In broadest terms a person is likely to first encounter death as the 'death of others'. Children hear people say that someone has died; they will no longer be going about their life, but this makes little impact. It is much like a piece of general community information. Similarly, people 'die' on television and in film every day. This, too, is largely devoid of serious impact. Then someone dies in the family; if it is a distant relative the death may be almost like that of the 'death of others' except that, now, a family member to whom one is close shows a degree of emotion over the death. A child, for example, may be aware of its parent being upset at the death of the mother's sister, an aunt relatively distanced from the child. The emotion of grief in another becomes a learning experience. Yet, even that is relatively little preparation for the day when the child, perhaps now already adult and with children of his or her own, suffers the loss of parent, spouse or even of their own child. Loss varies in many ways but there is something about grief that adds a new dimension to a person's life experience.
Many would agree that life before and after grief
is different. Even individuals who spend much of their life working
with bereaved people or with the dead, as with funeral directors or
priests, report how surprised they were when they were, themselves,
bereaved. Such loss cannot be anticipated; no 'training' or
'preparation' is possible. Yet, even this kind of experience may be
differentiated from what I have loosely called 'personal death
awareness', a term describing that moment or period when an
individual gains some degree of insight into the fact that they,
too, will die. This kind of intimation of mortality exists as a
spectrum, from a relatively light sense that what has just befallen
someone one loves will, too, happen to oneself, through to the
knowledge that one has a terminal disease and faces death soon. For
some people the sense of 'personal death awareness' may come with
age, especially old age, and is not perceived as some terrible
problem. For others, often in middle age, it emerges in the mind as
a novel sense of personal awareness unlike anything experienced
before, and may or may not be disturbing.
If Gilgamesh takes us to the earliest days of written accounts of human grief, the mummies of Chile take us even further back in their ritual treatment of the dead. From approximately 5000 BC the coastal Chinchorro people of what we now call Chile not only mummified their dead but also kept them for a period amidst the living. Possessing no written language, it is impossible to know what these practices meant, yet, two thousand years before the Egyptians began to mummify their dead, these early fisher communities along the Pacific Ocean did appear to have mummified all members of their society. Whatever sense of parting there may have been, the living retained the bodies of the dead, including infants below one year of age, giving them stylized masks as face coverings. And this in communities where, once the first year of high mortality rate is ignored, the average life expectancy was about 24, with most living between 15 and 30 years of age, but with some exceeding 40 years. In what were relatively small communities of what we would now consider young people it seems as though the group was extended by the inclusion of the dead.
Relationships, Death and Destiny
It is through human relationships that we come to a sense of our identity and through their loss that we come to know grief. In traditional terms, it has also been through membership in religious groups possessing some relationship with deity that people have gained a sense of salvation or have feared damnation if that bond breaks. Control of the afterlife has typified many religious cultures and empowered its gatekeepers. Those who held a true faith and practised it according to prescribed forms would obtain benefits in life after death. In the early centuries of Christianity, when doctrine was being established, creeds came to be particularly important as formulations of accurate belief and as means of identifying group members. The creed of fourth-century St Athanasius, important for Catholic and some Protestant churches, begins thus in the version in Anglicanism's Book of Common Prayer:
'Whosoever will be saved: before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic Faith. Which Faith except every one do
not keep whole and undefiled: without doubt he shall perish everlastingly'
This very strong language proclaims an 'anathema', a formal declaration on the state of persons who do not believe certain doctrinal statements expressing ultimate religious truth. This state of suspension or curse may even pass into formal exclusion through the ritual of excommunication conducted, traditionally, by a bishop with twelve priests, all with candles thrown to the ground when the excommunication was enacted. The rise of strong rituals associated with the sacraments of the Catholic
Church involved a correspondingly high degree of control by priests of their people. Confession and absolution lay at the heart of religious discipline and of obedience to the authority of the church. The justification for this stance, derived from the words of Jesus spoken to his disciple Peter, became a charter for Peter's successors: it proclaimed, 'I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven' (Matthew 16: 19). Error in doctrine and practice could even be sought out as, for example, in the witchcraft hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when those who were reckoned to have made a pact with the devil were tried and many killed. Their death would, doubtless, benefit them in the ultimate salvation of their souls. In this sense the history of death in that period of European history cannot be divorced from the history of church power and its use of the idea of true doctrine as a control over people's earthly and heavenly destiny. This is very clear in the Catholic practice of the last rights.
