Layers of Dying and Death

Edited by

Kate Woodthorpe

Layers of Dying and Death

Papers Presented at the Fourth Global Conference: Making Sense Of Dying and Death Wednesday 12th July – Friday 14th July 2006 Mansfield College, Oxford

Edited by Kate Woodthorpe

Oxford, United Kingdom

Dr Robert Fisher Series Editor

Advisory Board Professor Margaret Chatterjee Dr Wayne Cristaudo Dr Phil Fitzsimmons Dr Jones Irwin Professor Asa Kasher Revd Stephen Morris

Professor John Parry Dr David Seth Preston Professor Peter Twohig Professor S Ram Vemuri Professor Bernie Warren Revd Dr Kenneth Wilson, O.B.E

Volume 40 A volume in the Probing the Boundaries project >Making Sense Of: Dying and Death=

Published by the Inter-Disciplinary Press Oxford, United Kingdom

First Edition 2007

8 Inter-Disciplinary Press 2007

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

ISBN: 978-1-904710-39-5 EAN: 9781904710395

Contents Introduction ................................................................................................ 3 Family-Assisted Suicide in the British Media Daphna Birenbaum-Carmeli ............................................................ 5 Death and Dying: Making Sense of Life in Post-Soviet Cinemas Irina Novikova ............................................................................... 13 The Living Dead as Cinematic Images of Death Outi Hakola.................................................................................... 23 Complicated Grief Sandra Jones .................................................................................. 31 Britain’s ‘Punk’ Mourning Culture Gerri Excell.................................................................................... 45 The Making of ‘Good’ Memorialisation Kate Woodthorpe........................................................................... 55 Institutional Loss: Dialectical Tensions in Coping with Major Loss Melanie K. Finney ....................................................................... 667 Traumatic Bereavement and Coping: Implications for a Contextual Approach Karola Dillenburger, Montse Fargas, Grace Kelly and Rym Akhonzada ..................................................................................... 75 Can the Dying Mourn? Kate Powis ..................................................................................... 87 The Death of Innocents: Noncombatant Immunity vs. the Divine Foetus Lloyd Steffen ................................................................................. 97 Do We Have Moral Obligations to the Dead? Liz McKinnell.............................................................................. 107 Don’t Fear the Reaper: An Epicurean Answer to Puzzles about Death and Injustice Simon Cushing............................................................................. 117

Tele-visions of the Dying: Ghost-Seeing in the Society for Psychical Research in the 1880s Shane McCorristine ..................................................................... 129 “Of Death I Try to Think like This”: Emily Dickinson’s ‘Play’ with Death Lucia Aiello ................................................................................. 139 Coming to Grips with Death: Explained and Explored in a Children’s Picture Book Phil Fitzsimmons ......................................................................... 149 Older People’s Preferences at the End-of-Life: a Review of the Literature Eileen Sutton and Joanna Coast ................................................... 157 The Wholeness of a Broken Heart Leeat Granek................................................................................ 177 Religion and Medicine in the Process of Managing Death and Dying: The Case of Hospice Circle in Poland Malgorzata Zawila ....................................................................... 185 Convenient Arrangements with Death Florence Ollivier .......................................................................... 193 Death and Funerals in Sunni Communities of Turkey Reyhan Varli Görk....................................................................... 203 The Body of Necessities in Finnish Discourse on Euthanasia Leila Jylhänkangas....................................................................... 217 Images Of Death, Images Of Society: The Case Of Poland and Polish Community Emilie Jaworski ........................................................................... 229 Attachment Trauma, Sudden Death and Anticipatory Grief: the Chamorro Sample Stephen W. Kane and Vera de Oro .............................................. 237 Environmental Grief®: Hope and Healing Kriss A. Kevorkian ...................................................................... 249

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Introduction This collection of papers originates from the fourth annual Making Sense of: Dying and Death conference held in July 2006 at the University of Oxford, and forms part of the on-going Interdisciplinary.net catalogue of international multi-disciplinary dialogue into topical subject matter. The intention of this volume is to create a snapshot of the conference, thus the papers are presented in the form they were delivered, providing an overview of the diversity and dynamism of both the topic and the conference itself. Importantly, the international flavour of the papers in this volume illustrates the universality of experiences of dying and death. As one of the ‘universal truths’ 1 of human existence, the diversity of the papers in this volume points to the relevance of practices and issues surrounding dying and death to all of us, regardless of our origins or culture. As mortal beings we cannot escape our corporeal condition, thus every society indeed, every individual - has to deal with dying and death at some point. The varied manner in which this is constructed, practiced and interpreted is illustrated by the rich accounts in this multi-disciplinary volume. Making a contribution to a wide range of disciplinary fields of study on dying and death, this collection is an extremely evocative example of the dynamism and complexity of this most human of topics. The papers in this volume are a unique mix of, amongst other things, social research (such as Jones), philosophical debate (McKinnell), historical description (McCorristine), death imagery (Hakola), personal accounts (Granek), literature (Aeillo) and cultural analysis (Jaworski). They have been arranged to demonstrate the multiplicity of issues that are touched by death, and the global scope of the Making Sense of: Dying and Death Conference. Each paper therefore needs to be understood as a particular disciplinary and cultural account of dying and death, yet read as a contribution to a wider international inter-disciplinary dialogue on death and dying. I sincerely hope that this valuable and constructive exchange of ideas, and the productive sharing of knowledge into this most complex and emotive of subjects, will continue long into the future. Thank you to all those who have contributed to this e-book, and I hope that you enjoy the volume. Kate Woodthorpe, October 2006.

Notes 1

Zygmunt Bauman, Mortality, Immortality and other life strategies (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1992).

Family Assisted Suicide in the British Media Daphna Birenbaum-Carmeli Abstract The paper tackles the subject of family assisted suicide through its presentation in the British press during the 1990s. Looking for basic characteristics of the coverage, the paper reveals a consistently supportive stance towards family assisted suicide that is produced by depictions of the dying persons and the perpetrators as autonomous and conscientious individuals; by idyllic portrayals of family relations; and by praising judges for their lenient verdicts. Presentations of the law as a dated State system, as well as marginalization of opposing voices, further enhanced the supportive message. The argument of the paper is that this presentation may carry implicit political implications: in commending actors’ selfreliance and in calling for decreased State interference in personal affairs, the press augments the neo-liberal spirit that has come into prominence in Britain since the 1980s. Within this context, we raise some ethical questions regarding the broader political significance of such media representations. Key words: euthanasia, family, assisted suicide, Britain, press, neoliberalism. Biomedicine’s commitment to preserve lives has found one of its powerful expressions in extending the lives of terminally ill persons. Whereas some patients are greatly assisted by such options, others may find the resulting life conditions hard to accept. In this paper, we probe a particular type of suicide: one that is facilitated by a close family relative. Our interest is in the ways in which such cases and the dilemmas that they invoke are constructed in the daily British press, and in the political implications of these media constructions may carry. The mass media plays a crucial role in the emergence and unfolding of public debates. 1 It mediates the experience and the dissemination of ideas. It influences what issues will be considered worthy of attention; who should be held accountable and whose opinion can be dismissed; and it suggests where potential solutions lie. Especially susceptible to the media's influence are issues with which the audience has little direct experience. 2 Assisted suicide is a case in point. Assisting someone’s suicide is illegal in Britain, subjecting the ‘assistant’ to imprisonment for up to 14 years. However, studies reveal substantial professional and lay approval of this practice, which co-exist alongside passionate opposing views.

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___________________________________________________________ 1.

Article themes Within this general framework, I now turn to a content analysis of the press presentations of 3 cases of Family Assisted Suicide (FAS) that had taken place in Britain during the 1990s. In all these cases, the sick person had been reported to have repeatedly requested the relative to help them die. All the prosecuted individuals had pleaded guilty and all had eventually walked free out of court. Beyond the difference in circumstances, journalists constructed the reported cases in very similar ways. I will illustrate the essence of these leitmotifs. A. The deceased person Articles conveyed the deceased person’s age, marital status (all single), previous occupation and ailment. Character descriptions typically suggested strong-willed and independent individuals, courageous throughout their lives as well in the face of death: Jim Brady “fought like a demon against the illness”, Janet Pitman had been “a strong-minded, determined woman”. Annie Wilks used to be a “dignified,” “strong,” “self-reliant,” “vibrant career woman,” “the most loving person in the world … had a magic way with children… optimistic and happy. She loved to …go for drives to the seaside. She also liked Shirley Bassey and poetry”. However, now, being bedridden, Jim “could do nothing for himself. His family dressed his skeletal frame, took him to the lavatory, minced his food and held his baby beaker to his lips.” Mrs. Pitman was depicted as “crippled” and “pain-racked” and Mrs. Wilks emerged as “seeing double… [she] could scarcely walk,” she became “frail,” “distressed”, “confused, forgetful and started to suffer from hallucinations”. As common in FAS reports, the finer details come from the perpetrators themselves. Mrs. Wilks’ daughter thus described: Mum went all aggressive with the nurses. She threw a jug of water over one of them and head-butted a window. It was so unlike her - I’d never heard my mum swear or raise her voice before. It is significant that the description was not validated by external sources, nor was it used to question Mrs. Wilks’ mental capacity to request euthanasia. One device to sustain this accord was to show that Mrs. Wilks still retained some of her old ‘authentic’ self, e.g. her sense of humour and refraining from complaints.

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___________________________________________________________ We regard the stark contrast that journalists constructed between the autonomous healthy person and the dependent dying patient as suggesting a drastic transformation rather than gradual degeneration. This binary imagery of mind/body and health/disease constituted suicide as a release, freeing one’s ‘trapped’ self from a failing body. B. Perpetrators and their acts The perpetrators were positioned as the event’s key figures, portrayed as dignified individuals caught in unfortunate circumstances. Factual evidence established their moral decency, e.g. their honesty in confessing to their crime, their respectable professions, and the devoted care that they had provided to their relatives. Fully relying on the perpetrator's own declarations, the descriptions of the loyalty to the deceased relative presumably removed any doubt concerning the motivation for the act. Within this framing, assisting in suicide was construed as “an act of mercy”; “a gift”; “the ultimate show of … love”. Thus, Paul Brady was depicted as having “the courage to save [his brother] from his suffering”, and Jennison was given space to portray herself as a loving, devoted daughter: [E]ven if I had got a life sentence, and that’s what I was expecting, I’m glad I did what I did…I loved my mum so very much. She wanted to die, what else could I do? The image of moral integrity and the purity of motive was given official validation through quotes from judges’ parallel evaluations: “the circumstances … showed plainly that she was a caring and loving daughter.” The prosecution’s sharing of this positive evaluation provided still further evidence. Formative in the justification of the perpetrators’ actions was the explicit absence of any hesitation or regret: “I [Jennison] don't regret what I have done. I'd never have forgiven myself for letting her be in this living death.” The law makes Paul [Brady] a guilty man, but the family’s only regret is that they let Jim suffer for so long. The brief, scarce allusions almost trivialised the moral debate surrounding FAS. Indeed, the marginalisation of the case against FAS was consistent, with criticism relegated to one or two sentences at the end of the piece that were not followed by any engagement with the arguments: The Voluntary Euthanasia Society welcomed the decision [to free Brady] and called for the law to be changed. But a spokesman for the Roman Catholic

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___________________________________________________________ Church in Scotland voiced concern at the case. Through such fleeting comments journalists bestowed a ‘balanced’ appearance on their reports while virtually silencing the debate and enhancing the framing of FAS as an act of familial compassion. C. Families Family dynamic was virtually written off by the press. Through ‘normalised’ descriptions, family relations were made to appear as purely loving and harmonious, suggesting a lifelong closeness. Jim Brady’s death was located in a family Christmas gathering. Mrs. Wilks’ end was framed within a cosy weekend scene: [She] spent Friday afternoon with Gillian, her brother Colin and his wife. They had a few drinks and talked about old times… we had a lovely evening. Mum always liked a tipple, she enjoyed a sweet Martini. So even though the doctors had told her to stop drinking, she looked so serene that I thought, ‘Sod this’ and gave her a glass of sherry. These scenes of warmth paved the way for the act that was about to follow, which could then be framed as the culmination of harmonious family togetherness: In each other’s arms they lay, the loving daughter and her suicidal mother, talking about old times. Annie swallowed her pills - two at a time - sipped her sherry and slipped slowly into the big sleep. The consensual impression was affirmed through reports of relatives’ support of the prosecuted member as they made their way through the trial: “As he left the court, Brady was hugged by his tearful family, who had supported his actions and appeared on television to argue his case.” D. The State system: Law and judges From the press, the judicial system emerged as an oppressive apparatus that failed terminally ill citizens and tormented anguished relatives. In some articles, especially the few that did touch upon the broader ethico-political aspects of euthanasia, journalists would occasionally opt for even stronger language, implying that the existing law

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___________________________________________________________ was heartless to the point of absurdity (“Even sitting in the same room as someone who kills themselves … is considered to be aiding or abetting a suicide”). The disapproving message was reinforced by the favourable images of the judges, as compassionate, open-minded individuals, rising above bureaucratic rigidity. An article on Brady’s verdict praised judges, prosecutors and juries “[who were] prepared to perform legal sleight-ofhand to reflect society’s compassion - by dropping charges, accepting a lesser plea or passing a lenient sentence.” Through such positioning of the judges alongside the ‘offenders’, as individuals who were forced to grapple with an inadequate State system in order to respond to human suffering, journalists were isolating the State not only from its rank and file citizens but also from its own arbitrators. A main vehicle for bridging this law/judges gap was the exceptionality claim that journalists had repeatedly cited from the verdicts. This notion served to justify judges’ leniency while allowing to avoid an open discontent with existing law. Lord McFadyen’s comment on Paul Brady’s verdict was typical, explicating that owing to the exceptional circumstances of this case, the disposal must not be taken as reflecting any general view on the part of the courts, but simply the sentence I regard as appropriate in the individual circumstances of this case. Journalists, too, presented each case as unique, and have never referred to any of the preceding cases. We understand the media endorsement of the exceptionality claim as part of its preference for episodic framing, in which a heroic narrative and a human drama enhance the emotional draw of the article. It also relieved readers’ own fears and sidestepped related ethical debate. 2.

