I got curious after my post yesterday and decided to look at the usage of some of these phrases and terms over time. Here are some Ngrams:
"Celebration of life" does indeed seem to be a neologism, showing up just before 1960 and increasing fairly dramatically in use just before 2000. There doesn't seem to be any noticeable decline in the use of "funeral." "Celebration of life" does, however, seem to be correlated with the rise of "positive thinking."
My best friend from childhood killed himself this summer. We hadn't kept in touch really, but we would occasionally run into each other when I visited my parents in my hometown over the years. Regardless, his shadow casts very, very large over my formative years.
As seems to be a growing practice, his church held a "celebration of life" service for him. Not a "funeral," but a "celebration of life." When my mother told me this, I briefly remarked that I suspected that it was just a euphemism, but she disagreed, arguing that it was a categorically different event. I worry that this trend is part of (or at least parallel with) the positive thinking movement. (For an excellent takedown, see Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided.) I worry, too, that this is part of the death negative movement that has increasingly dominated American culture for generations. (For solid death-positive work, see Caitlin Doughty's Ask a Mortician). Funerals, wakes, and other traditional mourning rituals serve social and psychological functions. They make us happier in the long term but only by allowing us collectively to be sad in the immediate term. Celebrate the lives of the living; mourn the deaths of the departed.
When I die, I give you permission to mourn, to be sad, even depressed. The pain of loss is not something that can be wished away by focusing on the "good times." Our brains need time to process loss. It is time that shouldn't be avoided by taking a pill or thinking happy thoughts. We are radically social animals, and the ultimate rupturing of a social relationship is the permanence of death. This is why I hope that you will weep when I pass, that you will rent garments, as some translations of the Bible put it. I hope these things because they will help you ultimately to move past my death in a way that no celebration of my life could.
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Just to be clear, I am neither depressed nor suicidal. I'm doing quite well mentally and emotionally.
If you are struggling, know that my world is better with you alive in it. Call (1-800-273-8255) or chat online with the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. You are loved.
All of a sudden, I've heard a lot about this new "video game," That Dragon, Cancer. Here is the most recent episode of Radiolab:
Here is the most recent video from Feminist Frequency:
I'm struck both by the product and by the coverage, and I wanted to get a few thoughts down about it. True to this blogs title, I'm doing this on the fly, more than less as stream of consciousness.
First, I put "video game" in quotes above because this seems to be more of an interactive art piece than a traditional video game proper. As I think the Radiolab episode makes clear, it's more about catharsis for the father/developer than it is about gameplay. I'm intrigued by what seems to be a maturing of the technology.
Second, I have to admit that I was very surprised at the overt religiosity that seemed central to--and quite out of character for--the Radiolab coverage, and I'm not sure how to square that. The parents featured in the episode are Evangelical Protestants, and (spoiler) there is a recorded scene in the podcast of a prayer gathering that fell on what ended up being the night that the couple's son died. Abumrad and Krulwich simply report it uncritically. If I had to guess, I'd imagine they are likely to receive a lot of negative feedback from their regular listeners. To be clear, I was not so much put off by this as I found it odd.
Third, I find it interesting that a man who is part of the Evangelical tradition, one that in many ways is anti-institutional, would use a cathedral, the symbol of institutionalized religion, at the climax of the video game. Does this hint at some unrecognized and unmet need for institutional religion in times of personal tragedy? I was also reminded of my previous treatment of the changing imagination about the afterlife.
Finally, as a new parent (I have an 18-month-old daughter), I wept several times listening to and viewing the clips above, whereas, a year and a half ago, I would have been moved but not likely to tears. I think it's dangerous to argue that "you can't understand until you experience it," but parenthood has seemed to affect me in some pretty profound ways. I was also touched because friends of mine from high school lost a son a few years ago under remarkably similar circumstances to those that inspired the video game. I'm curious whether the game will bring comfort to people like them.
I learned something interesting a few weeks ago. I was heading back into town on my daily bike ride when I was approaching one of the several funeral homes we have here. A police office had her squad car blocking one lane of traffic while she stood in the other, directing a procession into the street. I, in the midst of a workout and not wanting to leave my target heart rate zone, was readying to pass the squad car when the police office stopped me. I immediately asked her if that was legal. As I have written about before, I worked for a summer in a cemetery in my hometown of Saint Joseph, Michigan, and learned that, while never enforced, it was technically illegal for cars to stop for a passing funeral procession. She informed me that in Baldwin County, Georgia, it is in fact punishable with a $150 fine! She also felt the need to add that since Baldwin Co. was such a "small, close-knit community," it was that much more important. (We were counted at about 44,000 people in the most recent Census.) We exchanged pleasantries, she thanking me for complying, and I thanking her for the information, and I waited for the procession to pass. (I got stopped again by the same procession a few blocks later as it meandered its way through town.)
It occurred to me that these are some pretty big differences in cultural practice. Laws are symbolic and tell us a lot about the values of a given people. How to account for these differences? Is it urban/rural? Midwest/South? contemporary/traditional?
It reminded me of this analysis of tweets about beer vs. tweets about church. People in the Northeast and Midwest love their beer. People in the Southeast (i.e. Southern Baptists) and in Salt Lake City (i.e. Mormons) love their church.
Jay Livingston has a post over at the Montclair SocioBlog in which he questions the whole hero-making practice in the wake of some Memorial Day wingnut mudslinging. The religio-political response to bloodshed is nothing new; in fact, it's as old as humanity itself. People die, and death makes us anxious. In order to deal with that anxiety, we must make sense of death, that is, we must give death meaning. Being social animals who are constantly surrounded by others, we are especially anxious about intentional death (e.g. homicide or war). When our soldiers die, we feel compelled to situate their deaths within a larger narrative about our collective identity, to fit it into our cosmology. To do otherwise would be to admit that life--and, hence, death--is arbitrary, random, and absurd. That is why all war dead (on our side, anyway) become de facto heroes. If they don't, then we must encounter the meaninglessness of death, life, and existence. Hero-making is always a retrospective practice by which we ritualistically confirm our group status by affirming our shared beliefs. To question the hero-making practice is thus a threat to the existence of our very society and the worldview that supports it. We shouldn't be surprised by the severity of the responses when we question such things--which isn't to say that we shouldn't do it, just that illumination comes with individual struggling and shared conflict. For an excellent summary of this topic, do yourself a favor and read Barbara Ehrenreich's Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War.
Last week, we lost an alumna of our department to a tragic accident.
She was fatally shot in a corrections-officer training exercise.
Reportedly, the trainer had swapped out a blank-filled training weapon
during a break for his standard firearm and neglected to swap them back
before returning to the classroom. Mourning is a complicated process in
itself, but when people die untimely or preventable deaths, the mourning
that those who knew them must endure is further complicated. Case in
point, I was struck by the angry sentiment of those who knew this woman
well. Instead of primarily expressing sadness over loss, several folks
expressed rage at the trainer. Certainly, this man's actions were
negligent and are deserving of professional sanctions (and arguably even
civil restitution), but he did not intend to kill anyone, and that makes all the difference. My first two emotions on hearing of this accident, and in this order, were sadness for the victim and sympathy for the man who will have to live the rest of his life knowing that he was responsible for prematurely ending that young woman's life.
