Is it the most wonderful time of the year? Sure, there is holiday cheer, family gatherings, food and gifts, religious observances, and cultural festivities. But let’s face it, there is also death, grief, and sorrow. On the one hand, celebrations of social connections among the living are in the air, on the other hand, relations between the living and the dead are not so stable, or publicized, while the holiday spirit engulfs American communities.
I have been teaching a death and dying course at Emory University for a few decades now, starting with about eight students in the late 1990s and now enrolling over 400. Each time I teach this, it is deeply fulfilling and enriching, at least for me. Why do so many enroll? A variety of reasons ranging from struggles with grief to dabbling in morbid curiosities, to looking for a break in schedules dominated by STEM mentalities and overloaded with passive learning.
Studying death with me is a very different experience since I seek to be easygoing, and easy. I have various goals in the class, but one of them is to better understand and perceive America’s death-saturated culture, based not simply on fear or avoidance, but on a more complicated mix that includes obsessions and fixations, desires and attraction, curiosity and engagement, that keep death firmly in mind.
The holiday season is a perfect example of this complexity. Under the shimmering surface of Christmas lights, Hanukkah candles, and Kwanza tables, is the lingering and often looming presence of mortality and the dead. In more private reflections of individuals mourning the loss of loved ones, remembering those who have died, and reconnecting to ancestors, mortality weaves its way into the fabric of holiday celebrations, celebrations often tinged with spiritual sadness and existential struggles.
In more public spaces, spectacles of death abound in popular culture, like the film Nosferatu, or popular shows like Death Note. Advice articles about how to cope with grief during the holidays also bubble up into public consciousness, offering steps one can take to alleviate or find ways to live with, the deaths that shape our present and future lives. The emotional pull of representations of death in our popular culture, traditional media, and now social media is pervasive and clear, perhaps as it always has been in every human culture through time.
But the encounter with death does not have to be exclusively an emotionally fraught topic. Instead, a more intellectual approach might be another way to tackle, if not embrace, the topic that will not go away. This goes against the grain of the deep-rooted and now domineering anti-intellectualism in American culture, yet some critical distance, interpretive ambiguities, and slow-roasting reflections may be good, and challenging, for the soul.
Indeed, death-related topics are fascinating to study and can open up new avenues for self-understanding, insight into animating social values, and perspectives on the meaning of life. Invitations to participate in the pedagogy of death abound by smart and creative people well-trained and skilled in translating these thoughtful lessons for a wide audience. Some of the more stimulating engagements we had in class were covering topics that students 18 to 21 rarely get a chance to think carefully about rather than being told how they should feel, or to avoid these topics altogether. And it is clear they desperately want the space to think about death, rather than have to only emotionally struggle with it or bury their own intellectual curiosities. A few examples of the questions brought up include:
What impact did the pandemic have on the spirituality of death and the experience of death in a racist society?
How do we make sense of the incredible variety of death rituals that include embalming, sky burial, cremation, and secondary burials?
Why are early Christians so attracted to the dead and how does the history of the autopsy change European attitudes toward death during the Enlightenment?
In what ways do the genocidal mass deaths of enslaved Africans and indigenous Native societies reverberate through American history into the present?
Can psychedelics lead to a transformation in attitudes toward death for the dying, as well as the living?
Does popular culture provide us with more religious resources for grappling with death than traditional institutions of religion?
Death does not have to rain on the holiday parade but it can be a great conversation starter, at least for some. One of my students wrote the following to me at the close of this semester’s class, a sentiment that I find uplifting, though morbid too.
“Hi, Dr. Laderman!
I hope all is well and you are enjoying the end of the semester. As bittersweet as it is to finish the death and dying coursework, I am excited to make it a primary focus of Christmas dinner conversation. During Thanksgiving, I told my little brothers about the Tibetan sky burials, and they have become fascinated with the course content. Thank you for such an incredible semester! I am walking away from this class with so much more than an academic understanding of basic concepts, this course has taught me how to think critically about abstract concepts and sensitive subject material.”