Discussion The one-sided, supportive coverage that we identified relied heavily on the notion of the ‘normal’ family. Suggesting similarity of actors’ sentiments across the cases, this narrative replaced the idiosyncrasy and complexity that one would expect in a real life consideration of FAS with descriptions of wholesome harmony. As such, the articles advanced a moral discourse on living and dying, effectively “reducing the traumatic event to a set of standardized narratives… turning it from a frightening and uncontrollable event into a contained and predictable narrative.” 3 From this perspective, the normal family discourse helped deny the very trauma by toning down complexity and anxiety, and emphasising individual heroism and beatific acts. Another constituent of the one-sided supportive coverage was the episodic framing of FAS, namely, reading the problem at a micro level, as

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___________________________________________________________ a difficult decision made between two individuals. As the arguments against euthanasia address broader socio-ethical issues, they are harder to contain within an episodic framework. The concept of dignity can illustrate the difference. Opposition to euthanasia revolves around a form of dignity that is neither negotiable nor reducible. 4 In contrast, arguments in favour of euthanasia turn on a concept of dignity that is personal and can be diminished or lost. 5 Episodic framing, with its focus on the individual, ultimately privileges personal conceptions of dignity and is therefore structurally biased against the major claims of euthanasia opponents. Located in the context of late 1990s Britain, the courageous individual narrative dove-tailed with a neo-liberal discourse of autonomy, and a move towards a State withdrawal from caring labour. Since the 1980s, the neo-liberal rationalities that came into prominence in Britain accorded a vital value to a self that is to aspire to autonomy, it is to strive for personal fulfilment in its earthly life, it is to interpret its reality and destiny as a matter of individual responsibility, it is to find meaning in existence by shaping its life through acts of choice. 6 The decisions made by the deceased and the perpetrators could be said to ally with this notion of the individual, as suicide became an act of self-determination. The emphasis on self-reliance and the near glorification of suicide further reinforced the neo-liberal accent on individualism and, possibly, the justification of cuts in State services. During the 1990s, neo-liberal reforms had legitimated the shrinking of health services, reducing the number of nurses, and hospitals as well as long term care facilities. While we are not suggesting that journalists were intentionally promoting a neo-liberal agenda, we suggest that the British press of the late 1990s constituted FAS in accordance with this vision. By framing particular types of suicide within a self-assured harmonious family narrative, family-assisted suicide emerged as commensurate with neo-liberal ideals in terms of care, family and societal morality at large. If our analysis is acceptable, then it raises several questions: How do such media presentations impact on circulating views regarding FAS? What do they imply regarding the role of relatives and the State in caring for the terminally ill? Is the coverage in fact advancing the privatization of death? More generally, could the glorifying of one's courage to die, in the sensitive context of FAS, contribute - if inadvertently - to a social climate in which people would be encouraged to ‘courageously’ end their lives? Further enquiries into this emerging territory would hopefully help elucidate these issues.

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___________________________________________________________ 3.

Epilogue On January 14, 2005, the BBC featured on its front website newspage the story of Brian Blackburn, a 62 year old policeman who pleaded guilty to manslaughter after having killed his wife who was dying of cancer. The journalist quoted the husband citing his deceased wife saying that this was the “last loving thing you could do for [me].” The judge was quoted stating that Blackburn “had acted as a ‘loving husband’,” and then, noting that the circumstances were exceptional, gave him a suspended nine month sentence. The couple’s two sons emerged from the piece as fully supportive, pledging for mercy. A description of Blackburn being “greeted by friends and family as he left the court” sealed the report. No opposing voices were included.

Notes 1

S.D. Reese, O.H. Gandy, & A.E. Grant (eds.). Framing public life: Perspectives on media and our understanding of the social world. (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001). 2 M. Baum, Sex lies and war: How soft news brings foreign policy to the inattentive public. American Political Science Review, 96 (2002), 91-109. 3 K. Tal, Worlds of hurt. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 4 L. Gormally, Euthanasia and assisted suicide: Seven reasons why they should not be legalized (1997). 5 D. Pullman, Death, dignity, and moral nonsense. Journal of Palliative Care, 20 (2004), 171-78. 6 N. Rose, Inventing ourselves: psychology, power, and personhood. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Daphna Birenbaum-Carmeli is a medical anthropologist at the University of Haifa, Israel. Her main interest is in the social and political implication of medical technologies. Within this domain, she has focussed on the subjects of reproductive medicine and genetic testing.

Death and Dying: Making Sense of Life in Post-Soviet Cinemas Irina Novikova Abstract The article focuses on how death and dying as an insistent discursive and emotional agenda of ‘post-Soviet-Hamlets’ have been represented in the post-Soviet Russian films of the 1990s-early 2000s. Post-Soviet cinematic ‘hauntology’ was marked by an emancipatory inventiveness to unsettle and re-imagine future uncertainties beyond the spectres of the past. Gendered imageries of death and dying plotted mainly in the father-son relationship have been central to the ‘real’ of the visual and political re-imagination of the nation, history, borders, and boundaries of post socialist ‘rebirth’. For my argument I will address particular instances of filmed death in the cine-texts by Russian ‘necrorealism’, Pavel Chukhrai, Sergei Bodrov, Aleksandr Sokurov, Andrei Zvyagintsev. Key words: death, dying, mask, ghost, body, metanarrative, film narrative, gender, masculinity, trauma. The death of a hero has been among the most favourite plot elements in cinematic storylines as it Determines a proponent role of the beginnings and the ends, especially the latter. Usually, the process of thinking about reality is subjected to its discrete partitioning, in particular, the literary plots inextricably related to the concept of the end and the beginning.… Just as the concept of art is connected to reality, the understanding of a ‘text - border of the text’ is inseparably interfaced with the ‘life - death.’ 1 The Soviet imaginary as a metanarrative that had its beginning and its end was related to the ‘ontologization of the spectre’, the eternal repetition of one and the same to relinquish “any hope of transcendental transformation,” 2 and the Soviet teleology of death “turned the mausoleum into museum.” 3 Jacques Derrida brilliantly discusses in Specters of Marx the effect of “an ontological treatment of the spectrality of the ghost... leading to the terrifying failure and totalitarian perversions to which it gave rise.” 4 The ‘ontologization of the specter’ was left to the perpetuated rituals of its mourning integrated in the Soviet cinematic vernacular.

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___________________________________________________________ After the break-up of the USSR in 1991, post-Soviet cinematic “hauntology” 5 was marked by an emancipatory inventiveness to unsettle and re-imagine future uncertainties beyond the collapsing spectres of the past. Although earlier, the Soviet filmmakers of the perestroika period (1984-1991) committed themselves to what was beyond the permitted themes and plots in the Soviet period, in particular, sexual and necromantic. Theirs was the “necropolis” time when the deaths of the Soviet leaders Brezhnev, Andropov, and Cherrnenko embodied the dying of the socialist route in the metanarrative of modernity. 6 The obsession with death and dying was central to necrorealism. 7 Evgeni Jufit, made Hospital Attendants-Werewolves (1985), a manifesto of necrorealist aesthetics, and his first feature length film, Daddy, Father Christmas Is Dead (1991). Necrorealism has been interpreted as “a barely allegorical manifestation of total social collapse and anomie, of the hypercharged atmosphere of cynicism and doubleness” 8 diagnosed by Berkeley anthropologist Alexei Yurchak among members of “the last Soviet generation.” 9 In the 1990s a number of the filmmakers revolted against their fathers’ cinematic legacy. The treatment of the phantomatic in these films challenges the absolute privilege granted to Derrida’s patrimony of the idol, both political and patriarchal.. One of the most recognized films of the early 1990s, the Oscar-nominated Thief (1997) by Pavel Chukhrai, was made as a tragic parody of his father Grigorii Chukhrai’s famous epic Ballad of a Soldier (1959). Apart from its outstanding cinematic qualities, the epic narrative of Ballad of a Soldier about a death of a Russian soldier as the symbolic/Christological sacrifice for the world’s liberation from Nazism became a medium of collective psychotherapy for millions and millions of its Soviet female spectators, very much within the emotional space of hope in the 1950s. The film of his son, Pavel Chukhrai is, on the contrary, based on a singular and banal plot, subaltern to the totalizing narratives of war heroes central to the Soviet metanarrative of Russian hegemonic nation building and its historiography after the World War Two. A thief Tol’an who pretends to be a military officer and a war veteran involves a young woman Kat’a and her small son San’ka into his plots of robbing communal flats. 10 Kat’a meets Tol’an on a train, falls in love with a handsome and brave hero of the war. She dreams - like many other young women of the post-war time - to become a wife of a Soviet military officer. When she finds out that Tol’an is a thief, she still trusts his promise to stop robbing soon for the sake of the family. However, the family travels from town to town, rents a room in a communal flat. His military uniform is the most valid and unquestionable ‘pass’ and evidence of his reliability among people who agree to rent the family a room. Later

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___________________________________________________________ he robs ruthlessly the inhabitants of a communal flat of whatever could be of any value to be sold by Kat’a in black market. Tol’an is detained and arrested by militia accidentally, Kat’a dies of a failed illegal abortion, and San’ka is placed into an orphanage. He dreams that his ‘daddy’ will return and adopt him to start a family. He runs into Tol’an several years later and decides to kill him to revenge on Tol’an for the honour of his dead mother. As a parallel plot, the ghost of San’ka’s dead father-soldier, semantically central in the lexicon of the Soviet ideologue and its spectres, emerges in some crucial episodes. The only fact that the son knows about his true father is his mother’s story of his death because of wounds soon after returning from the war battles the mystical character of the specter, as a para-religious experience for San’ka, is accompanied with the pedagogy of his adopting father, thief Tol’an of what it means to become a real man. Tol’an becomes San’ka’s model of masculinity - violent and aggressive. So, the boy is lost between his commitment to the memory of his idealized dead father and enchantment with his ‘daddy’, very masculine and brutal, at the same time, charismatic and trying to love both Kat’a and her son. San’ka is lost between a mask that ‘mimes the living’ and the ghost that should be mimed by the living. The effect upon San’ka’s subjectivity is born of this relation, ‘as double relation, one should say as double social bond’. Both - the specter and the mask - are the invincible forces and the original powers in San’ka’s subject-formation as the double ‘ghost’ effect. The Oedipus-Hamlet mythological convolution that plots the psychologically complex relations between San’ka, his mother Kat’a, and his stepfather, does not finish with the scene, when after many years of an orphanage San’ka accidentally finds and kills Tol’an. Neither the boy nor the spectators know whether Tol’an is really dead, or he mimics his own death (as he was a mask all his life) on the floor of a cargo-car in a speeding-up train, taking away his body - dead or alive - away from San’ka. The very act of San’ka’s shooting at his ‘daddy’, a thief, a mask, has a subversive meaning. Killing a mask as revenge becomes a terrible loss to the boy. San’ka is attached to Tol’an, seeing himself as his son, however, the annihilation of the mask discloses emptiness behind it, nothingness, and absence of a real body to be buried and mourned. ‘Daddy’ can be annihilated only on condition of annihilating oneself, as a ‘daddy’ body has become inalienable part of the life of his son, his norms, behaviour, choices, actions and body. The third and final part of the film shows San’ka as a colonel somewhere on the southern borders of the collapsing Soviet Union. His childhood dream ‘like father, like son’ came true - he became a military like his father, the ghost in the film narrative and the sacralized figure in

