MAny year ago, as part of the school’s homework project, I asked my grandparents what was the most important social change in their life. Two of them answered “child mortality”. I’m surprised. Didn’t anyone else, more important experiences in long life falls from the first and second world wars in the 1980s?
But now I’m old and experienced loneliness, I understand their answers. Both sisters have sisters who die in Diphtheria. And the younger brother of my grandfather died of sepsis, which means that his parents buried two of their four children before the age of three. Their childhood becomes a deep loss defeat. Child mortality is, at that time, it is terrible, and from their first years many people spend their lives in coping with emotional falls of sadnessto mold their lives in aging.
I spent the past 10 years coming to death history, while training as a childbirth counselor. In my book, there is no ordinary death – a history of mortality to the people we know that many have learned from the past, especially in kindness at the end of life, and those who struggle with emotional distress and loss.
Differences between the present and past even some generations have passed many. Today, most people die in hospitals or nursing houses, but to the 20th century the best of the house. Relatives or close friends are usually washed and preparing the body for funding. The time between death and burial were understood as a dangerous and unstable moment for the spirit, and some communities developed elaborate wake rituals that could involve smoking, drinking, singing, games and “trickster” antics (such as lowering a shrouded body down the chimney, as recorded once in 19th-Century Wales, presumably to distract any passing demons from Stealing Away with the Soul).
Awake can last anything from Hours until the days and even weeks; An issue that scares the 19th century in public public health camps. In fact, such practices are often cited as one of the main reasons why funeral reform is needed, asked that the funeral should be far from city centers and pastures.
Today, death and death, at least in the rich, western societies, mostly administrative and medically determined. Unless we work with health care or emergency services, the view of a dead body is an unusual experience. And we usually point out the time of death.
If there is no immediate access to a doctor, a stethoscope (not invented until 1816) or the technology we have today to assess all types of interpretation. A mirror, a feather lips, the last to the masters, a landing of magpie on the roof, a black dog barking – all kinds of signs and symbols can indicate the end. But until the body begins to slander, which can take several days, the time between the living – but-at-near end and dead is not always accurate. The view for the signs of death and care of dying is a skilled role that the older women often do, comforting family, friends and priests in the bed when they were killed during death.
The moment of death was particularly important as it marked the beginning of the activities to protect the spiritual integrity of the soul, which may include lighting candles (light around the dead, closing or placing coins on the eyes, and bringing aromatic herbs or personal items such as Rosary beads, a favourite toy (for a child), a treasured cup or plate to be tucked in with the body. It is possible that placing such serious things is a pre-Christian practice and can hold many definitions. It may be considered things that are useful in later life; For some communities using the goods belonging to the dead are considered to bring bad luck, their original owner will best bury it if their original owner is right.
We may think of depression and literature of consolatory like Julia Samuel’s bestselling Grief is working or Megan Devine’s is OK you’re not ok As a modern innovation, but for centuries who published the guides guides to die and mourn well, giving a mixture of administrative embrys and ends of loss.
While we can find some more time, for example, Victorian mournful rituals – full of burdensome, small cloths in months recognizing Beravement For most of us is the most profound experience we can gain. Expecting that people should “move from” or “heavy” defeats are the wrong potential to hurt our sense of self. Previously unusual to find “sadness” as a cause of death of death rolls or death certificates. Lives spent in a more close relationship with death recognized the ways in which it can prevent us.
Perhaps paradoxically, our medical approach to the end of life has now resulted in an interest recovery in some old manifestation methods. Death Doulas It seems to have brought the torch to the “deaths of guardians” in the past, recognized that the endings can be supported, care, even happily. Modern “Positive Position” actions, if they feel their friends, family and friends to be taken to wash and take care of their processes and loss and start processing our sadness.
For me, there is more radical message as well. If we learn to participate – without fear – at the idea of our own mortality, accepting the fact that we die can be a free work. We can use this to reassess our relationship with gathering things, or thinking about kinds of personal heritage, if we have, we want to leave. And we may also know to bring the past, take the best and most human elements of death, the death supported and perhaps worse, sadness and mourning are known. Doing this may help us reach a deep relationship with mortality, a kind of modern extraction We are in the middle of death life – In the midst of life we die.
Molly Conisbee is a social historian, researching a colleague of the center of the center for death and society at the University of Bat, and Author of There is no ordinary death
