23 Let’s Put the Fun Back in Funeral: Learning to Affirm Life Over Death
23 Let’s Put the Fun Back in Funeral: Learning to Affirm Life Over Death
by Madison Hesse
** Content Warning: This piece intimately discusses issues surrounding death **
I can tell from the way my grandmother darts her eyes when walking past her living room that she never wants to step foot inside it again. My guess is that when she stares for too long at the faux leather rocking chair nestled in its corner, she is transported to the same vivid moment as I am in which she, my mother, and I frantically resuscitated her husband as he sat unresponsive in that very chair. Approximately 12 hours later, it ceased to be a topic of discussion. Three generations of freshly terrified women now sit alone with concealed grief, refusing to acknowledge the event except for the occasional involuntary shudder at the sight of that rocking chair. The three of us will probably never discuss how even though no one died in that room, the air inside it moves with a heaviness of death– the same heaviness that is becoming more and more familiar as other larger tragedies unfold all around us. Our silence surrounding this heaviness reminds me that my family, and probably millions families similar to mind, are not empowered to open ourselves to grief in a way which invites love. We are not equipped to courageously acquaint ourselves with death.
I blame our death-worshipping nation, and specifically its media platforms, for normalizing this behavior. My pedagogy, a one which aims to affirm life through loving hopefulness, thus must first consider death as it is weaponized against the project of education. The worship of death, or necrophilia, which bell hooks elaborates on in a number of her works, involves an anti-human ideology which affirms violence for the sake of personal gain and, consequently, scoffs at humaneness. As has been blatantly obvious over the course of the past year, the United States has mastered this art of necrophilia. Hooks recognized this fatal flaw all the way back in 1999 in her book All About Love: New Visions, where she notes that:
Cultures of domination court death. Hence the ongoing fascination with violence, the false insistence that it is natural for the strong to prey upon the weak, for the more powerful to prey upon the powerless. In our culture the worship of death is so intense it stands in the way of love. (hooks, All About Love: New Visions, 191)
Though it may seem only tangentially related at first, my personal experience with an inability to confront the fear of death shamelessly with love is but one example of the influence a death-worshipping nation has on its people. The dominator nation, through this “false insistence” she refers to, makes a pointed effort to condition the masses to become apathetic necrophiliacs, just desensitized enough to death to fear dying without questioning its role in subjugating them to a culture of oppression. Accomplishing this on such a large scale requires constant yet furtive messaging to reinforce t