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___________________________________________________________ the paternalist metanarrative of the Soviet ideological and political order. However, San’ka’s gendered perception of masculinity was modelled by the Word and Law of Tol’an. Army and prison are two allegedly opposite forms of collective construction, control and organization of normative (army) or deviant (prison) masculinity. However, both institutions perpetuate Tol’an’s principle of violence and aggression. This gendered principle of modern masculinity is central to the Oedipal father-son plot in the complex ‘ghost’ space of Soviet history - Lenin (eternally alive), Stalin (symbolic father), father-soldier (legend, myth, ghost), stepfatherthief (thief) and their lost sons. The phanthomatic presence of Stalin (father of every Soviet child) in the filmic narrative, the regular emergence of father-legend in San’ka’s fantasies and finally, Tol’an’s ‘death’ - are ghostly presences in the protagonist’s quest to understand himself and the meaning/value of his life. Only in the final episode, the agonizing death of an old alcoholic stranger whom the colonel mistakes for Tol’an (the same tattoo of Stalin’s profile on the left side of the drunkard’s chest) becomes the ghastly symbol of the dying political order and its narrative of hegemonic masculinity. 11 Similarly to Pavel Chukhrai, Vladimir Khotinenko addresses the major institutions of forming modern normative/deviant masculinities in his famous film Muslim (1995), focusing on a dramatic story of a mother and her two sons in a post-Soviet Russian village. The elder brother spent time in prison; the younger took part in the Afghanistan war and spent some time in captivity with mojaheds. Both institutions and experiences remain beyond the film narrative when the two brothers meet again in the house in which their father had committed suicide by hanging himself on the hook in the ceiling. The very beauty of typical Russian landscape -pastoral panorama of green fields, distant churches around a quiet village, the heart and soul of the Russian nationalist discourse since the 19th century - invites the film’s spectators into the ideal chronotope of the missionary Russian idea, genealogically central to the discourses and practices of Soviet Orientalism. However, death, or its expectation, is woven effortlessly into a loose fabric of cinematic incidents and images in Muslim. Khotinenko brilliantly examines and deconstructs the ‘idiocy’ of village life, symptomatic not only of the collapse of the Soviet system and its values, but of the dying Russian Idea, a historical and nationalist metanarrative, central to the very mechanism of Russian xenophobia. Nikolai, an Afghanistan war hero, comes home after having been officially declared missing in a military action for years. His arrival causes a shock in the village community - during his captivity years he had converted into Islam. The villagers openly hate the Muslim, Nikolai

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___________________________________________________________ Ivanov or Abdullah, for being different, though one of their own, for reminding them with his very presence, work and behaviour of their own corruption. Villagers, including his own mother, want Nikolai-Abdullah to leave as they do not want to learn and know how to deal with Otherness not on the ‘margins’ but inside the Russian ‘pastoral’ world of today. Nikolai’s death that he accepts with relief does not bring redemption and hope in the end of the film. In the film Captive of the Mountains (1996) by Sergei Bodrov a Chechen father tries to break off the chain of deaths permeating the distant world of his Chechen village in the mountains and the town where a Russian army garrison stays. In the last episode of the film the father takes a Russian young soldier, his captive, to an execution to revenge for his son, killed by a Russian soldier during his attempt to run away from prison. The old Chechen man releases his captive but his attempt to disrupt the chain reaction of men’s deaths on both sides of the conflict is futile. The final episode directly alludes to the episode of a sanguinary bombing of a Vietnamese village accompanied with Wagner’s music Valkiria Riding in the legendary film Apocalypse by Francis Ford Koppola. In Koppola’s film, the magnificent symphonic orchestration of the politics of the sublime annihilates its objects/abjects into the gaze of his spectatorship frozen with horror and anger. In Bodrov’s film, only several Russian military choppers modestly emerge out of the mountains. They fly over the head of the soldier to bomb the village. Unlike Koppola, Bodrov does not show the bombing of the village and death of its inhabitants. Instead, he lets his spectators enjoy the exotic and wild beauty of a still untouched oriental landscape with a tiny village, vis-à-vis the approaching choppers - the image on the screen before it becomes an offscreen destroyed reality off the screen. The final sentence of the narrator who is the former captive in the village does not leave us any hope for a happy-end fantasy. A spectator is as helpless as the former captive soldier, in the role of a visitor to another ‘museum’ of war and its natures mortes. The situation of how a son perceives the death of his father becomes the plot and narrative in Aleksandr Sokurov’s film The Second Circle (1990). 12 The perception/recognition of father’s death by his son, the protagonist of the film, occurs in a direct visual and tactile contact of the son with the body of the deceased. Having lost its intentionality, the dead father’s body is leaving life and demanding the shelter/haven in nonbeing. The spontaneity, rigidity, granularity of the contact between father’s non-being and his son’s being is an emphasized and focused process in the film narrative. This allows Mikhail Yampolsky to argue that Alexander Sokurov's film has introduced death in its metaphysical

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___________________________________________________________ dimension into the modern Russian cinematic tradition. Sokurov introduces a missing part in the Russian cinematic tradition - the directly visualized work of death, the process of dying, the chronicle of necrotransformations therefore his cinematic world finds completeness and loses the language, thus, waiting for a new language, the son’s language, to be imagined. In the film The Return (2003) by Andrei Zvyagintsev the narrative plot focuses on the return of the father to the family of mother, grandmother and two adolescent sons Ivan and Andrei. An old photo of a happy young family is both the imagination of a lost paradise for both boys, and the suppression of images of the missing father in their imagination. Will the return of the real father resurrect the lost completeness of life? A tower, a phallogocentric 13 metaphor of the ascension, death and rebirth, appears in the beginning and in the end of the cinematic narrative. The first tower is the place where the boys have to prove their manly courage and jump into the water. The second tower on an abandoned island is the place from which the father tries to save Ivan, accidentally falls and is broken.

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___________________________________________________________ The image of the tower strongly implies a rigid discourse of masculinity, or ‘a gender corset’, meant to discipline a boyish body and consciousness in compliance with certain schemata of man’s behaviour. Most likely, the father in his childhood passed rituals of becoming a man, but we never find out about his past, and what had happened to him. However, he does not know how to become the father to his sons. His latent traumatic experience eventually tells itself in the aggression against his adolescent sons. He is a son of the certain social and gender order, which had trained him in the certain system of coordinates and norms of masculinity. He is theatrical in his hyperimperous behaviour at the dinner table, he is obnoxious when trying to give categorical orders to his sons (the Law of the Father), and he is violent when the boys disobey his orders. During the years of separation, Ivan and Andrei have subconsciously waited for the return of their father. Three of them spend some days on an uninhabited island, in a mutual return to each other; let it have a tragic end. Rescuing Ivan, father perishes, and the sons have to sit next to the body of their father in the boat while returning from the island. Here the reality of the death of the father, the pain of the loss reveal the changes in the boys, particularly, the rigidity and resoluteness which come to his elder son Andrei, testifying that, at least, for him the return of the father is real. The Sokurov-Zv’agintsev cinematic space of death and dying is intriguing as it focuses visualization of death in an image of a dead body of the father. In their films the figure of the father goes on a trajectory from deconstructing the metanarrative (Chukhrai, Khotinenko) to absolute silence. His death as absolute silence designates a situation of a voice transfer, igniting the reciprocal speech of the son. In other words, father demands in his death for the similar and articulated repetition of his words, action, narrations, as it happens with Andrei in Zvyagintsev’s Return. All his questions to his son (or sons) become one question – the question of his/their commitments to him as a past reality, not a returning ghost. The direct observation of a dead body of the father is at the same time a metamorphosis occurring to his son/sons. Looking at the face of the late father, the son/sons try to see, and, hence, to understand and seize, i.e. to take advantage of mechanisms of sight and to understand, and, thus, to connect the fact of father’s death with speech – “in time to start talking.” The dead body of father becomes the object, which breaks the habits of sight and looking. It becomes a chasm that demands to be sealed off, or in other words, re-signified into certain narratives of future reality.

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Death and Dying: Making Sense of Life in Post-Soviet Cinemas

___________________________________________________________ Death of a male body and the spectacle of a male body dying, mainly represented in the father-son relationship, prevailed in the postSoviet Russian films of the 1990s, interrelating the themes of history, masculinity and nation, but not more than diagnostically. The shift from a metanarrative to a metanarrative has been represented mostly in the tragic film genres, focusing on the ‘masculinity crisis’ as effected by the historical trauma of the late 1980s. The historical traumas are thus translated into the historical consciousness of the transitional period into capitalist modernity, demanding for the reconstruction of ‘authentic’, ‘lost’, ‘destroyed’ masculinity, thus, for the revival/return of the nation. This Zeitgeist of revival/return includes the very crisis of masculinity as an indicator of its overcoming. At the same time, the very masculine subjectivity has been considered self-sufficient and metaphysically selfreproductive by distancing its ‘essence’ from the former abjected iconographies of hegemonic masculinity in the lavish objectifying and dissecting representations of the deaths of former icons in the post-Soviet Russian cinema of the 1990s.

Notes 1

Felicitas Becker, Knowing the Limits. Kinoeye. New Perspectives on European Film, 10 November 2003, (5 May 2006). < http://www.kinoeye.org/03/13/becker13.php>. 2 Boris Groys, Utopiia i obmen. (Tr. Utopia and Exchange). (Moskva: Znak, 1993), 354. 3 Ibid., 64. 4 Jacques Derrida, The Specters of Marx. Tr. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994, 91, 97. 5 Ibid., 10. 6 Metanarrative “is a global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience”. In John Stephens. Retelling Stories, Framing Culture: Traditional Story and Metanarratives in Children's Literature (1998) 7 Christina Stojanova, The New Russian Cinema, Fall 1998, (9 May 2006). . 8 Thomas H. Campbell, The Bioeasthetics of Evgenii Jufit, 26 January 2006, (16 May 2006). . 9 Alexei Yurchak, The Politics of Indistinction. Bioaesthetic utopias at the end of Soviet history, 5 April, (2 June 2006).

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___________________________________________________________ . 10 A Soviet communal flat was inhabited by several tenant families sharing a kitchen, toilet and bathroom. 11 R.W Connell, Masculinities. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 12 The title of the film refers to the second circle of hell depicted in The Divine Comedy, Volume I: Inferno by Dante Alighieri. 13 Phallogocentrism, by Jacques Derrida, refers to locating the centre of text/discourse within the logos and the phallus and privileging of the signified over the signifier. Irina Novikova is Professor of the Department of Culture and Literature, Director of the Centre for Gender Studies, at the University of Latvia, Riga. Her current research is on gender and genre in literature and cinema.

The Living Dead as Cinematic Images of Death Outi Hakola Abstract Death is an open area for beliefs, fears and fictions. The cinematic living dead, as vampires, mummies and zombies, represent and visualize death in a corporeal way. These creatures are familiar from the horror genre where they threat humanity because of physical and mental transformation through death. The living dead are uncanny other and they create abjection. They highlight the fear of death and otherness, unknown existence and marginal phenomena. In the living dead film the undead characters symbolize contradictions of race, class, sexuality or nationality. In my presentation I will consider the nature of the living dead character between life and death and those fears and imaginative possibilities these creatures open to us. At the same time I will consider the narrative tradition of these films and how the narration marks these creatures as monsters. I use as an example Francis Ford Coppola’s film Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In this film the un-dead character is both evil and empathetic and victims are both sinful and innocent at the same. In this film love and sexuality become the driving forces for the unnatural extension of life beyond death. Key words: living dead, horror movies, abjection, otherness, narration. The ‘living dead’ is a term for such fictive creatures as vampires, mummies and zombies. In this paper I discuss the themes of death and dying in the living dead films. As an example I use a vampire film - Bram Stoker’s Dracula (released in 1992) - that was directed by Francis Ford Coppola nearly 15 years ago. I start with an image of the love scene between Dracula and Mina. Dracula, who sees in Mina his former beloved, has taken the form of a young aristocrat and has seduced Mina. The scene starts when Dracula enters Mina’s bedroom and Mina demands to know, what he actually is. Dracula responds: “I am nothing. Lifeless. Soulless. Hated and feared. I am dead to all the world. I am the monster that breathing men would kill. I am Dracula.” This is moment when Mina realizes that this man of her dreams has murdered her best friend, Lucy. Even then Mina can not deny her love or desire to be what Dracula is. Dracula tells her the means to become a vampire: “To walk with me, you must die from this life and be reborn to mine. Then I give you life eternal, everlasting love. The power of the storm and the beasts of the earth. Walk with me to be my loving wife forever”.

