Reaching For The Dead

 On Wednesday's post on the anniversary of the death of TB The Elder, Friend-Of-This-Blog Bob made the following observation:

"Dates affect people different ways.  My mother died first, and I remember on the one-year date, it really made no impression on me.  I called my dad, and he was much the same.  He acknowledged yes, it had been one year, but that was about it.  I think we both realized we didn't miss her more on that date than any other."

His comment, as I thought about it (and eventually responded), brought to mind a consideration of the finality of death and how we have come to view it.

Death, at least death viewed by cultures, is a funny thing.  I am no anthropologist, but it occurs to me that most cultures historically had some concept of an afterlife and that in some way or form, the personality we define as a "soul" continued on - be that as an individual or by being recycled.  Another thought that occurs to me was fairly universal is that death was a viewed as a sort of termination of the relationship, at least temporarily.  Communication was largely cut off from the dead except by things like necromancy (communicating with the dead) and special times where the spirit world and physical world of the living became very close, such as Samhain or Obon or even in more modern culture, Dios de Las Muertos. 

But underlying all of this was the sense that however it might be possible to communicate with them, it was some kind of effort.  There was a gulf, a wall, that could not easily be breached (if at all).

Thinking about how we view things in a modern sense, it strikes me we now see such things very differently.

In the modern world (and here I make very vague, generalizations about Western Culture), death is both something shocking and a revelation:  shocking in that for so many, we forget that death can happen literally at any moment (which was much more a perceived reality in times past) and that death creates a wall we cannot pierce. 

For the first part, we have come to accept that modern medicine and modern society keep death at bay in a way that it did not in days of yore.  That is true in the Western world although not so true in the developing world; once upon a time it was true everywhere (go look at an old cemetery and see how many young men and women died early).  For the second part, perhaps this is an outcome of our modern communication technology, where we assume that we can contact anyone at any time.  

And, perhaps, the fact that we - thanks to our entertainment and changing world view - see death as something other than what it really is:  an end, at least on this plane of existance.  

We have become used to people living a long time and being able to talk to them; the fact that this is not so - sometimes in shocking immediacy - seems to catch so many off their guard.  Reading of the death of young or old, too often some version of the words "I never thought this would happen" makes an appearance.

No matter what one may believe about the afterlife, I think it is fair to say that communication - meaningful communication, not "Guided by the memory of " or "What would X do?" - ends with end of life.  Would that we as a society paid attention to this more often.

And would that we, as individuals, sought to treat every communication as potentially the last one.