I just recorded a bunch of songs about death. Why? Fr. John Behr, Regius Professor of Humanity at the University of Aberdeen, has often remarked on how the biggest societal change in modern times has not been the invention of electric lights, air travel, or even the internet, but the fact that our way of dealing with death has been so drastically altered—the “disappearance of death,” he calls it.

By the ‘disappearance’ of death, I do not of course mean that we no longer die, but rather the troubling eradication of the presence of the dying and the dead from our living space. Instead of death happening at home, with the dying one cared for by family and neighbors, who then tend to her or his body till she or he can be commended to God and entrusted to the earth, death has now become largely consigned to the hospital, where ‘life’ is preserved as long as possible, and when it becomes unfeasible the ‘life-support’ machine is switched off, with the family allowed a brief period of mourning with the corpse before it is handed over to the mortician, culminating in a ceremony at which the corpse is increasingly not present (having already been disposed of) but the past ‘life’ of the departed celebrated. In a very real sense, we today live as hedonists (as if this life in the body as we know it is what it is all about) and die as Platonists (the chains of the body now being removed and disposed of, so that we can, unfettered by the reality of the corpse, celebrate the past ‘life’ of the person), all of which displays a very ambiguous attitude towards our embodiment. It would not be an exaggeration to say that this is the greatest change in the history of the human race: everyone, everywhere, from time immemorial had to deal with death in an immediate, familial, manner until its industrialization over the course of the twentieth century.

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