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___________________________________________________________ But when Mina is about to drink Dracula’s blood the monster shows his empathetic side. He stops being seducer and the love towards Mina forces him to tell the terms of transformation as well. “I cannot let this be. You will be cursed to walk in the shadow of death for all eternity. I love you too much to condemn you.” But Mina has already made her mind. With Dracula she sees her life in a different light. She sees the obstacles and barriers that limit her decisions. With Dracula she sees the possibilities to make different choices, to have extreme and denied experiences. She says: “Take me away from all this death” and starts her transformation process into a vampire. This love scene between Dracula and Mina is beautiful and essential part of the Coppola’s film and in this scene the important themes of my paper come apparent. This scene reveals the living dead as immortal, powerful and seductive as well as murderer, nonhuman and unclean. In Coppola’s film death is main narrative turning point. On the one hand, death is feared and avoided because it transforms you to something creepy. In this case into a monster who has the narrative task to destroy on physical, moral and / or psychological levels. 1 But on the other hand death is a doorway to a new life. As for Mina the vampirism reveals her feeling that she is not always living life to the full. She wants to bypass the limiting social or moral barriers. 1.

The living dead as Otherness The living dead are undead bodies and death is their main and unifying feature. They are visualized images of death. As dead and alive at the same time, they are placed outside the natural order and they represent otherness and unknown. The living dead, such as Dracula, visualize death in a very corporeal way. A living dead is primarily a corpse, a physical and moving body even though it is pronounced dead. As American horror film historian Gregory Waller says, the living dead betray their origins. They stay recognizable human beings, even though their physical appearance may change or they may achieve supernatural powers or other special characteristics. 2 The threat caused by the living dead arises from this transformation and from their unnatural relationship to death. As corpses these undead bodies start to fall apart and to be able to stop the decomposing process, the living dead exploit the living. They need blood, flesh, bodies and even souls of the living to survive. Therefore the otherness is underlined by physical danger. Drinking of blood is a key to vampirism and it is a symbol for extreme egoism that shows no respect to other’s lives. Harto Hänninen

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___________________________________________________________ and Marko Latvanen see the bleeding as the crossing point between life and death. The vampire does not have its own blood production and therefore it seeks the blood of others. The vampire’s bite causes immortality but makes the victims lose both blood/life and their human identity. 3 Dying separates a person from the society, as well as it separates him/her from social behaviour. In a moment of death both conscious and consciousness as a moral figure are lost. The drives and immediate fulfilment of desires surface instead. The drives, deeply buried into the subconscious according to Freud’s psychoanalysis, represent the darker side of humanity. Death brings these suppressed elements of the human being into the open. The living dead are a nightmare what a mankind could be and perhaps already are. The monstrousness is in the human being, it is not something exterior. 2.

The living dead as admired creatures Because we can recognize ourselves in the image of the living dead, we can identify to the surfaced desires and feelings as well. Vesa Sisättö considers that even though the vampires stand for death and darkness, they stand for the ideal of freedom at the same time. For example, the vampires are powerful creatures, they have conquered death, they shamelessly fulfil their desires and they express their sexuality openly. 4 They dare to do what we dare not. One essential suppressed and desired element is sexuality. Where as death and immortality stand for the outreaching the natural limits, sexuality stands for the transgressing the limits of society. As Andrew Tudor remarks, in horror fiction sexuality is a threat to the social order. 5 Especially in Coppola’s film sexuality and control are important themes. Dracula is an erotic creature and its victims participate willingly in the seduction. Andrew Tudor emphasizes that Dracula’s threat arises out of our own weaknesses. The strongest obstacle for a vampire is a strong will, not any physical object. The vampire uses our suppressed sexuality and desire for excitement. 6 In the Bram Stoker’s Dracula the vampires bite one man and two women. The man is able to resist his own lust and sexual seduction and escapes. The two women willingly give in for the experience of lust. However the film does not state that women are easy victims. Instead, as Bonnie Zimmerman argues, Coppola’s version is a story of attempts to free oneself from the restrictions that cultural codes have enforced people to act out. 7 The story is situated to the 19th century and is based on the sexual restrictions women confronted while men seem to have more space

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The Living Dead as Cinematic Images of Death

___________________________________________________________ to express their sexuality. Dracula merely gives to women a chance to explore their sexual drives openly. 3.

Narration of dying As figures of death the living dead can be feared and admired at the same time. They image the post-mortem to be both rewarding and punitive experience. Their unnatural corpses are appalling, but their freedom from social limitations is envied. However the narration of the horror films puts these monsters in their places. For horror fiction, as Yvonne Leffler states, the antagonist is a central narrative and structural element. 8 The narrative structure with beginning, middle and end brings forward a narrative progress were a monster is born, then its existence is accepted and finally the monster is destroyed and the order regained. In this progress the beginning is the introduction of the main antagonist, Dracula. Then the threat is materialized with human victims, like Lucy. The victim is contaminated and he/she returns as a representative of the undead. The body is alive, but the personality has replaced with monstrousness. In the end, both main antagonist and other reborn monsters must be destroyed. The narration does not only picture a transformation process into a monster, but also describes beautifully and horrifyingly the processes of loss, grieve and rejection. One needs to accept the death of a loved one in order to survive. These films make a viewer to concentrate more on the cultural and personal meanings of death than on the medical definitions of it. 4.

First death: death of a person The birth of a monster is important narrative turn. In the living dead films a death is not the end. Instead it is a new beginning. David Skal has remarkably interpreted that all monsters can be seen as an expression of birth, whether it is weird or unnatural. 9 In the living dead films, I call these narrative turning points as first deaths, deaths of a person, because at the moment of death the personality of individual victim dies. The essence of person is lost and this essence appears to be the soul. Soul marks the humanity, the body marks the animality. Dualistic separation brings the body and bodily instincts, such as hunger and sexuality, the dominant forces. The loss of soul is internal transformation, but as Roger Dadoun emphasizes, in the rebirth process the inner state of monstrousness becomes outer and concrete reality. 10 In horror fiction the outer appearance reflects otherness and inner existence.

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___________________________________________________________ In Bram Stoker’s Dracula the fate of Lucy is a good example of the described process of dying. She is a lively and passionate girl and easily seduced by Dracula. The first marks for forthcoming transformation can be seen even before the first death. The external changes work as warning signs. The bodily marks are bite marks in the neck, paleness and growing fangs. Personality starts to change as well, and Lucy becomes openly lustily and aggressive. The first death finishes the transformation process and makes the changes irreversible. 5.

Social death: grieving Transformation from human into monster is difficult situation to handle. Norbert Elias has remarked that death is a problem to the living, not to the dead. The living have to find means to deal with death, loss and the anxiety they arouse. 11 Those who are left behind have to accept this change in order to destroy the monster. After being buried Lucy keeps rising from her grave and eats little children. The normal transition and grieving rites fail their task and death needs to be faced directly. Michael Mulkay talks of biological and social deaths. The biological death is the death of an organism, whereas the social death is the death of a person’s social influence. 12 The living dead films describe the same processes. The first death has started a process where a person has to be declared to be both biologically and socially dead. In the living dead films, death is a state of emergency and a challenge to the society and individuals. The exclusion process of death stands as a symbol for social death. In the horror narratives the importance of social death is often described with Julia Kristeva’s concept of abject. Abject has been a part of a human being, but after separation from the subject it creates a threat to the identity and therefore it needs to be cut loose. 13 Jonathan Lake Crane sees a corpse as a typical source of an abject in the horror. The corpse reminds of life and subject and denies them at the same. The corpse becomes a source of mayhem and it must be excluded, often with violence. Before exclusion can take place, the protagonist and other characters need to accept the transformation of diseased. They must negotiate between their memories and abject. 14 If characters are unable to deal with loss and grief they become easy victims for a newborn monster. When men come to destroy Lucy’s undead body, they do not want to believe that the transformation has actually taken place. They wish to see Lucy, but in the end they do realize that the blood-sucking creature is not Lucy, but something else and they cut her head off.

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___________________________________________________________ 6.

Second death: end of existence The second death is end of exclusion process and end of existence. The extermination is a physical act. Because the vampire is not born naturally, it cannot be killed naturally. For example, ever since the days of folk tradition the vampire could be pierced with a wooden stick, burned or the head might be cut off. 15 In the second death the monstrous body is destroyed. In Coppola’s film Dracula returns to his former, human body and rests in peace. At the same moment both his and his victims’ souls are set free. Death has been replaced under societal control and separated from the normal life. 7.

Death as a threat to body, identity and society As a conclusion I claim that the living dead create a threat at least on three different levels. Firstly, they threaten the body, because they cause the bodies to transform into something unnatural. Secondly, they threaten the human identity because they replace sense with drives and instincts. They make a human to recognize his / hers own monstrousness, which is the biggest threat to the identity according to Yvonne Leffler. 16 Thirdly they threaten society, because they stand for egoistic desires that break up the social order. On the one hand the narratives on these fascinating creatures criticize the social structure, limitations and humanity; on the other hand these narratives highlight the importance of status quo and social order. As Michael Pickering sees, the living dead may serve as ritualistic and symbolic process of exclusion of otherness. 17 This otherness is marked by death, and these narratives tell as much about the fear of death than the process of dying. These films picture death as nightmarish and celebrate the living.

Notes Yvonne Leffler, Horror as Pleasure (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2000), 156. 2 Gregory A. Waller, The Living and the Undead. From Stoker´s Dracula to Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 16. 3 Harto Hänninen, and Marko Latvanen, Verikekkerit. Kauhun käsikirja (Helsinki: Otava, 1992), 58-59. 4 Vesa Sisättö, ’Hirviö on tuhottava! Vampyyrimagian rajoituksista ja kehityksestä’, in Kirjallisuus, tunteet ja keskipäivän demoni. 1

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___________________________________________________________ Kirjallisuudentutkijain Seuran vuosikirja 51, osa II, ed. Outi Alanko (Helsinki: Suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seura, 1998), 76-77. 5 Andrew Tudor, Monsters and Mad Scientist. A Cultural History of the Horror Movie (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 167-172. 6 Ibid, 165. 7 Bonnie Zimmerman, ‘Daughters of Darkness. The Lesbian Vampire on Film’, in The Dread of Difference. Gender and Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 397-398. 8 Leffler, 137. 9 David J. Skal, The Monster Show. A Cultural History of Horror (London: Plexus, 1993), 287. 10 Roger Dadoun, ‘Fetishism in the Horror Film’, in Fantasy and the Cinema, ed. James Donald (London: British Film Institute, 1989), 49. 11 Norbert Elias, Kuolevien yksinäisyys (Tampere: Gaudeamus, 1993), 3-6. 12 Michael Mulkay, ‘Social Death in Britain’, in The Sociology of Death, ed. David Clark (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), 32-34. 13 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 1-12. 14 Jonathan Lake Crane, Terror and Everyday Life (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1994), 30-34. 15 Hänninen, Latvanen, 21. 16 Leffler, 153. 17 Michael Pickering, Stereotyping. The Politics of Representation (Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave, 2001), 2-5, 47-50. Outi Hakola is Ph.D. student from the Department of Media Studies, University of Turku, Finland.

Complicated Grief Faced by the Families of Death Row Inmates: Obstacles to Effective Grief Therapy Sandra Jones Abstract The families of death row inmates experience unique grief and loss issues that have largely been neglected by scholars and clinicians alike. This study uncovers the meaning that lies within the specific forms of grief and loss experienced by family members who currently have a loved one on death row or have already lost their loved one to an execution. The concepts of disenfranchised grief 1 and non-finite loss 2 are utilized to bring attention to the ways in which the circumstances surrounding an execution complicate the grieving process for the family members of those condemned to death. Obstacles to effective grief therapy for these family members are further examined and addressed within this study. Qualitative interviews were conducted with 50 family members of Delaware death row inmates. The reactions of family members to having a loved one on death row are varied and complex, yet they include the following common responses: social isolation; loss of the assumptive world; intensified family conflict; diminished self-esteem; fragmented sense of security, trust, and meaning; guilt and shame; and a chronic state of despair. These symptoms create numerous barriers to these family members receiving effective grief therapy. Key words: complicated grief, death penalty, disenfranchised grief, nonfinite loss, grief therapy, death row inmates, execution. 1.

