Ask yourself the question:have you ever seen a corpse? While most of us have dealt with the death of a relative, friend, loved one — too often for some — the logistical issues surrounding it tend to be relegated to a few specialized professions, headed by funeral services — a profession as unknown as it is enigmatic. Another example:have you ever felt out of place when faced with someone talking about the recent death of a loved one, as if even a limit of propriety had been crossed? Relegation to the margins of society, hardship in the expression of feelings linked to mourning...it seems that our society has to deal with a real complex when it comes to the evocation of death, and behaves towards it like a child covering itself the eyes to make disappear what frightens him. Yet, at the risk of sounding morbid, death is the one certainty we all share — along with taxes, said Benjamin Franklin, though tax evasion is more common than immortality.
This tenacious taboo around death is the logical outcome of what the German sociologist Norbert Elias called the "civilization process". He observed how technical progress and the constitution of a centralized state were accompanied by a pacification of mores:we are today more modest than our medieval ancestors, and much more sensitive to violence. Likewise, this process would have been accompanied by a repression of death. While the latter remained a commonplace occurrence until the end of the Middle Ages, it became increasingly private with modernity — a phenomenon that Elias pointed out in a work with the evocative title, The Solitude of the Dying .
There is something bipolar in this relationship to death:omnipresent through the daily enumeration of dramas in the news, but impersonal and statistical, it is therefore also repressed when it touches on the intimate. It is because with this taboo—and its corollary, that of old age—there emerges the certain finality of our own mortality, the founding existential angst of the very human experience, since it is indeed this which separates us from animal. There is no religion that does not concern itself with death, an equally central subject for philosophers and artists throughout history. The question then arises:if death is so central to our experience on earth, why repress it? Why institutionalize something so personal?
There is nothing wrong with being afraid of death:the unknown has always been a source of anguish, and there is no greater unknown than this. Everyone has their beliefs around the subject, but no one can say with certainty what awaits us after our death. However, it is precisely this anxiety that has led us to repress the subject. Thinking carefully about this certainty over which we have no control has the gift of plunging some of us into deep panic. So we approach it in a light, superficial way. We use euphemisms to evoke it:we "lose" a loved one, this one "is gone". And so on. However, making it a taboo only risks exacerbating these anxieties, plunging us into a vicious circle. At least that is the conclusion drawn by the death positivity movement .
Faced with the observation of this taboo and to answer these questions, voices have been raised for twenty years deploring the banishment of society from this inevitable phenomenon. Coming from diverse backgrounds, this elastic constellation of authors and therapists has observed the harmful effects of this ostracization:if their reasons are therefore varied and it is a scattered movement, its supporters have seen themselves grouped under the name of death positivity movement . They share a simple conclusion:approaching death in a healthier way leads to a better life. The name — which can be roughly translated as "movement for positivity around death" — is not intended to be as morbid as it might sound. It is not a question of exalting death in the manner of the controversial Church of Euthanasia, for example. No mass suicides or mass murders on the agenda, rest assured. Here, it is precisely public events with a good-natured atmosphere that are favoured:artistic performances such as simulations of funeral masses and burials, meditation groups imagining one's own death, blogs and Youtube channels, death dinners, and so on. . At the same time, formations of doulas to accompany in death rather than during birth have appeared.
One of the most visible manifestations of this movement is the emergence of death cafes. You guessed it, these are not gothic gatherings, but meetings during which strangers will discuss over a drink or a slice of cake on the subject of death, discuss their experiences, their anxieties, their desires… There is even a board game called Morbid Curiosity, as well as a plethora of works on the subject, written by its figureheads and therefore acting as a library of the movement. Discussing the theme of death allows you to get out of your solipsism on the subject, to compare your own thoughts with those of others.
If all this is still somewhat confined to the Anglo-Saxon world, the movement seems to be gaining ground in France, with the emergence in the big cities of "mourning cafes". It is interesting to note that the followers as well as the main actors of the movement are relatively young:the author Caitlin Doughty, for example, is in her thirties. It would seem that the younger generation is anxious to avoid what it perceives as an error of its elders vis-à-vis the segregation of death, often in reaction to the loss of loved ones having seemed to them to be badly managed.
Lawyers for the death positivity movement underline that this taboo around death is a very new idea. While around 80% of deaths take place in hospitals and nursing homes, it was still common until the last century to die at home, surrounded by loved ones. Supporters of the movement draw inspiration from foreign or pre-modern cultures to underline the ethnocentric nature of this taboo. In Mexico, the Day of the Dead is distinguished by its particularly festive character, and among the Torajas of Indonesia, the ancestors are downright dug up and paraded, then cleaned, changed and finally reburied. If these rites can be seen by Westerners with a circumspect gaze, it is the taboo that surrounds the subject here that would be shocking in these cultures.
Paradoxically, considering one's own mortality frankly can help to live one's life "better". Many people express regret on their deathbed. Confronting your finiteness rather than hiding it allows you to act, to refocus on what is truly important to you. We've all asked ourselves a similar question:what would I do if I had 24 hours left to live? Like the existentialists, for whom death gives meaning to life, the supporters of the death positivity movement find something liberating in our mortality. Dealing with death comes down to looking negatively at our life, and by freeing ourselves from fear, to living it in a more powerful way.
The movement also insists on the notion of choice. Highly personal, death is an event that must belong to us. This implies on the one hand being able to decide how one dies — the question of euthanasia comes to mind, but others can also choose to pursue aggressive treatments until the end —, but also how his body will be treated or the type of funeral desired. However, to be able to appropriate his death, it is necessary to have been able to approach the subject with his relatives who will be responsible for administering it, which is why a release of dialogue is necessary. It is also not necessary to force this dialogue:the essential thing is to know that it is possible, that we will not fall on deliberately blocked ears when our tongue is loosened. And just as considering his death is liberating for the first concerned, an open and frank discussion with his loved ones allows them not to find themselves alone with regrets.
Moreover, from a more pragmatic point of view, these discussions allow everyone to better navigate the administrative and organizational labyrinth of their own death, and therefore to help prepare their funeral and their legacy, making mourning more easy for the loved ones who survive us.
