The new taboo
When we were living in the UK, it was always a delight to meander up the narrow country roads of the Hambleden Valley in the Chilterns, and to stop for a pub lunch at the Frog in Skirmett, or the Bull and Butcher in Turville. But our favourite spot was Hambleden itself, and not just because they did a nice pint of Brakspear Bitter at the Stag and Huntsman.
It was the village church; and if you ever get to Hambleden yourself, you shouldn’t miss it. One of the side chapels has a large marble memorial dating back to the early 17th Century, with a sort of tableau of a Jacobean family; the bearded lord of the manor, Sir Cope D’Oyley, resplendent in his finery, kneels and faces his lady in her Sunday best. Around him are their male children, and the girls surround their mother, all kneeling like their parents: ten children in all. Four of these smaller figures are holding skulls, signifying that they died young.
I was fascinated by the marble family; and two things struck me in particular. First of all, there was the fact that four out of ten children had died young - and this in a wealthy family who were presumably able to afford plenty of food and the best (admittedly inadequate at the time) medical care. What would it have been like for the poverty-stricken and the plague-ridden in the village? Child mortality would have been off the scale.
The other thing that intrigued me was the skulls themselves. There is a sort of innocent, uncomplicated acceptance of death; almost as if the sculptor and the commissioning family wanted to make it very clear that these children had died, that this was normal, and that their deaths were to be acknowledged, not kept hush-hush. The skulls are “in your face”, as we say these days.
I was 21 when I saw my first dead body. He was a fellow student in Launceston, Tasmania, and he and two friends had decided to take on the challenge of white-water rafting the Launceston Gorge in full flood. It went horribly wrong, and Trevor was thrown off the raft and smashed into a rock. It was twenty-four hours before the fire brigade could retrieve his body, which had become wedged into a space within the outcrop that had killed him. Some of his friends, including me, were asked to go and help. A rocket bearing a thin rope was fired across the gorge, and then used to haul a much heavier rope to the other side. A fireman abseiled down to the rock, hovered above the still boiling river, and attached Trevor’s body to another line; we then helped draw our friend ashore, hanging stiff and lifeless in the air. For me, it was a moment of horror.
Had I been one of Cope D’Oyley’s sons in 1610, I would have grown up with death; I certainly wouldn’t have waited 21 years to see my first dead body. By the age of 20, I would have probably seen dozens, if not hundreds of them. I might have been one of them myself.
Medical science has changed all that, which is something to be enormously grateful for. But there are two unfortunate byproducts of our stunning breakthroughs in healthcare. The first one is that we end up with a sense of entitlement: we think we deserve to live until at least the age of eighty, and if we don’t, we must have been been cheated, and life is unfair. This is of course nonsense; no one is entitled to anything. It is only in the past century or less, and only in certain parts of the world that life expectancy has risen to such a high point. We just got lucky.
The second byproduct of medical progress is the one I want to focus on: in wealthy countries, so few children die and so many older folk live well beyond their eighties that we have grown unfamiliar with death. And we have become uncomfortable speaking about it. We try to shield ourselves from its harshness and its horror; undertakers arrive swiftly and whisk the body away to a funeral parlour, and the mourners only see a beautifully varnished closed casket, heaped with flowers. At the graveside, neat green artificial turf covers any exposed dirt, with not a shovel in sight.
Of course I am mainly talking about Anglo-Saxon culture here: others do it so much better. If I went to a tangi (funeral, for you non-Kiwis) at the Māori marae a mile from here, I would find an open coffin, with friends and relatives gathered to mourn together for three days, often speaking to the dead person with words of praise or reproach. For the tangata whenua, death is healthily accepted as a part of life, not something to be hidden away.
In Toulouse I was asked to do the funeral for a young man from Cameroun. Here I saw something I’d never seen before: a coffin with a window! It was a porthole at the level of his head, so although the lid was screwed down, his face was visible to all. But it was what followed the funeral that made even more of an impression on me: they invited me to a sort of wake afterwards in a large hall which was packed to capacity with the Camerounian community in Toulouse. Person after person stood to pay tribute to the young man: some sang; others performed readings; when I left at midnight, it was still in full swing, and I heard later that it had carried on until the morning. It was strangely wonderful.
Not so in European New Zealand, and other parts of the Western world. Here, death has become the new taboo.