Introduction Anyone who has experienced the death of a loved one is likely to feel that their life has been complicated by their loss. Even under the best conditions, grieving is a complex and an individual process, yet there are particular types of deaths that make the grieving process even more complicated due to the circumstances surrounding the death. 3 Research aimed at determining the prevalence of complicated grief has led to an estimation that 14-30% of grieving people develop some form of complicated grief. 4 Although the mental health profession lacks a formal diagnostic category for complicated grief, a significant amount of literature has emerged in recent years aimed at defining and treating those who suffer from this intensified form of grief. 5 Examples of particular types of deaths that are likely to lead to complicated grief among the survivors of the deceased include those that carry a social stigma and those that occur through violent means.6 The sources of stigmatized deaths are many, yet perhaps no greater stigma

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___________________________________________________________ exists than that which accompanies the death of a loved one due to execution. While much of society may not see an execution as a violent death, the family members of death row inmates certainly view it as violent.7 While much has been written about the effects of incarceration on family members of the offender8 and there is an important body of literature on grief and bereavement,9 there has been little research into the grieving process associated with a death sentence and execution. This paper explores the effects of a death sentence and execution on family members of the accused, and their unique bereavement. The obstacles that interfere with these family members receiving effective grief therapy are further examined. This article not only provides insight into the complicated grief experienced by this population, but it also yields information that should prove crucial to mental health professionals who strive to address the clinical needs of these families. 2.

Overview of the population In an effort to justify sentencing someone to death row, the prosecution and media must make the capital defendant appear subhuman and monstrous. Therefore, it can be difficult for the general public to realize that there are people who love the accused. To the extent that attention is even given to the family members of death row inmates, they are typically criminalized along with their loved one, rather than viewed as the productive members of society that they tend to be. The pain of having a loved one on death row, and sometimes having to survive their execution, is excruciating. Several authors have conducted research with family members of death row inmates and have found among them high levels of social isolation, stigmatization, depression, and chronic grief. 10 It is against this backdrop that death row families experience the grieving process. Moving closer to understanding their bereavement is the work of John Smykla, Margaret Vandiver, and Susan Sharp. Smykla11 interviewed forty family members of eight death row inmates and found strong prolonged grief reactions among them that were distorted to the point that they significantly altered their personalities and lives. Vandiver12 suggested that the family members experience something that she called “chronic dread,” which comes from the anticipatory grief associated with executions. Sharp13 analyzed their grief process using the approach of stage theory, made famous by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross. Sharp describes the stages of grief facing the families of the accused as BADD (bargaining, activity, disillusionment, and desperation). Unlike the stages of grief described by Kübler-Ross, which eventually reach a point of resolution, the grieving process brought by the BADD cycle is particularly

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___________________________________________________________ destructive because it typically contains multiple repetitions of the stages, pushing eventual resolution farther out of reach.14 3.

Methods The primary source of data collection was qualitative interviews conducted with the family members of capital offenders. The family members participated in a 45-minute to several hour interview, which included questions that explored the nature of their grief as they have moved from the time of the arrest of their loved one throughout the various stages of the death penalty process. Topics that were explored include their relationship with the accused, changes in their family structure, and their interactions with the criminal justice system, the media, and their community. Their mental health status was assessed as they were asked to discuss whether or not they have sought any mental health services to assist them through the grieving process. When they indicated that they have received mental heath services were asked to evaluate the effectiveness of such services. More often than not, the family members indicated that they have not received such services, thus these family members were asked a series of questions to assess the obstacles that prevented them from receiving mental health treatment. Participation observation served as a secondary source of data collection, as I visited the prison on numerous occasions to meet with the men on death row. The time I spent in the prison visiting area provided me with opportunities to observe the grief of the families. The moments leading up to, during, and immediately after the time that the families spend with their loved one on death row allowed me to observe the ways in which they cope with the realization of their loss and the intensity of their response 4.

Sample The state of Delaware has a very small death row population, yet when the small size of the state is taken into account, the rate of executions is alarming. For nearly a decade following the first execution in 1992, after the death penalty was re-enacted within this state in 1974, Delaware held the distinction of executing more people per capita than any other state in the United States.15 The current Delaware death row population includes 16 men and 14 others have been executed over the last 14 years since the death penalty was reinstated. My sample includes 37 family members who are related to eleven of the sixteen men currently sitting on death row and 13 family members who are related to four of the fourteen men who have been executed since Delaware resumed executions in 1992.

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___________________________________________________________ 5.

Non-finite loss The theory of non-finite loss contributes to our understanding of the ways in which factors associated with particular types of deaths complicate the grieving process. Non-finite loss refers to those situations in which losses are slowly manifested over time, and often do not have an impending ending. It is loss that is continuous, and exacerbated by such things as milestones, which are not met by the affected individual. The continuous nature of the loss eludes the family member’s ability to go through the stages of grief to a point of recovery.16 Authors Bruce and Schultz, who coined the term, state that the grieving person is lost between two worlds, one that is known and one that is dreaded. There are three conditions for non-finite loss. The first is that the loss must be continuous and often follows a major event. The second involves developmental expectations that cannot be met. This is well illustrated by examining the grief felt by parents of developmentally or physically disabled individuals. These parents grieve when their children reach an age that carries significant milestones that cannot be obtained. The last condition described by Bruce and Shultz is the loss of one’s own hopes and ideals. Those who experience a non-finite loss question who they could/should/might have been. An examination of these conditions that must be met in order for a loss to be considered ‘non-finite’ suggests that such a loss is very likely to lead to complicated grief on the part of those who are grief-stricken. Many of the factors associated with the specific deaths that complicate the grieving process of the mourners can also be found with non-finite losses. These factors include death from an overly lengthy illness, the unique nature of the loss, the mourner’s perception of the deceased’s fulfilment in life, the secondary losses that come with such loss, and the anticipatory grief that accompanies such a loss. 6.

Disenfranchised grief The theory of disenfranchised grief contributes to our understanding of the ways in which particular antecedent and subsequent variables complicate the grieving process. Disenfranchised grief is a term that was developed by Kenneth Doka,17 and refers to instances when the bereaved are denied the ‘right to grieve’ by the larger society. Disenfranchised grief occurs when a loss cannot be openly acknowledged, publicly mourned, or socially supported. Doka and others have found that when disenfranchised grief occurs, the emotions of the bereaved are intensified and healing becomes more difficult. In addition, the bereaved often experience high levels of distress, disorganization, and prolonged grieving. The concept of disenfranchised grief becomes more profound

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___________________________________________________________ when it is combined with Romanoff’s finding18 that grief is most effectively addressed when there is community support for the bereaved, and the relationship between the dead and his or her mourners is acknowledged. The mourner who is disenfranchised from his or her grief is likely to face many of the same antecedent and subsequent variables that have been noted to occur with complicated grief. These variables include anger, ambivalence, or marked dependence directed toward the deceased, ‘mourner liabilities’ such as prior or concurrent unaccommodated losses or mental health problems, and the mourner’s perceived lack of social support.19 The most obvious variable operating prior to, during, and after the death of their loved one for those mourners whose grief is both ‘complicated’ and ‘disenfranchised’ is a lack of social support within the community. As a result of the social isolation that typically ensues from their loss, it is not uncommon for disenfranchised mourners to feel anger or ambivalence toward their deceased loved one. Their grief is further complicated by the assaults waged against their notion of the “assumptive world,”20 as they are often disillusioned by the lack of social support that they receive from others during their time of sorrow. Other antecedent and subsequent variables that complicate grief, including mental health problems and such social factors as the mourner’s educational, economic, occupational, or legal status, are frequently found to occur among disenfranchised grievers. 7. Findings A. Non-finite loss When the grief experienced by those families directly affected by the death penalty is examined, it becomes apparent that many aspects of their mourning are indicative of a ‘non-finite loss’. In all cases, the pain started after a specific event, the crime and subsequent arrest. Rebecca’s description of her family’s reaction to her husband’s arrest was typical among the families interviewed. I think it was just shock… I think it hit everyone like a ton of bricks because it’s unexpected. There was a lot of grief. I just really can’t put it into words, what you feel. I guess its anguish, like your world has been snatched away. The sudden event then spawns what might be considered the most overarching experience for family members, which is the continuous nature of the loss. With each new phase of their loss, including the arrest,

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___________________________________________________________ conviction, sentencing, death warrants, numerous failed appeals, and, in some cases, eventual execution of their loved one, family members feel as if they are experiencing the loss for the first time. In terms of sheer years, the time between arrest and execution is often 10 years or more. Throughout the years, hearings and appeals occur frequently. For most families, appeals only confirm the death sentence, and most said that when that occurred, they felt like they were reliving the worst days since the arrest. However, even a good outcome can bring its own set of fears. Margaret is the mother of a man who was sentenced to death row over eight years ago. Her family is one of the ‘lucky’ ones because her son won an appeal for a new sentencing hearing four years ago. Margaret and her family have been experiencing ‘anticipatory grief’ as they wait for the new sentencing hearing to begin, a hearing that has been scheduled and postponed several times. The various themes that tend to cycle with a nonfinite loss surfaced in Margaret’s comments as she spoke of her fear that a new sentencing hearing may very well land her son back on death row. Just when she manages to put aside thoughts of her son’s pending hearing, a court date is set again and she finds herself isolating from everyone and entering a state of despair. The constant threat looming over this mother’s head rings loudly in Margaret’s words when she asks rhetorically, “Everyday you wonder, is this going to be the day when somebody else besides God says it’s time to end your child’s life?” The second condition for non-finite loss is the inability to meet developmental expectations. The example of having a developmentally or physically disabled child is aptly compared to the experience of having a child on death row. Of the family members who were interviewed for my research, Bonnie’s story provides the clearest understanding of family members’ experience with developmental expectations. She is the mother of two sons, one who is developmentally disabled and one on death row. When Bonnie’s son was sentenced to death row, it suddenly hit her that both of her two children are likely to die before her. Having already survived three near death experiences with her disabled son, she had long ago accepted the possibility that he would die prematurely, but now she struggles with the realization that her other son’s death sentence may too lead him to an early grave. The milestones Bonnie will never see, such as weddings and grandchildren have been exchanged for a different and devastating event: the death of a child. In addition to the continuous nature of a non-finite loss, Bruce and Shultz note that a common characteristic of such mourning is the loss of one’s own hopes and ideals. This aspect of non-finite loss was readily apparent in the remarks of the family members interviewed. The most overarching loss of ideal was the families’ loss of what their government

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___________________________________________________________ means to them. Prior to their loved one’s conviction, many of these individuals saw the state as their protector. After their experiences with the state, they were left feeling quite jaded and betrayed, and were forced to reconcile this earlier notion with their current view of the state as being no less than a premeditated murderer. This ambivalent view of the state and, by extension, the criminal justice system, serves as an example of the effect of complicated grief upon mourners who have their notion of the ‘assumptive world’ challenged. B. Disenfranchised grief The concept of ‘disenfranchised grief’ sheds light on another dimension of the unique grieving process experienced by the families of death row inmates. The stigma associated with having a loved one on death row is so enormous that the families who were interviewed for this research frequently indicated that they do not feel comfortable acknowledging their loss with anyone outside of their family. Stated by one mother of a death row inmate, “I don’t tell anybody. They will never know it from me.” Of course, it is not so easy to keep this information from people within the community, due to the high level of publicity that typically surrounds the case of their loved one. When people within the community note the associations that family members have with death row inmates, the reaction is typically negative. As a result, the families of these men on death row are essentially disenfranchised from their grief. Elizabeth is the mother of a man who was executed for the murder of four people, including three children. She recalled the harsh treatment that she received by strangers in her community during the early period of her son’s incarceration, when she entered public places like grocery stores and heard people yell out “There’s the mother of the baby killer!” The taunting that Elizabeth was exposed to throughout her son’s death row sentence continued through to his execution. She insisted on being a witness to her son’s execution, yet was not prepared for the taunts that she would hear from the victim’s family in the execution chamber as she watched her son being put to death. The families of death row inmates are further disenfranchised from their grief in that their loss is never acknowledged. Even if their relationship with an inmate were to be recognized as a legitimate and significant one, many people would not consider the unfortunate experience of having a loved one on death row to be a real ‘loss.’ To the extent that the feelings of the family members are even taken into consideration, it is not usual for outsiders to dismiss any thoughts that families are suffering a loss because they are considered to be better off without a murderer in their family.

