Remember Me

Constructing Immortality - Beliefs on Immortality, Life, and Death

Margaret Mitchell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415954846
• eBook ISBN: 9781136920851
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Remember Me brings together contributors from around the world with unique insight on the ways in which one's relationship with loved ones continues, endures, and perhaps even grows after death.

Much of the available literature speaks of healthy bereavement as letting go of the deceased and moving forward with life. This new text challenges that notion, discussing the meaning attributed to death and to the anticipation of death.

The living, as presented in these innovative chapters, construct social entities of those who have died, via the carrying out of wishes in the Will; pursuing legal claims; or simply attributing certain desires, emotions, or choices to the deceased reconstitutes them as active, even vital, voices even after biological death. Just as life itself, the end of life and death is an interdisciplinary matter. A clear psychological theme and focus ties together these perspectives under three conceptual areas: the anticipation of death; the social life of the deceased and the legal embodiment of the deceased.

CHAPTER 1
Constructing Immortality

The Role of the Dead in Everyday Life

MARGARET MITCHELL

Human beings are resourceful and every culture has attractive ways of imagining a world in which the dead are really still alive.

(Merridale, 2000, p. 441)

Death is an interdisciplinary matter. This chapter and the volume Remember Me: Constructing Immortality—Beliefs on Immortality, Life, and Death present a very wide range of perspectives on the ways we interact with the dead in social, emotional, and practical ways. It is intended to give a broad base and add some flesh to the bones of our constructions of immortality. Its purpose is to go beyond remembering and memorializing the dead to present ways in which the dead play a lively part in our lives. But our relationship with the deceased is obviously changed (I don’t need to explain why!). We may take as a metaphor Robert Wyatt’s proposition, in his discussion in this volume of painting the “posthumous self,” that those we keep with us after their death become “larger than life” through our attributions and activities. In a collection of essays on death and dying, Arnold Joseph Toynbee proposed a “capital fact” about the relation between living and dying: “There are two parties to the suffering that death inflicts; and, in the apportionment of this suffering, the survivor takes the brunt” (1968, p. 271). The way that the suffering referred to by Toynbee is manifested, as we will see, takes many forms. Rather than considering grief and suffering per se, however, the focus of this collection is on the creative ways that people—possibly in the face of personal suffering—continue the dead as “alive.” In this chapter I discuss the private connection that bereaved individuals have with the dead, from public activism or pursuit of a cause to memorializing, and the ways people carry on physically in images and other ways such as biography.

I had difficulty at the outset of this work explaining to people that I was not talking about the afterlife, reincarnation, ghosts, or similar beliefs. Rather, my approach to “life after death” is secular and pragmatic. To me, reincarnation and an afterlife are not necessary to make things interesting. It is sufficiently interesting that we attribute feelings, desires, and emotions to the deceased, that we continue dialogues with them, that the material possessions they leave behind become imbued with potent meaning, and that we carry on public fights and pursue causes on their behalf. That the living continue to pay heed to the dead has many manifestations in our daily lives, and many functions. We might say that the “vitality” of the dead is a very real part of our lives.

Some time ago I was at a small conference on the theme of death at Glasgow University. As Monique Kornell gave her exquisite presentation on anatomical illustration and described the sixteenth-century convention of depicting the corpse as alive and told how “in this way the dead were allowed a form of eternal life,” I thought it would be interesting to look at the various forms of everyday “life after death.” The First chapter that I sought for this collection, from Kornell, was a literal rendition of the way that a person can continue, one way or another and in practical ways, long after his or her death. In the present volume, Kornell discusses the idea that a “second life” was given to cadavers through their use as models for anatomical illustration. In some cases these were “real,” known people whose natural lifespan was greatly enhanced by their continued use by medical students and artists studying anatomy.

As I started thinking about it, many examples came to mind where the dead appear in life. An obvious example can start the discussion. A will is an instrument that a person prepares, knowing that it will be read and acted upon after they are dead. But a will is not an inert “legal instrument”: the writer of the will intends to reach forward, to affect people in positive (or possibly negative) ways, and to influence their emotions. Carrying out the deceased’s wishes as expressed in a will reconstitutes him or her as an active, even vital, social and political voice after biological death. In some cases the will’s impact is considerable, the deceased person living on through families arguing and negotiating over inheritance, and over small and apparently insignificant items that belonged to their mother or father. Other aspects of death are also “built into” our lives, such as life insurance, death benefits, and the funeral industry. But this chapter and the collection is concerned not only with the ways death and the dead are structured into our lives, but also with our complex attributions, meanings, and explanations about the ways the dead continue to affect us.

