Will the Pandemic Help Solve Americans’ Problem With Death?

In case you haven’t noticed, America and Americans have a problem with death. We ignore and deny it and, when that doesn’t work, we seek ways to cure it. When someone does die, even an old person, we are often shocked, as if what occurred was a freakish, unnatural event.

It’s one thing to hope or pray that death doesn’t arrive at the doorstep of oneself or a loved one, and to mourn if it does; this is perfectly normal. It’s another thing to pretend that death doesn’t exist or to wish that it would go away. This is unhealthy and I believe something that takes some of the joy out of living. It may be paradoxical, but it’s only by recognizing and accepting the fact that one day each of us will die that we can fully realize and appreciate the preciousness of life.

Why do Americans, in particular, have such an aversion to thinking or talking about death? Death is perceived as un-American, one can argue, as it runs counter to virtually all of the nation’s defining values, e.g., youth, beauty, progress, achievement, winning, optimism, independence, and persistence. Death goes against everything we like to believe in and is thus treated as an unwelcome guest when it decides to make an appearance.

How did this come to be when death, like birth, is a fundamental and universal part of life? Our antipathy of death emerged in the early 20th century as the tentacles of modernism reached into all avenues of everyday life. A more secular age, centered around the many pleasures and freedoms to be had in place of a judging God, encouraged an abhorrence towards death. The tools and techniques of modern medicine—antibiotics, vaccines, new kinds of surgeries, transplants, and, of course, machines—allowed us to skirt death or, more accurately delay it.

Previously on intimate terms with death because of its sheer prevalence, we consistently distanced ourselves from it, the once familiar presence now hidden, isolated, and contained. Once a neighborly, communal, and familial affair, death became professionalized and institutionalized, just another part of our service economy. Rather than be seen as an entirely natural event, death became seen as a mistake of nature. Death had become, rather perversely, separate and detached from life, the result of something gone terribly wrong.

Alongside this, Insurance companies, armed with precise statistics and actuarial tables, helped to turn death into a rational and predictable event, extracting much of its spiritual power. Death became a classic case of “out of sight, out of mind”; the subject became something to which we paid little attention until we were forced to. And like anything unknown and unfamiliar to us, our fear of death grew to the point where the end of life was perceived as an abstract and alien idea.

Given our current greater awareness of death due to COVID-19, can this disturbing, century-long narrative take a different, more positive direction? With the number of deaths both in this country and around the world posted daily like the box scores of baseball games, it’s virtually impossible to ignore the subject or deny its reality. Many of us have some personal connection with death from the coronavirus, even if distant (for me, that of a cousin’s brother-in-law), this too making it an inescapable presence.

It’s too early to tell whether the pandemic can help make death less of a social taboo (our last one, I believe) as it becomes a louder part of the national conversation. Because of the wholly understandable fears surrounding the virus, our discomfort with death may even escalate as the pandemic runs its course. And unlike dying in bed from old age, surrounded by loved ones, death from the coronavirus does indeed represent a life horribly interrupted. Over the next couple of decades, millions of baby boomers, the largest generation until millennials came along, will die, making this the more likely event to normalize death and reintegrate it into everyday life.