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___________________________________________________________ Perhaps the time when the families of death row inmates are most often left feeling as though their loss is not recognized occurs soon after their loved one is arrested and convicted, when the community’s memory of the horrific murder is still fresh. Several family members who were interviewed recalled exchanges that they had early on with the family members of the murder victim or others who were intimately familiar with the case against their loved one. These exchanges often left the death row families feeling not only as though their loss had gone unrecognized, but also that they were being scoffed at for the mere suggestion that they might be in pain. Particularly when the loss suffered by the family of the murder victim was contrasted to their loss, the families of death row inmates were made to feel as though they did not have a right to their grief. They received remarks like “at least you can still see your son; mine is dead.” 8.

Obstacles to effective grief therapy The vast majority of the family members in my sample indicated that they have not sought mental health services to help them deal with the pain of having a loved one on death row. This was not the case for the children in my sample. Fourteen of the eighteen children I interviewed indicated that they have received some form of counselling after their father was incarcerated. Most of these children currently have a father on death row, yet three of them have also survived the execution of their fathers. Family members provide a variety of reasons for their reluctance to receive mental health services. Many of them indicated that they were reluctant to seek therapy even before their loved one was charged with murder. They reported that they were not inclined to seek counselling either for cultural reasons or because they viewed such services as reserved for those who are “crazy” or “weak.” Even those family members who would ordinarily seek counselling to address problems throughout their life, however, were unlikely to seek such services to assist them through their grief. The reason most often given for their reluctance to seek counselling is that the stigma attached to having a loved one on death row has left them feeling very mistrustful of strangers. These family members invest a great deal of energy into shutting themselves down to outsiders who are not in their immediate support network. They work hard to protect themselves from the ostracism that they face all too often once people at their jobs, school, or community find out that their loved one is on death row for murder. In order to talk to a therapist, therefore, they must be willing to make themselves vulnerable enough to reopen the wounds caused by their grief. Many of the family members I interviewed

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___________________________________________________________ are simply not willing to risk opening these wounds with someone who they fear may judge them and stigmatize them as so many others within the community have done. When it comes to the children of the men on death row, however, family members are much more willing to seek counselling for them to help them deal with the complications that arise from having a father on death row. These children typically display emotional and behavioural problems at home and in school that their mothers, grandmothers, or other adults in the family worry are manifestations of the anxiety that comes with their father’s looming execution. Several of the children in my sample who received counselling had survived having a father on death row for many years by the time I met with them. Now young adults, they reflected back on the early years of their father’s death row sentence and shared how helpful they found counselling to be for them during that time. Caroline, the 22-year-old daughter of man who had been incarcerated for nearly ten years at the time of our interview, stated that she was taken to a couple of different counsellors as a preadolescent. Her mother sought such services in an attempt to help her daughter deal with the effects of having a father tried for capital murder in a highly publicized case. Caroline said that she did not find counselling at all helpful to her. Her father’s case was in the local and national news so frequently that she felt suspicious of counsellors who asked too many questions, wary that they were only interested in hearing about her father’s famous case. Even when they were impressed with the demeanour of the counsellor they visited, the majority of the children of death row inmates I interviewed indicated that they simply found that they did not want to talk about their feelings around their father’s death sentence. This was certainly the case with 21-year-old Bobby. When his father was executed, Bobby was 14 years old. He was sent to numerous counsellors to address the “anger problems” he and his paternal grandmother said that he has had over the years that have transpired from the time that his father killed his mother, was sentenced to death row, and eventually executed. Many times such counselling was court-ordered due to numerous assault charges that he has received since his father’s execution. Bobby said that the counsellors that he was court-ordered to see were usually very nice to him, but he just didn’t like to talk about how he felt about having a father on death row. This was a common sentiment expressed by many of the children. In order to assist the families as they deal with the non-finite nature of their loss of their loved one to death row, it is important for the grief counsellor to address the loss of ideals and the challenges toward the mourner’s assumptive world that come with this type of loss. Before it is

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___________________________________________________________ possible to do so, however, the loss experienced by the family member of a death row inmate must be legitimized and the magnitude of the loss must also be recognized. It is important, therefore, for the grief counsellor to first enfranchise the grief of the family member in order to address the non-finite characteristics of the loss. If a grief counsellor hopes to legitimize the status of death row families as mourners, however, he or she must first have an awareness of the secondary losses that come with the disenfranchisement of these families. 9.

Discussion Given the current discussion taking place in the United States about whether the death penalty should continue to occupy a place within our criminal justice system, it is crucial to consider the impact of this form of punishment on the family members of the accused. These family members have often said they feel like they have been given a death sentence along with their loved one. The unique experience of having a loved one sentenced to death row has set them upon a long, complicated grieving process. Their grief has been made complicated by the interaction of two circumstances associated with their grief: non-finite loss and disenfranchised grief. They grieve what may have become of their loved one before he was accused of murder. They grieve numerous other secondary losses, including the loss of their assumptive world, the loss of community support, and for some, and the loss of their own identity. The mental health needs of this population are great. A majority of the family members in my sample suffer from some form of a depressive and/or anxiety disorder. Symptoms of post-traumatic stress in particular are prevalent among these families at points throughout their grieving process. This is most often the case among those family members I interviewed who have survived the execution of their loved one, such as the mother who witnessed the execution of her son on her birthday. Unfortunately, the social isolation and stigmatization that is associated with having a loved one on death row makes it extremely difficult for these families to feel comfortable enough to reach out for help from a stranger. They frequently worry that a prospective counsellor may support the death penalty and, if so; many confided in me that they could not possibly bear their grief to someone who supports the institution that is likely to lead to the death of their loved one. Some of them commented that their loved one had received mental health treatment at numerous facilities before they committed the crime that landed them on death row. These family members remarked that they are not inclined to seek counselling because they are disillusioned by the mental health community that they see as having failed their loved one.

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___________________________________________________________ The pain of having a loved one on death row becomes so great, however, that some family members eventually find their way into a mental health facility. Their entry into treatment is not typically via the traditional route of mourners who seek grief counselling. They are more often compelled to seek treatment by the complications arising from their grief, such as drug addiction, legal problems, or parenting concerns. When mental health professionals find an occasion to work with the family members of death row inmates, there are several implications from my research that they can use to assist them toward their aim of effective treatment outcomes for these individuals. They need to have an understanding of the complexities related to a capital crime. Therapists also need to be willing to disclose their position toward the death penalty in order to determine if it is an obstacle for their client. Therapists must work toward enfranchising the family members by validating their grief. The secondary losses of the family members must also be identified and addressed.

Notes 1

Kenneth Doka ed., Disenfranchised Grief: New Directions, Challenges, and Strategies for Practice. (Illinois: Research Press, 2002). 2 Elizabeth Bruce & Cynthia Schultz, Nonfinite Loss and Grief: A Psychoeducational Approach. (Baltimore, Md.: Brookes Publishing Co., 2001). 3 John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, Vol. III. (New York: Basic Books, 1980); Colin Murray Parkes. Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life. (New York: International University Press, 1972); P. Marris, Loss and Change, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986). 4 Linda Schupp, Grief: Normal, Complicated, Traumatic. (Eau Claire, WI: PESI Healthcare, 2004). 5 It has been identified with different terms, such as ‘traumatic grief’ by Selby Jacobs, Traumatic Grief: Diagnosis, Treatment, and Prevention. (Castleton, N.Y.: Hamilton Printing Co., 1999); ‘pathological grief’ by John Bowlby ‘Pathological mourning and childhood mourning’, Journal of the American Psycholoanalytic Association, 11 (1963), 500-541; or ‘unresolved grief’ by A. Lazare, ‘Unresolved Grief’ in Outpatient Psychiatry: Diagnosis and Treatment, ed. A. Lazare (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1979); S. Zisook, & L. Lyons, ‘Bereavement and Unresolved Grief in Psychiatric Patients’, Omega, 20 (1988-1989), 43-58. Regardless of the terminology utilized, increasingly more attention has been given to complicated grief in an effort to equip clinicians with the diagnostic tools

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___________________________________________________________ and treatment strategies that will allow them to respond in the most effective manner possible to those suffering from this form of grief. 6 Edward Rynearson, Retelling Violent Death. (Philadelphia, Pa.: BrunnerRoutledge, 2001); E.K. Rynearson, & J.M. McCreery, ‘Bereavement after Homicide: A Synergism of Trauma and Loss’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 150 (1993), 258-261. 7 Susan Sharp, Hidden Victims: The Effects of the Death Penalty on Families of the Accused. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005); Recent research indicates that the process of lethal injection may be far more brutal than it appears. Research suggests that some individuals may feel enormous pain from the lethal injection, yet are unable to express it, as the protocol requires three injections and the second one is a paralyzing agent. L. Konaris, T. Zimmers, D. Lubarsky, & J. Sheldon, ‘Inadequate Anaesthesia in Lethal Injection in Lethal Injection for Execution’, Lancet 365 (2005), 1412-1414. Professional medical groups, such as the American Medical Association, have deemed it unethical for their members to participate in executions. As a result, numerous lawsuits have recently been filed in the U.S., challenging the constitutionality of lethal injection as a mode of execution, and a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling has made it easier for death row inmates to file such a claim. Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) 8 Donald Braman, Doing Time on the Outside. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004); Katherine Gabel & Denise Johnston, Children of Incarcerated Parents. (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 1995); Jeremy Travis & Michelle Waul, eds. Prisoners Once Removed: The Impact of Incarceration and Re-entry on Children, Families, and Communities. (Washington, D.C.: The Urban Institute Press, 2003). 9 John Bowlby, 1980; Colin Murray Parkes, Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life. (New York: International University Press, 1972); T.A Rando, Grief, Dying, and Death: Clinical Interventions for Caregivers. (Champaign, Il.: Research Press, 1984); W. Worden, Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy, 2nd. ed. (New York: Springer, 1991). 10 E. Beck, S. Britto, and A. Andrews, In the Shadow of Death: Restorative Justice and Capital Offenders’ Family Members. (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming); E. Beck, B. Sims-Blackwell, P. Leonard, & M. Mears, ‘Seeking Sanctuary: Interviews with Family Members of Capital Defendants’, The Cornell Law Review, 88 (2003), 382-418; R. King & K. Norgard, ‘What about our Families? Using Impact on Death Row Defendants’ Family Members as a Mitigating Factor in Death Penalty Sentencing Hearings’. Florida State University Law Review, 26 (2003), 119-1174.

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___________________________________________________________ 11

J.O. Smykla, ‘The Human Impact of Capital Punishment: Interviews with Families of Persons on Death Row’, Journal of Criminal Justice, 15 (1987), 331-347. 12 Margaret Vandiver, ‘The Impact of the Death Penalty on Families of Homicide Victims and of Condemned Prisoners’, p. 477-505 in America’s Experiment with Capital Punishment: Reflections on the Past, Present and Future of the Ultimate Penal Sanction, eds. by James R. Acker, Robert M. Bohn, and Charles S. Lanier. Durham, (N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 1998). 13 Susan Sharp, Hidden Victims: The Effects of the Death Penalty on Families of the Accused. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005). 14 Ibid. 15 Oklahoma recently rose to the position of the state that executes more people per capita than any other state in the country, bumping Delaware to second in line for this dubious distinction Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) 16 Bruce & Schultz, 2001. 17 Doka, 2002. 18 B.D.Romanoff & M. Terenzio, ‘Rituals and the grieving process’, Death Studies, 22, 697-711. 19 T.A. Rando, Treatment of Complicated Mourning. (Champaign, Il.: Research Press, 1993). 20 Colin Murray Parkes, ‘Bereavement as a psychosocial transition: Processes of adaptation to change’, Journal of Social Issues, 44, 3, 53-65.

