Learning from other cultures’ approaches to death
The manner in which we deal with death in our homogenized modern culture is quite strange. when you start to think about it.
After thousands and thousands of years of living side by side with death and accepting it as something natural and undeniable and necessary, much like the changing of the seasons, we as a human race are now in a place, at least in the dominant western society, where we seem to have disassociated life from death.
Death, much like birth, is something we’ve become uncomfortable with and most of us now have an acquired cultural fear of dying. There’s even a word for it: necrophobia. We’ve become death phobic and prefer to deny its existence for as long as possible–until the bitter end.
Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, humanity went through a huge transformation and our relationship to death was part of that change.
“Death became ‘medicalized,’ no longer considered natural, but rather a failure to be warded off,” writes Erin Sawatzky in her thesis Death Perception: Envisioning a cemetery landscape for the 21st century, submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies of The University of Manitoba. “Death… became psychologically removed from the daily life of the community.”
Mourning also became something that we as a society no longer wanted to witness. Sawatzky writes, “As death became a medical issue, bereavement also became something to be remedied … The dead were to be left behind as the bereaved ‘moved on’ and ‘faced reality’”.
What was once a shared communal experience with public rituals of mourning and remembrance is now a private ordeal in which we’re alone with our grief and isolated from others. Pain and heartbreak are to be hidden away and preferably not shown out in the open.
The consequence of our distorted and distant relationship to death and grief is that, as Canadian writer, teacher and grief literacy advocate Stephen Jenkinson says, “All of us come to our time to die as an utter amateur. We have almost no experience with it.
It is not human to fear death,” says Jenkinson. “The circle of your love of life exists because it ends.”
Thankfully, not all cultures around the world share our medicalized and detached approach to death and mourning. In Latin America, for example, people’s relationship with death and the dead is very different. Mexico’s vibrant Day of the Dead celebrations may be the most famous, but other countries, like Peru, hold similar ceremonies and festivals that have their origins far back in history, long before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors.
According to the historical reports of the Quechua chronicler, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, the eleventh month in the Incan calendar was known as Ayamarcay Quilla – the month of the dead.
The Incas would take their deceased from their tombs/chullpas and carry them through the streets, make offerings of food and drink, dress them in fine clothes and sing and dance with them. It wasn’t a somber occasion; it was festive and filled with laughter and drink.
These rites and rituals of the month of the dead were carried out with the hopes that one’s deceased loved ones would help make the new agricultural year be fruitful and filled with bounty. After the ancestors were honoured and celebrated, they were returned to their resting places for another year.
The arrival of the Spanish changed many things, but elements of these ancestral practices and beliefs remain alive to this day. Christianity fused with the existing customs and what resulted is a syncretism of Catholic and Indigenous traditions.
Instead of it being a month, it’s now two days: November 1 and 2. In the Andean cosmovision/worldview, death is not the end of one’s existence; it’s only a point of transition and transcendence.
Dia de Todos los Santos (All Saint’s Day), as it’s referred to now, is a time of re-encounter with those who have passed away, but remain alive in our hearts and memories. The belief is that the souls of one’s loved ones return to visit during the first two days of November (“el día de los vivos” and “el día de los muertos”).
Families gather together to cook and share food, visit the cemeteries and remember the ones who have passed on. An altar is usually set up with a photo of the deceased and offerings of flowers, fruit, bread, candles, beer, chicha and coca are left for them – all their favourite things.
The dead are said to still enjoy what they liked when they were alive and still feel hunger and thirst. Therefore, the first and biggest plate of food is to be placed on the altar before anyone else eats. In the cemeteries people come together to clean the graves and niches of their family members, eat food, play music and share prayers and conversations with the dead.
Each community and each family has its own particular way of celebrating these special days of the year but there are always certain common pieces. Sweet bread is usually baked in the form of babies wrapped in a blanket (“T’anta Wawa”) as well as beautifully decorated horses (“Pan Caballo”), lechon (suckling pig) and tamales are prepared and eaten and tribute is paid to the dead.
There’s an acknowledgement and acceptance of the fact that our existence is cyclical and that these rituals can nourish a connection with one’s ancestors and strengthen the feeling of belonging within one’s family.
Todos Los Santos is not a time of fear, but one of happiness and remembrance. There may be tears and moments of sadness but, for many, it’s ultimately a comforting antidote to the western notion of the finality of death.
As Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler wrote in their book On Grief and Grieving, “The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same, nor would you want to.”
As a collective, we shy away from pain and grief and heartbreak, but what if it’s the feeling of those emotions that allows us to also experience the other end of the spectrum: joy, gratitude and love?
We’ve turned death into a caricature that we bring out on occasions like Halloween or turn into a spectacle on the news or in movies and yet we refuse to acknowledge that it’s actually something that we will all come into contact with, sooner or later.
There’s wisdom to be found in the way other parts of the world approach death; maybe it’s time to shift our own perspective on dying in order to fully embrace life.