Now "death as taboo" is by no means an original thought - but it’s interesting to go into it a bit more. “Taboo” was brought into English by Captain Cook after his experiences in Tonga and New Zealand. In both Tongan and Māori, these days it is spelt tapu, and refers to what is sacred, or holy. Māori believe everything in existence has an intrinsic tapu, which is derived from its link to the gods. Things have different levels of tapu; life itself is tapu, particularly human life, and the life of a priest or tohunga is endowed with so much tapu that he may not eat or drink from the same vessels as a commoner.
The thing to notice here is the difference between tapu, which might be translated as “sacred” and the English word “taboo” which in common usage now means “things you are not allowed to talk about”. That’s actually a significant divergence, which becomes important when we are thinking about death. When a death occurs in Māori culture, the laws of tapu do indeed apply very strongly - but this does not mean, as in the English use of the word, that it must remain forbidden and unspoken as much as possible, and surrounded with euphemism. On the contrary, the tapu of death means that it is treated with great thoroughness and acknowledged as a present reality. As I mentioned earlier, a three-day tangi allows for much more expression of emotion than a one-hour funeral, and seems like a thoroughly healthy way of dealing with life’s end.
Conversely, in societies where death is “taboo”, forbidden to speak of, there are obvious unhealthy consequences. Our endless denial of death, refusal to acknowledge ageing, frantic pursuit of the elixir of life through fad diets and the cult of the gym, facelifts, Botox, these are paraphernalia of a culture in full flight from the reality of death, living in permanent and unspoken fear.
When Becky died in 2003, we were devastated; but as we thought about how to cope with her death and funeral, we decided to try and imitate the other cultures we'd seen. We had the undertaker bring her body back to her bed, and she stayed with us for three days. During that time about 150 people came to our home to help us grieve and to reach out to us in our deep sorrow. It was agonising, but also a strangely wonderful time: the togetherness, and the emotional warmth that came from the presence of friends, and the frank acknowledgement of the disaster that had happened, helped us all to get through those terrible days.
I imagine that for many of our guests, it would have required a good deal of courage to walk into a home where there was a dead teenager, and a grieving family. But I believe that for many, if not all of them, it was a moving experience to join us in this acknowledgement of our loss, and to share intimately in this time before the funeral. People would sit quietly in her room with her, and I can remember the day her school companions came from Papatoetoe High School, and I was choked up with emotion to see them gathered around their friend, now a lifeless figure on the bed. For them too it was an unforgettable experience. Death had broken free of its taboo status for them, and they were able to allow it to enter fully into their consciousness. We weren't trying to hide anything.
It is strange now to be anticipating my own death, but at the moment I feel emotionally removed from it. I'm actually very surprised by my own reactions here: in the ten months before Becky died, there was a dark and heavy cloud of dread over me. Dread is an awful emotion to deal with, and it took a long time to go away. At the moment, what I feel is nothing like that. I feel a sort of luminosity and joy, which may well be drug-fuelled (good old Dex!) or it may come from something deeper: the pleasure of relating to so many among my friends and family on a level that goes well beyond the weather and the All Blacks. This plateau is a gift, and for as long as it lasts I want to make the most of it.
When, inevitably, I start to slide off the plateau, I will have to face up to some harsh reality. I don't know how that will be for me. Three years ago, I was facing a second major operation in three months. I was in a drastically weakened state physically, I had already lost one kidney, and the odds of retaining my second one stood at 1/100. The lights in my life started fading; the tide went out, and for several weeks I was in a dark and depressive state. The only options seemed to be death or dialysis (as well as the inevitable return of the sarcoma) and I didn't want either of them. There is no guarantee that I won't slip back into the same state of darkness. All I can say is: I hope not. I hope that, along with the inevitable grief, fear and sadness, there will be a lot of reality, very few euphemisms, no taboos, and plenty of good healthy black humour.
For sheer style, it’s hard to beat John Le Mesurier, the much-loved actor who played Sergeant Wilson in “Dad’s Army”. When he died in 1983, this “self-penned” announcement appeared in the Times:
JOHN LE MESURIER wishes it to be known that he conked out on November 15th. He sadly misses family and friends.
That’s the spirit. I’m going to conk out one day (and so are you). Keep me at home, come and see me, make sure there are plenty of laughs at my funeral, play "Always look on the bright side of life" as you carry me out, and afterwards, have a first-class wake. And if you ever get to Hambleden, you can drink up large in my memory with a pint of Brakspere.
Cheers.