Britain’s ‘Punk’ Mourning Culture Gerri Excell Abstract In 1977 the British music industry was rocked when the Sex Pistols catapulted into the music world with their anti establishment assault on the industry. Now it’s the turn of the British mourning culture, out with established rules of mourning and, in with the new anti establishment mourning culture of the roadside memorial. There are no prescribed rules of what constitutes a roadside memorial and, this is exactly the characteristic that appeals to the bereft, the personalisation of a memorial site. A content analysis of 50 roadside memorials in the UK reveals that it is the individuality of the symbolism that is important for those bereft in today’s society. The roadside is a public space and is the perfect space to incorporate a memorial that can draw attention to the end of a life; the roadside can be used as a place to celebrate the life whilst at the same time protest the untimely death. Religious iconography does not focus heavily in the roadside memorial culture of the UK, is this because the roadside is not perceived as the place for a religious icon? Could it be that the death itself has questioned their faith? This paper will chronicle the development of the roadside memorial in the UK and, discuss how the proliferation of memorials is challenging established rules of mourning. The new ‘punk’ movement of mourning will not go away but may possibly evolve as policy is fashioned and attempts are made at standardising the memorials. However, more can be learnt from the individualised memorials; what are societal values today? What makes a statement about this life, and maybe more importantly what might have been missed about this life if a memorial had not been placed? The roadside memorial provides a voice for a life that may only have a brief eulogy in a crematorium by an officiant who never knew that individual, this voice encourages freedom of speech. Key words: mourning, punk music, roadside memorials, spontaneous memorials. 1.

Introduction In this world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes Benjamin Franklin, 1 death is the greatest leveller for all, besides being born death is the only other certainty we have. However, how our deaths are memorialised remains one of the great uncertainties, unless of course plans have been made in this age of the buy now die later prepayment funerals. The mode of your death, however, may have a qualifying effect on how you are memorialised. Since the 1980s there has

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___________________________________________________________ been a substantial growth in the number of spontaneous and roadside memorials in the UK. 2 This paper will examine the phenomenon of the roadside memorial and compare their emergence on British mourning culture to that of the onslaught of punk music on the British music scene of the 1970s. I will argue that Britain’s mourning culture has been subject to the same processes that the music industry suffered at the hands of the punk music genre. What was once a bottom up movement moves into the mainstream. Whilst at first being feared by the established music world and society, punk music quickly became part of the mainstream and lost some of its original power. The same argument will be levied at the roadside memorial phenomenon, what once courted controversy, has once again joined the mainstream. This paper draws heavily on a previous research project carried out in 2004 as part of my Masters degree. The focus was roadside memorials in the UK, in which interviews were conducted with those who have placed and maintained memorials at the roadside. 2.

Roadside memorials in the UK Over a period of four years I have photographed roadside and spontaneous memorials, collecting visual evidence of this form of memorialisation I decided to research the phenomenon of roadside memorials for my Masters dissertation; I interviewed individuals who had been bereaved through road traffic accidents. I wanted to find out why they chose this form of memorialisation and what meanings they had attached to the memorial. The findings revealed that the mode of their loved ones death, sudden, violent often lonely death was the determining factor in their decision to place a spontaneous memorial. The British have a stoic reputation when it comes to grief, with the British stiff upper lip and a lack of demonstrative public acts. Geoffrey Gorer famously stating in his book on mourning that in the UK death was “pornographic.” 3 However this historically stoic British reputation was in jeopardy of being dismissed as a myth when Diana Princess of Wales died in 1997, the Australian sociologist Peter Griffiths 4 , claiming that in England there was a new “Mediterreanisation” of emotional expression. However, public acts of remembrance and memorialisation have always been a part of the British way of mourning. According to George Monger 5 there has always been a tradition of placing wayside flowers in the British Isles. Yet, it was not until the 1980s that the numbers of spontaneous memorials grew and became part of the British way of mourning. The 1980s saw a host of tragic events, Hillsborough, Lockerbie and The Kings Cross Fire for example, each subjected to spontaneous memorialisation-

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___________________________________________________________ both formal and informal. 6 The mass media played an important part in the dissemination and mass exposure of this organic form of memorialisation. Today, with the advent of 24-hour news television and the Internet, news editors depend on the image of the spontaneous memorial as a poignant backdrop to the news story they are reporting on. In the course of my earlier research I was helped by the UK charity RoadPeace, an organisation founded by Brigitte Chaudhry following the death of her only son in a road traffic accident in 1995. RoadPeace offer advocacy to the families of those bereft through road traffic accidents and offer an online memorial site and a permanent plaque that can be placed at the scene of the fatality. These plastic A4 plaques feature a bleeding anemone and a space where the bereaved can write the name of the person who died, to date RoadPeace report that over 3000 of these plaques are in place. 7 Although RoadPeace claim that over 3000 of their “Remember Me” plaques are in use, it is the individualised, stylised roadside memorial that is commonplace in the UK. 3.

The study Having previously established the rationale for the placing of a spontaneous memorial in an earlier research project 8 , focus was placed on the material culture of the roadside memorials. Cataloguing over 100 memorials from the UK, 50 random memorials were selected and their material culture recorded. Cataloguing the unique features of each memorial in the sample revealed some fascinating insights into our memorial culture of the UK. Drawing from previous published research into roadside memorials from the USA and Australia 9 , it was evident that the UK was unique in its spontaneous memorial culture. Most noticeable was the dearth of “crosses” in our roadside memorials, In Australia Clark & Cheshire 10 report that 80% of the memorials in their sample had a small white cross in the material culture. Similarly in the USA white crosses are the most common form of memorialisation in the roadside memorial culture, many states in the US provide formal white crosses to be placed on the roadside, and only these official white crosses may be placed. 11 The top ten totems found in British roadside memorials were (1) Flowers; (2) Names; (3) Footballing items (flags, shirts, tickets); (4) Candles; (5) Messages; (6) Photographs; (7) Soft toys; (8) Alcohol; (9) Clothing; and (10) Automobile wreckage. 12 This post-modern mourning culture surrounds itself in personal representations of the individual, the individual is the focus, what football team they supported, who they have left behind and what their loss means to society. The study supported the assumption that roadside/spontaneous

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___________________________________________________________ memorialisation is a bottom up movement, where there are no rules of what makes a good memorial it is entirely personal and organic. 4.

The connection with ‘punk’ The early 1970s were dominated by bands that wore more make up, sequins and glitter than the amassed crowds of female fans. Music became light, almost comical, the art school college bands and Oxbridge educated bands like Pink Floyd were edged out by the pop bands such as Sweet, Glitter Band and T Rex. Throughout the twentieth century music styles and cultures had clashed, big band sounds versus rock & roll, Mods Vs Rockers, soon, all music styles encountered their nemesis in the Punk Rockers. Early punk rock was an underground movement that attracted those disillusioned by the grandiose ostentation of the glam rock scene. The Sex Pistols were a band that epitomised the punk movement young men with little or no futures and marginally less musical ability, but with a Machiavellian mentor one Malcolm Maclaren. Keen to make as much money as he could Maclaren was the mastermind behind the Sex Pistols. The rationale behind the Punk movement was borne from that of the Situationalists 13 a social movement active in France in the early part of the nineteenth century. The punk movement was a kick against the established music, clothing and way of live. The seminal Sex Pistols album ‘Never Mind the Bollocks’ contained such ground-breaking songs such as Anarchy in the UK, God Save the Queen and Pretty Vacant. The Sex Pistols were hailed as the voice of the youth, Johnny Rotten, infamous for his angry nihilism; was renowned for his bitterly sarcastic attacks on pretentious affectation and the very foundations of British society. Once again British society was debating the birth of yet, another subculture. Sarah Thornton describes a subculture as Subcultures are groups of people that have something in common with each other …which distinguished them in a significant way from the members of other social groups. 14 This explanation of a subculture exemplifies the punk rock and spontaneous memorial activists in that they are distinguishable from other members of society one by their outlandish appearance and the other with their fervent desire to express their grief so publicly. Thornton goes further in her dissection of a subculture and reveals that subcultures have been studied whilst in a state of transience. This is also true of those who participate in acts of spontaneous memorialisation; they are in a liminal state, a state transition-the mourning phase. Subcultures are often feared

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___________________________________________________________ and misunderstood Stanley Cohen’s seminal work on subcultures 15 laid the foundations for sociological investigations into societal reactions to deviant behaviour. Punk Rock was feared, the very physical appearance of the punk rockers with their safety pin piercings, Mohawk hairstyles and ripped clothing striking fear into the hearts of society. Television programmes discussed the impending dangers of the punk rockers and their influence on impressionable teens. Bill Grundy, the late veteran TV presenter was partly responsible for the Sex Pistols notoriety; the group disrupted a live television interview with their swearing and apparent disregard for the presenter. 16 This behaviour had never been seen on television before in the UK and the nation was in uproar, but the bubble was soon to burst. 5.

The diminishing return Punk rock was a shock, an underground movement, grass roots and anti establishment. However this was all soon to change, the music rapidly became the norm the music charts groaned under the weight of pseudo punk rock bands. High street fashion shops stocked mass-market chain street punk fashions; punk was the norm anyone who had the money could buy into the punk lifestyle. Where once questions were asked in Parliament, now punk was seen in soap operas, daytime television and glossy fashion magazines. The power that punk had was diminishing. The phenomenon of the roadside memorial crept into the British mourning culture by stealth; nobody was interested in the increasing numbers of memorials on busy roads or country lanes. Yet, just as punk burst onto the music scene, now came the dawn of the spontaneous mass memorial. Throughout the decade of tragedy, the 1980s, nightly images, via the news channels, were beamed into our homes, haunting images of the lost lives on the pitch at Hillsborough, or in the sleepy Scottish village of Lockerbie. Once a mass audience had seen the footage the act was absorbed by the viewing public and adopted as a format for memorializing a sudden death, a death that is tragic, and an untimely death. The fascination with this form of memorialisation is that it is spontaneous, what is placed is instantaneous and provides a snapshot of that raw grief at the very moment it was felt. With accidental death agencies of control taking over - the Ambulance, Police and Coroner - the bereft lose control of the situation. The mourning period then resembles what Goffman 17 termed front and back stage behaviour, what goes on front stage the controlled stoical face of ‘bearing up’ has no relation to what is going on behind the scenes The spontaneous memorial allows an outlet for this grief, outrage and protest. The scene of the death, where those bereft lives changed forever can be regained and controlled and personalised within

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___________________________________________________________ hours of the death occurring. No waiting for the undertaker to plan the service and show you the body in its newly purchased coffin, the bereft can act right away to protest and memorialise the death. This is where the danger and fear of the memorial began to materialise, the very fact that the memorials could be used as a protest, a very visual protest. Just as punk rockers were feared because of the questions they asked of society so do roadside memorials their existence poses questions of society and this can be dangerous. Local authorities began to outlaw the practice on the grounds of road safety; others had their own agenda one local authority councillor publicly stating “We don’t need this European mumbo jumbo here in the UK.” 18 As with the punk music phenomenon, there was good and bad press. The freedom of expression in memorialising was good for all, especially with the restrictions imposed by cemeteries with regard to memorial content. However, roadside memorials were considered a contentious issue and the subject of debate in the press and radio, many voicing concerns that the memorials were really litter. The spontaneous memorial made society notice deaths that were sometimes ‘hidden’ for example the numbers of road deaths, the numbers of deaths due to gun crimes and fatal stabbings. The media inflamed these debates by using the memorial sites in their news bulletins and so increasing the numbers of ‘mourning tourists’ those individual’s who choose to visit memorial sites purely out of curiosity. It is almost de rigueur that a spontaneous memorial is placed at the site of a fatal accident. Memorials have developed into, whatever you can do I can do better situation. In economics there is a theory of diminishing returns, for example when you go to the pub the first drink you have you savour, it quenches your thirst, you relish the experience, however, any second or third drinks may be equally enjoyable but, never the same as the first. The same can be said of the roadside memorial, whenever you come across your first roadside memorial you can be saddened, curious angry or disturbed. Yet, it is possible to become desensitized to the memorials and just drive or walk passed with just a glance at yet, another memorial. 6.

Inclusive mourning British mourning culture has embraced this new form of memorialisation and added it to the repertoire and acknowledged that this form of memorialisation encompasses disenfranchised grievers into the fold. The sample of fifty UK spontaneous memorials used in this study revealed that the usually absent group of young individuals 16-25 19 are heavily involved in this form of memorialisation. Youth culture has embraced a way in which they can actively participate in the

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___________________________________________________________ memorialisation process and infuse their own values and beliefs into this practice. Although, this form of memorialisation has allowed a more inclusive mourning practice here in the UK it is sad to see that what was once a powerful individualistic way of expressing private grief publicly has been diluted by its very popularity. 7.

