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FEW people like to contemplate their own death, but knowledge of its inevitability has some surprising upsides. According to a school of thought called terror management theory, the desire to transcend death is the driving force of human civilisation. The “worm at the core of life” inspires people to create symphonies, build cathedrals, nurture their children and seek knowledge.
But if awareness of death is such a force for progress, we are not very good at harnessing it. In the West, we distance ourselves from death at every opportunity. Dying is medicalised and the aftermath stage-managed and sanitised (see “This mortician wants to fix our broken relationship with death“).
The funeral industry must take much of the blame for this. It could change its ways. Natural burials – which eschew embalming, expensive coffins and so on – are on the increase. There is also a growing movement to amalgamate burial plots into conservation areas, in which your own personal resting place is built into something bigger, lasting and environmentally beneficial (see “Why burying loved ones in unmarked graves could save wildlife“). Such burials promise to both demystify death and provide the lasting legacy that we so desire in life. Worms and all.
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This article appeared in print under the headline “Get closer to death”
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