No Ordinary Deaths

Wakes were once an important part of death ritual, one of the ways in which families and wider community began to understand and come to terms with the end of life. They often came after a period of watching and waiting for death and formed a part of the contract between the living and the dead, prior to burial – an easing into loss. As people who work in palliative care, or with the dead, might tell you, it is perhaps our modern defamiliarisation with death that can make it feel remote and frightening, inducing in extreme cases an intense fear called thanatophobia. This is not to say we do not discuss death as a society; I think we do, a lot. The media, and now social media, are always full of stories about dying and death. But this is very different from experiencing the physical proximity to death that many of our forebears coped with.

[...] Kat Lister, who has written a memoir of her experiences of widowhood, also expresses this feeling of physical as well as emotional loss:

If my experience of grief – and my reading of it, too – has taught me anything, it’s that it can be counterproductive to try to contain something so unquantifiable in its shape and form. Perhaps the only constant to be found in grief is its inconsistency.

This metaphor of loss/being lost, and Lydia’s sad story, are powerful reminders that those who are grieving do not universally experience their emotions in a cycle that ends with acceptance. Acknowledging the intensity of bereavement was something our forebears appear to have had some sensitivity and compassion for; and perhaps we can learn from their understanding that ‘that large grief’, did, for some, overwhelm with its intensity.

[...] invites us to reflect on how social, economic and political changes have impacted on how we die, now. In this context, I reject the old chestnut that ‘the only thing we learn from history is that we do not learn from history’, an expression of fatalism that locks us into a loop of potentially repetitive and damaging behaviours that are apparently immune to change. Life for our forebears was incredibly difficult, and their challenges included the dangers of childbirth, almost any health-related issues, unemployment, poor housing, dreadful sanitation, the likelihood of impoverishment in old age, and little to nothing in the way of organised relief to support them, beyond the workhouse. But alongside these realities were the ways in which people met their experiences with fortitude, stoicism and pragmatism. Agency could be fostered through family and community networks, and different forms of mutual support, both organised and informal. The ways in which dying and death were managed in the past can show us this: many of the rituals and processes around handling end-of-life matters served to reinforce ideas of social solidarity. Watching over the dying, care of the dead, and holding wakes and remembrances in their honour were all ways in which communities came together to honour the dead – and the living. Loss and grief were collective experiences.