Still Life
Growing up With Death
A Visual Memoir
(a) Is death taboo? If so, in what sense? (b) if it is not taboo, then why the frequent announcements that it is?
It is this second question that scholars have not previously attempted to incorporate into their theory.
Six possible modifications/critiques are offered in an attempt to resolve the difficulties:
(1) that there was a taboo, but it is now disintegrating;
(2) that death is hidden rather than forbidden;
(3) that the taboo is primarily limited to the (influential) occupational groups of the media and medicine;
(4) that the loss of a coherent language for discussing death leads to conversational unease;
(5) that all societies must both accept and deny death, so pundits can pick whatever examples fit their thesis; and
(6) that it is the modern individual, not modern society, that denies death.
Death. This was another topic that was off limits.
This was another example of how different I was from my friends. Besides the fact that my mother died and I was the only one out of my many friends that had this tragedy occur; no one wanted to talk about death. We were teens; we talked about sex and music, school, death was a foreign language.
I could not discuss death. It was a subject no one understood, and it was too frightening just to bring up.
Death was all scary and creepy and Halloween-like.
For me, death was typical.
I grew up with death.
While death was so normal for me; it was just as unusual for my friends. Most had not had a significant death in their life.
Death didn't scare me because my mother was already there (someplace) it was just this great mystery that I wanted to or rather needed to discuss.
I wanted to sink into death like a warm bath, and I wanted to have deep, long-lasting conversations about it. Death was a place. Death was my mother. No one wanted to listen.
Ariès, P. 1962. Centuries of Childhood. London: Cape.Ariès, P. 1974. Western Attitudes Toward Death: from the middle ages to the present. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