Contemporary texts on death and bereavement, particularly since the publication of Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief (Klass, Silverman, & Nickman, 1996), have discussed the many private ways a social relationship with close persons can continue and endure long after their death. Klass, Silverman, and Nickman questioned the idea that the “purpose of grief is to sever the bonds with the deceased in order to free the survivor to make new attachments.” (p. 3) They also questioned the implied model of grief and bereavement—that is, that severing bonds and disengagement is healtaey. The ideas presented in Continuing Bonds remain as lively and as relevant as they were a decade ago. Howarth (2000) further develops these ideas, describing the boundaries as “blurred” and breaking down between life and death. Howarth describes the many ways that the boundary between life and death can be breached, such as talking about the dead, the role of anniversaries, constructing future biographies for the dead, pilgrimage, and talking “with” the dead. Placing these ideas in a sociological context, she argues that ideas of “the continuing relationships between bereaved people and their deceased relatives and friends are not new but have been marginalized by the discourses and practices of modernity” (2000, p. 128). In the same article, she argues that the bereaved incorporate the dead person into their sense of self, and that the precise way that they do this varies according to class, gender, ethnicity, and age. The specific way that they are incorporated will also be influenced by the manner of death and characteristics of the relationship during life.

The psychological literature on coping with bereavement provides evidence that talking with the deceased, keeping objects that belonged to them, and frequent dreaming about them as alive are very common and can be sources of great comfort. Bennett and Bennett (2000) have studied what widows do to keep the dead person close, including using their deceased husbands’ possessions and photographs of them to maintain contact and communication. Their study participants also reported the frequent experience of the deceased person being present. As Bennett and Bennett argue, the dominant scientific view is that these experiences are symptoms of “broken hearts and minds in chaos or … of looking for the deceased that characterizes the early stages of grief.” But communication with the dead is common and underpins the idea that social interaction does not cease just because the person is not here. Indeed, it is not all that strange to have a conversation with someone who is not with us: witness the many muttered, admittedly one-sided, imaginary conversations we have with loved ones or adversaries who are alive and kicking but not with us.

In the same vein, spiritualist communication with the dead—or at least attempts to communicate—characterized the mass bereavement occasioned by the First World War. This led to the bereaved using any methods they felt were available to them to try to continue a dialogue with sons, nephews, husbands, and lovers killed on the Western Front. Winter (1995) explains the rise in spiritualism as a reaction to the failure of the established church to assist in such large-scale bereavement. Joanna Bourke’s essay on spiritualism in this volume underlines the active participation of the dead in the psychological, emotional, and social lives of the living, particularly in response to such widespread and inexplicable loss. The title of her chapter on spiritualist communication comes from a booklet published in 1920, part of her meticulous study of original sources and extraordinary contemporaneous publications. Not all use of spiritualists and attempts to contact the dead can be relegated to the distant past. Justine Picardie’s account of her attempts to communicate with her sister following her sister’s death at age 33 is subtitled “Life and love after death.” Published in 2001, it provides both a funny and a deeply moving account of her use of spiritualists. Of particular importance to her was her desire to hear her sister’s voice—again a common and long-lasting desire among the bereaved.

Research on continuing bonds is helpful in clinical and counseling settings. That there is a blurred boundary is not only an interesting thing to know but also is useful to understand because it may inform medical, legal, and other professional (and indeed lay) approaches to people at the end of their life, the bereaved, and their families. Understanding the pervasive nature of the dead in our lives can help to explain behavior that, to outside observers and some professionals, can be difficult to explain. Despite acknowledgment of the work by Klass et al. (1996), Howarth (2000, 2006), Bennett & Bennett (2000) and others, Kübler-Ross’s work (1969) has cast a long shadow on our understanding of death and grief. Three remains an implicit assumption of “phases” and working toward a resolution of “letting go.” Indeed, respondents in studies of bereaved persons (for example, Johnson, 2005, and in this volume) speak of friends’ and relatives’ expectations of an acceptable time for grieving, after which the person should be “over it.” In Johnson’s study, bereavement was the result of intrafamilial homicide, which is arguably a highly complex form of bereavement that is not simple to get over, yet the expectation of resolution within a time period persisted.

In some cases, the extremity of the circumstances of the death and the feelings of helplessness about it must be channeled into something positive.

In the following example we can see that the dead person, in this case the victim of a murder, has fundamentally affected the lives of the living. Ultimately the survivor attempts to achieve something good or positive from the death, in this case feelings of forgiveness for the perpetrator.

