while her family viewed her as dead? These cases show that even in the
scientific age, something as seemingly “clean” as death is actually complicated
and undefined.
Anthropologists’ goal is to define and
describe aspects of human culture. From the beginning, anthropology has
attempted to explain the differences and similarities among humans. Death may
not have received the attention that kinship, subsistence, or language have,
but anthropologists have nonetheless devoted time to understand death. Death
and dying is universal, but as has been shown, is not treated or defined the
same between cultures or even people. Rather than neatly classifying death and
dying, anthropologists have worked to understand the significance of the ways
people treat and react to death. Anthropologists have used their tools like
cultural relativism and participant observations to determine the meaning of
death and the function of death rituals in the surviving community.
For
the family and loved ones of the deceased it is important that both biological
and cultural death take place completely so that they can move on. Cultural
death may happen when an individual is brain dead. Biological death occurs when
the individual’s organs do not work and are not supported by machines. Only
when these two deaths come together is an individual truly “dead”. Without
both, they are only “mostly dead”. Some cultures readily acknowledge the
different stages of death. Some choose to acknowledge and value the transition
as in the case of the Olo Ngaju. Others have the view that death happens in an
instant and there is nothing confusing or undefined about it. Whether there is
an exact moment between the lungs ceasing, the heart not beating, the brain not
sending signals and the burial where an individual truly “dies”, we may never know.
But it is clearly important to experience both a cultural and a biological
death before the wound in society can heal, we can say our final farewells and
death can truly leave the living alone.
References:
Hertz, Robert
1960
A contribution to the collective representation of death. In Death and the Right Hand.
London: Cohen and West
Huxtable, R.
2014
McMath and Muñoz cases challenge definition of death. New Scientist. 15
January.
Lock, Margaret
1996
Death in Technological Time: Locating the End of Meaningful Life. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, News Series. 1996:
4(10):575–600.
Roach, Mary
2003
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. New
York,
New York
Reiner, Rob, dir.
1987
The Princess Bride. 98 min. Act III Communications.
Suzuki, Hikaru
2000
Chapter Three: The Phase of Negated Death. In
The Price of Death: The Funeral I ndustry
in Contemporary Japan. Pp. 60 - 90. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
