Maybe I’m just being cranky, but lately, something about Death has been bothering me. Is it just me? Is it just my self-absorbed myopia? Or is Death practically invisible in modern America?
How many Americans will die today?
Every year on average 40,000 Americans die ‘from’ cars. In fact, the cars are innocent, falsely accused of homicide. At most, a car can be charged with being an accessory to murder. It is the people driving the cars who do the killing. Some of the people drivers kill are walking or bicycling or standing at a bus stop scanning ads for menial low wage jobs on their iPhone when—WHAM!—someone drives a car into them.
And when we add in the many non-vehicular ways to die in this nation of 300 million-plus souls—from cancer to suicide-by-cop, from domestic violence to slipping in the bathtub—thousands more will join the 109 of us who will become road kill today.
So, where is all this dying being done?
Once in a while I see an ambulance with siren blaring working to pass drivers who are so intent on killing people with their cars that they do not pull over to allow the ambulance to pass. And I think about the person inside that ambulance. But I cannot know if that person is on the way to the morgue, or the maternity ward.
Some experts say the reason for Death being invisible in America is that we all moved from the farm, where Death was a daily event and the axis the cycle of life spun around—into the city, where we no longer raise and kill our own food, or witness Uncle Zeke fall into a mechanical thresher and get chopped into mincemeat.
Other experts say the reason for Death being invisible in America is that fewer Americans are dying. They’re not saying Death is now optional, they’re just saying that Americans who once routinely died from infections or influenza, from viruses or vitamin deficiencies, now, given the advances in medical knowledge and technology, recover and live.
While all the experts on Death are probably right to varying degree, I feel compelled to add my own more difficult to quantify, two-part explanation for Death being invisible in America.
Part One: Americans snub Death.
Most Americans go through Life without being near someone who is actively dying. (With the exception of the people they walk past, clustered outside of buildings and bars, smoking cigarettes.)
Rather than do their dying at home—the silent majority of Americans now do their dying in hospitals and nursing homes, often in rooms shared with strangers, behind curtains, with plastic tubes placed in their arms, mouths, and up their noses, and under the empty-eyed watch of security cameras, digital heart monitors, and a few people who don’t know them from Adam or Eve but earn their living working 12-hour shifts watching strangers die.
Americans snub Death using the same containment strategy they use to snub mental illness or disability or deviation from the norm: Put all the ‘afflicted’ in one place, out of the way, and make sure they stay there.
Why do we isolate the dying? Are we afraid that if the young and healthy and whole were to see—and worse—have relationships with—people who are in a state of fatal disintegration—this intimacy with Death might give them pause? Are we afraid that if young people are bedside as a parent, friend or loved one died, they would learn how the dying never exclaim, “I wish I had acquired more debt and spent more time in the office!” But rather, how heartbreakingly often the dying confess in a whisper, “I wish I had the courage to have lived my life true to myself, and not a life others expected of me.”
Might these hale and hearty young people then be inspired to decline to work 60-hour weeks, 50 out of 52 weeks for 40 years to pay off the $80,000 of debt they took on just to get a basic college education? Might they decline to borrow a year’s salary to buy a grossly uneconomical but luxurious SUV? Or, worse, would they decline to sign the ballooning mortgage that would rent the McMansion just long enough for their hard work to fill it with stuff they never had the time or energy to use?
I wonder, if more of us encountered Death more frequently, more naturalistically, would we choose to pay better attention to each day, and to spend more time with our children, friends and family, and less time with employers and money lenders? Might we purchase a used clarinet and start taking lessons?
Corralling of the dying into a few off-stage ghettos is Part One of the magic act of making Death invisible in America.
Here’s Part Two:
At the same time we Americans exert a staggering amount of psychic energy and money to repress and deny real Death—we also expend a staggering amount of psychic energy and money to revel in fake death.
Watch American movies or television; listen to American music; look at American art; read or listen to American storytelling, from Corporation Hollywood to the unproofread self-published Kindle books obsessively detailing the gruesome adventures of horny teenage vampires. Do that, and you will see that Americans are obsessed with Death as a violent, random, meaningless, grotesque, artificial and fictitious absurdity. Often Death is presented as a punishment or penalty, and almost never as the defining event of a Life.
While we Americans fear real Death, and studiously keep it out of our mind and sight— we are fascinated by fake Death. So long as it’s done at a distance, done to someone else, and done with special effects. It is ‘normal’ for Americans to routinely consume thousands of fictitious stories of violent, meaningless Death. It is normal for Death to be delivered by vampires, zombies, racially profiled generic terrorists, and hysterical infectious diseases transported on jet planes in carry-on luggage and bringing doomsday down in 72 hours. Gee whiz, it’s enough to make the average hormonally in-flux college freshman reach for his mom’s AK-47, stuff a bomb in his backpack, and head off to his Psychology 101 class.
I wonder, does our preference for ignoring and fearing real Death, and glorifying outrageously phony Death, play some role in how easily we Americans make war— initiating the use of force to kill people we don’t know?
I wonder, has our denial of real Death and our delight in fake Death made it easy for us to make believe Death is nothing more than a grainy image captured by robotic cameras strapped to ‘smart’ bombs fired by drone aircraft? Death as video game?
And I wonder if this language of smart bombs and dumb bombs, drones and improvised explosive devices is a verbal expression of how we have substituted fake Death for the real thing. As if it is the ‘smart’ bombs and pilotless drones that select who gets killed, we don’t. Once upon a time, unintended murder was graphically named: manslaughter. The phrase now in vogue, collateral damage, could describe stubbing one’s toe, or default on a loan.
Since September 11, 2001 we have been telling ourselves that we live in a time of new, asymmetrical war and of unidentified threats from all directions. Already we have forgotten that living this way has been our choice.
I wonder what would happen on this planet if Americans were to unilaterally disarm themselves to Death. What would change in our world if we first recognized and then rejected, fictitious, fake, absurdist Death? Would nothing change? Or everything?
If we make peace with Death, would it then be easy and natural to make peace with ourselves and everyone else?
(Read Death to America! Part One)