In 1994 in the United Kingdom, Frederick and Rosemary West were arrested for the rape and murder of at least nine young women, including their own daughter. The Women were tortured, raped, and murdered, and their dismembered remains buried in the garden of the Wests’ home at 25 Cromwell Road, Gloucester (demolished in 1996). One of those women was 28-year-old Lucy Partington, who had been missing since 1973, her remains having been indentified in 1994. Her sister, Marian Partington, described the intense public exposure of her deceased sister and her family, and her pain at the negative characterization of her sister in the media. The tone of her writing is deeply distressed and angry, much of it directed at the media:

In retrospect, it is hard to know how much of my internal feelings were scape-goated onto the media. But the intense media activity certainly contributed to the shock and sense of outrage. Three was also a sickening feeling that this was going to be a long haul. Inadvertently, inexorably we were in the midst of a high profile case which had been seized on as the “crime of the century.” (Partington, 2002, pp. 2–3)

Partington describes the need to “[reclaim] Lucy from the Wests and the media.” Lucy, she writes, had “lost her privacy when she entaered the public domain and became a ‘Missing Person’ after her disappearance … twenty years later the same image that had been posted on trees … was in the news again.” The ones of the victims “became “exhibits for the defence” for another year, stored in cardboard file boxes in the mortuary at Cardiff Hospital. They were marked with numbers, letters, and eventually their names. “Only when Frederick West [suicided in jail] a year after the unearthing of the crime were we free to re-bury Lucy’s bones, restoring her dignity in our funeral rites. As my son said, ‘burying her in a nice way’” (Partington, 2002, p. 3). Marian spoke of her relief at being able to wrap the bones and make them safe, again making the inert alive and attributing feelings to the dead.

Partington’s story was published in the Guardian Weekend (May 18, 1996). In response, she received “over three hundred letters and poems of great quality. Each communication was deeply affirming of all that is best about humanity and gives me a feeling of hope. Lucy and I were heard, understood and honoured” (Partington, 2002, p. 5 my italics). The difficulty of creating something good out of this damaging experience is obvious. In dealing with the horror of the murder and what it meant to her sense of self, Marian Partington, however, now participates in the Forgiveness Project specifcally to work on forgiving Rosemary West. “Some people have asked whether I feel I am betraying Lucy by doing this and I say, ‘No, absolutely the opposite: I feel I’m honouring Lucy.’” Partington’s activities in defending her sister’s characterization in the media, keeping her bones safe, and honouring her speak to the ongoing relationship with her murdered sister.

Grief and bereavement are not the main focus of this collection, although it is recognised that grief will motivate the acts of continuance described in this book. Grief can be channeled into activism in one form or another, which is a common consequence of experiencing the death of a loved one; people will take up causes relevant to the circumstances of the death. The motivation seems largely to ensure that the person did not die “in vain,” thus rendering the death meaningful. This is even more likely when the deceased person is seen to have died under circumstances that were preventable, or where an individual or an authority can be blamed or has failed in their duty of care. The example often cited is that of Candy Lightner, the mother of a twelve-year-old girl killed by a drunk driver, who started the group Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) in California in 1980. It has grown in 25 years into an infuential lobby group whose aims are to “educate, prevent, deter and punish [and the organization] has caused judicial reform throughout the United states” (www.madd.org). The lever name, its acronym, and the straight-forward message and purpose of this group have added to its success. The fact that MADD reflects problems in everyday life, that is drunk driving and fatal road accidents, and problems that can easily be prevented, also contributes to its longevity and success.

That these campaigns are motivated by grief and mourning, and even by the desire to maintain active contact with the deceased through doing something for them, seems self-evident. What may not be so evident is the almost limitless energy that is expended in the effort, and how durable it is over time. The sudden death of a loved one profoundly changes and can even consume lives. Jim Swire, whose daughter, Flora, was killed in the Lockerbie disaster of December 21, 1988 (when 259 passengers and 11 people on the ground were killed when a bomb exploded on board Pan Am fight 103), has not rested in his fight. His aim is to find out...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• CHAPTER 1 Constructing Immortality
• CHAPTER 2 The Rebirth of Death
• CHAPTER 3 Sustaining Kinship
• CHAPTER 4 “Rachel Comforted”
• CHAPTER 5 Collective Memory and Forgetting
• CHAPTER 6 Fever
• CHAPTER 7 The Will
• CHAPTER 8 Complaints About Health Care in the United Kingdom Following a Person’s Death
• CHAPTER 9 Knowing by Heart
• CHAPTER 10 Psychosocial Death Following Traumatic Brain Injury
• CHAPTER 11 Should Suicide Be Reported in the Media?
• CHAPTER 12 Family Disputes, Dysfunction, and Division
• CHAPTER 13 Dark Tourism
• CHAPTER 14 Immortality Work
• CHAPTER 15 Art as Afterlife
• CHAPTER 16 The Eternal Cadaver
• CHAPTER 17 Representing Trauma
• Transcendence
• Contributors
• Index