End without End: Mourning during the Coronavirus

In The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), the French Jesuit philosopher Michel de Certeau (1925-1986) includes an incredible chapter on death and dying in modern society called “The Unnamable.” At one point, de Certeau writes: “In a society that officially recognizes ‘rest’ only in the forms of inertia or waste, death is given over, for example, to religious languages that are no longer current, returned to rites that are now empty of the beliefs that once resided in them.” In the modern age, death has become the absolute Other—a pure waste for a society organized by and for the conservation of life. In a time that values maximal productivity and glorifies labor, the cadaver is a scandal. To borrow Hannah Arendt’s words in The Human Condition (1958), in a “factual transformation of the whole of society into a laboring society,” the dying man is and can only be obscene. “Wrapped up in a shroud of silence,” de Certeau claims, the dying man is “the unnamable.”

One of my favorite books when I was in my early twenties was Western Attitudes Toward Death from the Middle Ages to the Present (1974) by the great historian Philippe Ariès (1914-1984). In this fantastic genealogy on the histoire des mentalités towards death, Ariès anticipated in historical terms what de Certeau would have said more emphatically and more poetically a decade later. Death has been forbidden in the modern age; it has become the greatest taboo of our time. “Death,” writes the French historian, “so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar, would be effaced, would disappear.” For a society that has put the greatest emphasis within human life and not unproblematically outside of or beyond human life, death has become an impossible occurrence that must be repressed. This is why we keep death as far as possible from the dying person. According to Ariès, the social obligation to contribute to collective happiness, to an “inalterable optimism,” especially in American society, has produced an interdiction and a refusal to accept the presence of death within human existence. At best, Ariès tells us, burials themselves become the object of showy publicity, “like any other consumer’s item, be it soap or religion.” De Certeau would have agreed. This is what he meant by death as another “waste,” returned to rites that are now empty of their beliefs. In this terrible scenario, mourning and grief become impossible tasks, death an obscene subject. Kenneth Lonergan’s terrific film Manchester by the Sea (2016) captures such a scenario. In one devastating scene the main character, Joe Lee Chandler, arrives at a hospital, because his brother has died. Death appears as a “technical phenomenon,” administered by the hospital when the doctor gives Joe a list of things to do. Death becomes busy work, another task—albeit an impossible one.

This is what I have always thought about death. Though I believed I was right, I was not. It has taken a global pandemic and the experience of witnessing—even from afar—the death of people alone in the hospital, whose families could not grieve together, without funerary services, to show me the shortsightedness of my thoughts.

Against the opinions of Ariès and de Certeau, the global pandemic has demonstrated that, for however much death has become “unnamable” and the rites emptied out of their beliefs, funerary rites still provide a place for a placeless experience. I do still believe that death is a taboo for our society. I also believe that the attitudes towards death have a history and that those attitudes change over time. However, Ariès and de Certeau’s interpretation of modern funeral rites as commercial and performative in nature is reductive. In addition, the necessary precautions of suspending funerary services during COVID-19 has forced me to reconsider de Certeau’s claim that religious language is “no longer current.” Reading the news, in Italy and then in the United States, about people dying alone and being buried alone, of not holding funerals with families, has moved me to rethink my most basic assumptions. For today we are witnessing an end without end.

Our current crisis makes me reflect on the rites that, before, appeared to me as emptied of “the beliefs that once resided in them.” Even for a society that venerates labor and productivity, the importance of religion for the legitimation of a social world in the face of death is decisively important. For however emptied out a religious rite might appear, it still confirms that the unnamable experience of death has a place within the universe. The global pandemic made the pain of death less tolerable and the terror more overwhelming, because the impossibility of fulfilling funerary rites deprived communities of the sheltering canopy of what the sociologist Peter L. Berger has called nomos, or the meaning that counteracts the experiences that reduce the individual to a “rest,” an “inertia,” a “waste.”

In an article published in The New York Times, Jodi Kantor responds to a letter from a writer who could not mourn his father after he died of coronavirus. Family was not allowed in the hospital, and only a few people, all standing six feet apart, could attend the funeral. Afterwards, it was impossible to grieve as a family—no sharing of meals and tears. The letter ends by asking: “How do I find closure?” In seeking clues about how previous generations mourned amid pandemics, Kantor contacted historians of death who predicted that “this crisis would transform the way we grieve.” Historically, pandemics change the way people mourn. After the horror of the Black Death and consequent social upheavals of the early fifteenth century, the Ars Moriendi, the tract on “how to die well,” widely shaped protocols and behaviors surrounding death in the West for more than two centuries. As with the Black Death, the kind of catastrophe we are living through is changing how we mourn.

In the article, Kantor also interviews therapists, members of the clergy, and academics. “As gut-wrenching as these stories are going to be,” says Gary Laderman, a professor of American religious history at Emory University, “we are going to find ways to innovate and adapt, to make meaning out of these separations.” Others predict a greater decentralization of religious beliefs. As podcast-host Priya Parker says: “I think we’ll see a radical shift in the democratization of authority, who has the right to officiate a funeral.” Thus, authority figures like clergy members may become less central. Finally, the article suggests that social media and the internet might provide a solution to the current difficulty of mourning, and provide, in the future, new ways to mourn.

I agree with Judy Kantor and with her respondents that this crisis will force us to find new ways of understanding what the word “mourning” means. While I believe in change and innovation for the better, I also fear that innovation, for us, too often means a transformation of the means in the direction of greater “efficiency” at the cost of meaning. Innovation cannot be beneficial if it is not reintegrated within a meaningful order that has a coherent theory of history and sense of community. The historical existence of meaning-systems is the result of activities of successive generations. In a world that is assaulted in its most basic beliefs, meaning returns as our most pressing question.

Donato Loia is a Doctoral Candidate in Art History at the University of Texas.