Conclusion The premise for this paper was that Britain’s memorial culture has been transformed by the same processes and sub cultural undercurrents that transformed the music world in the late 1970s. In the USA purpose made memorial crosses and plaques can be purchased from websites eager entrepreneurs finding a lucrative business. The spontaneous memorial has become the ‘darling’ of the mass media, poignant images of a spontaneous memorial site being used as the backdrop of the new report of the incident. The once spontaneously hastily placed bunch of flowers in its supermarket cellophane wrapping with attached price tag, has become a stage-managed prop. Recently on British television a favourite character was ‘killed off’, the character was stabbed and died in the street. The next episode began with a panoramic shot of the gates of the square decked with floral tributes to the dead character 20 . Most of this episode focused on the memorial and characters central to the show were seen placing their tributes and talking about who actually had the right to place tributes there. This can be cited as evidence of how the spontaneous memorial has become part of the norm when it comes to memorialising a tragic death. The soap opera in question claims to represent modern living in London and by using a spontaneous memorial it is enforcing what would be expected to happen in that locality in real life .Real life is reflected in the totems found at these post modern memorial sites . Each memorial is unique, previous research 21 has highlighted the importance to the bereft of the site of death itself a site that is made sacred by the bereft and a place in which reflections of a lost individual can be used in a way to regain control of the tragic circumstances surrounding the death. Cemeteries throughout the UK have introduced wide ranging rules and regulations regarding the decorations and adornments allowed on the graves. Not surprisingly then that the bereft may attempt to find another avenue for displaying their grief. The roadside provides this freedom, the freedom of expression, and the spontaneous memorial is valuable as it is spontaneous. It provides society with an immediate response ho the death, whether this response is an angry protest or a touching human personal response to the death providing a valuable resource for researchers into death, bereavement and post modern

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___________________________________________________________ mourning practices. In the formalized memorial world it may take weeks often months before a permanent memorial is in place, in the events of homicide it may be months of bureaucratic demands before the bodies are released for cremation or burial. Post war British memorial culture has been dominated by the denial of death paradigm, Tony Walter 22 has written extensively on the ‘revival of death’ and a Modernist approach to the rationalization of death; however this rationalization of death only serves to distance death once again from the bereaved. The spontaneous memorial provides a new fresh avenue for active involvement in memorial practices, and holistic approach that was inclusive for all. Lessons can be learnt from the eclectic array of totems so representative of a post – modern world I fear that the once innovative spontaneous memorial has lost some of its initial power and influence on society as a whole. Evidence has been provided where the cultural image of a spontaneous memorial has become part of the TV and music video repertoire, this is a double edges sword it may bring the genre to the masses but, some how reduces the whole aspect and meaning of a memorial of this type. The law of diminishing returns, where once a powerful icon of sudden death now the return has lessened and will we see familiarity breeding contempt?

Notes 1

Benjamin Franklin, Letter to Jean Baptiste Le Roy (1789) US author diplomat, inventor, physicist, politician & printer (1706-1790). 2 Gerri Excell, Roadside Memorials in the UK: Private Grief made Public. Unpublished MA thesis, The University of Reading, UK (2004). 3 Geoffrey Gorer, Death, grief and mourning in contemporary Britain (London: Cresset, 1965), 41. 4 Peter Griffiths, ‘Words cannot say what she is’, in Planet Diana Cultural studies and Global Mourning, ed. Public (Kingswood: University of Western Australia, 1997), 47-48. 5 George Monger, ‘Modern Wayside shrines’, Folklore 108 (1997), 113114. 6 Anne Eyre, ‘Post-Disaster Rituals’, in Grief, Mourning and Death Rituals, ed. Jenny Hockey, Jeanne Katz & Neil Small (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001), 104-111. 7 RoadPeace actively campaign in the UK for the rights of road crash victims to ensure the trauma they suffer is acknowledged. Since 31st August 2003, over 3,000 A4 plaques have been placed nationally, resulting in over 400 articles in local and national press.

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Excell, 2004, 68. Roadside memorials have been subjected to academic debate in the USA and Australia for some years. The first International symposium on Roadside Memorials was held in Australia in 2004. 10 Jennifer Clark and Ashley Cheshire. ‘RIP by the roadside: A comparative Study of roadside memorials in New South Wales, Australia and Texas, United States’, Omega 48 (2004), 229-248. 11 MADD, Mothers against Drunk Drivers in the USA have campaigned since the 1980s and are a tour de force in the US. MADD sanctioned the White Crosses to be placed at the scene of a fatality where alcohol was involved. 12 Gerri Excell, ‘Contemporary deathscapes’ paper given at 7th Annual International Conference on Death, Dying & Disposal, The University of Bath, September 15th-18th (2005). 13 Situationist International (SI) a political movement formed in 1957 in Italy. It grew out of a number of avant-garde artistic and political movements. Its main aim was to challenge conformity and overthrow capitalism. 14 Sarah Thornton, ‘General introduction’, in The Subcultures Reader, ed. Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton (London: Routledge, 1997), 1. 15 Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The creation of Mods and Rockers (London: Mac Gibbon & Kee, 1972), 57. 16 Bill Grundy presented the Thames Television news show ‘Today’ the show was aired only in the London area. On December 1st 1976 the Sex Pistols were a last minute stand in the band Queen who cancelled at the last minute. The band were all intoxicated and were goaded and patronised by Grundy throughout the interview. Grundy succeeded in getting the band to swear live on air, the next day the tabloids were outraged, Grundy was sacked from the show and ‘Today’ was taken off the air for two months. 17 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 70. 18 Sophie Kummer. ‘Road Fatality Signs are Morbid and Un-English’, Edgware Times, sec3, p.4., 12 July (2003). 19 In my local neighborhood a sixteen year old boy tragically drowned. His peer group held nightly vigils until his funeral. T-shirts were produced by the group and worn throughout the period prior to his funeral and at the funeral. Walls were ‘tagged’ with RIP Tyson and signs defaced with text speak messages. The group received press coverage throughout the mourning period those interviewed were in the age range was 14-25. 9

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___________________________________________________________ 20

Eastenders is a BBC 1 soap opera shown three times a week in the UK, first aired in 1985 it portrays the fictional London town of Walford. The episode in question was shown over the Christmas/New Year period 2005. 21 Excell, 2004, 40. 22 Tony Walter, The Revival of Death (London: Routledge, 1994), 51.

Bibliography Hartig, Katie & Kevin Dunn. ‘Roadside Memorials: Interpreting New Deathscapes in Newcastle, New South Wales’. Australian Geographical Studies 36 (1998), 5-20. RoadPeace, ‘About RoadPeace’ Available online at [accessed 17 August 2006]. Based at the University of Reading, Gerri Excell has researched the phenomenon of roadside memorials for the last four years. Her current research examines the spontaneous memorials following terrorist attacks in the UK.

The Making of ‘Good’ Memorialisation Kate Woodthorpe Abstract Studying death is by no means a new adventure in sociology. However, making connections between the different areas of research that largely follow the chronological pattern of dying, moment of death, and after death practices, have to date not been systematically made. Thus, this paper is going to make some preliminary associations between pre-death and post-death literature, via the concept of the ‘good death’. Specifically, it will use Bradbury’s 1 conceptualisation of the good death in order to make sense of how practice in the cemetery is becoming increasingly subjected to norms of behaviour, and constructions of what conforms to/is defined as ‘good’ mourning practice. Using this valuable concept I wish to suggest that, similar to the arguments proposed by Field and James 2 whereby the hospice is becoming increasingly institutionalised - that the contemporary cemetery could now be understood as an institution that dictates memorialisation behaviour and activity, creating powerful norms of ‘good’ memorialisation that in turn are utilised to signify how individuals are ‘coping’ with their bereavement. Key words: cemeteries, memorialisation, good death, institutions, bereavement. 1.

Introduction Social research into death and dying is by no means a recent endeavour. However, the sociality of death and dying remains on the periphery of sociology, with a lot of the literature being produced in this area coming from more anthropological perspectives. The origins of these anthropological perspectives owe much to Hertz, 3 who is commonly regarded as one of the first, and most significant, anthropologists exploring the social meaning of death rituals. In terms of Western death practices, sociological interpretation has tended to reflect the growth of the death work industry, which recently has been dominated by the monumental developments in health care. The 1960s can lay claim to being one of the most progressive decades in the development of a ‘death movement’, with the establishment of the Hospice Movement by Dame Cicely Saunders, and the publication of Jessica Mitford’s ‘American Way of Death.’ 4 Importantly however, whilst these two isolated occurrences reflect the progress of intellectual endeavours on death and dying, whereby they did not act to establish a link between the periods before and after death. This separation between work on before and after death has prevailed since then, with a huge

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___________________________________________________________ growth in dying and palliative care study, and less attention paid to issues surrounding disposal and after-death practices. Evidence for the current state of affairs in England today includes many academic departments devoted specifically to researching hospices. Cemeteries, on the other hand, remain on the periphery of academics’ remits, although there have been important developments with the establishment of the Cemetery Research Group at the University of York and the Death Centre at the University of Bath within the last decade. In addition, whilst there have been individual academic authors who have attempted to bridge the gap between dying and death 5, 6 , 7 these works have not fully entered the contemporary cemetery landscape, tending to focus on exploring wider ritual activity and frameworks of understanding. This paper therefore intends to expand on these tentative bridges between disciplines, and incorporate ‘dying’ literature into an ethnographic study of the contemporary cemetery and memorialisation practice, underpinned by “a dawning realisation that contemporary attitudes to death and dying are unsatisfactory and that society has somehow lost touch with the meaning of life.” 8 As sites of remembrance, cemeteries have a lot to offer us in terms of how people understand and remember the dead, both individually and collectively, locating the activity of bereaved people in the social world; something which, to date, has been neglected in the positivist climate of bereavement research. 9 Thus, I wish to create a dialogue between accounts of those experiences of dying and contemporary mourning behaviour, using the model of the good death 10 to describe and suggest there is scope for utilising concepts from the dying experience when exploring post-death experience, specifically memorialisation. This will then be extended to suggest that there are similarities between the institutionalisation of hospice activity 11 and an institutionalisation of ‘good’ memorialisation activity. The data for this paper comes from an ESRC funded ethnographic study of the contemporary cemetery landscape, co-funded by the City of London and Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management. All fieldwork took placed at the City of London Cemetery and Crematorium in Newham, East London. This 220-acre site is celebrating its 150 year anniversary this year. It is run by the Corporation of London, employs approximately 90 staff, and is in the process of establishing itself as a ‘Centre of Excellence for Best Practice’. In addition the cemetery prides itself in offering a range of choices for the burial of dead individuals, including lawn burial, traditional burial and woodland burial. In this vein, the cemetery attempts to cater for everyone, placing accessibility and individuality at its core. The purpose of this project has

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___________________________________________________________ been to explore conservation and how different groups of people (visitors, staff and the local community) perceive this dynamic and complex landscape. In turn, this has developed into a wider exploration of meanings and values attributed to the dead and conceptualisations of life, as “the issue of death throws into relief the most important cultural values by which people live their lives and evaluate their experiences.” 12 2.

The ‘good’ and ‘bad’ death The beginning of the conceptualisation of the ‘good death’ can be attributed to Glaser and Strauss’ 13 ideal dying typologies, whereby the dying person has varying degrees of awareness of their situation. The notion of an ‘ideal’ way to die was further expanded upon by Ariès 14 who compared contemporary dying with a romantic model of the ‘tame’ death from the nineteenth century. Bloch and Parry 15 developed this typology of death, with several of the papers in their edited collection pointing to a ‘good’ death being closely linked with ideas of rebirth. 16,17 A good death is largely characterised as one where there is an absence of pain and an awareness of dying, “while a ‘bad death’ may mean weeks, months, or even years of slow agony.” 18 These conceptual tools of a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ death can be contested for being overly romantic 19 and too narrow in their scope 20 , yet the ‘intellectual structure’ that they can provide 21 is nevertheless a useful mechanism through which to explore experiences of death. In particular, how the good death has been constructed gives us great insight into how we, individually and collectively, can understand ‘life’ and ‘death’, as Sociological contributions to our understandings of the good death [that] have provided descriptions of the social management of dying and death, and expositions of cultural reactions to death and their consequent shaping of the lives of dying people. 22 Specifically, this paper focuses on Bradbury’s 23 understandings of the good death to suggest that there are real parallels between activity within institutions that the dying and dead inhabit. In addition there are further similarities in tensions that arise between these ‘ideal’ types of dying/post-death practice and the increasing bureaucratisation and routinisation of these settings. 24 3. Good death typologies and cemetery memorialisation A. Sacred good death

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___________________________________________________________ For Bradbury a sacred good death involves the notion of ‘moving’ on to a better place and the concept of rebirth. It is therefore spiritual in that there are larger belief systems about life and death being incorporated into the death experience, in order to make sense of it. Pain and agony can be present, but in this death they are acceptable, as they are part of the process of moving from life into death. In this typology death is a social event, with death bed farewells commonly occurring. Thus, the death bed scene is central to this type of death, with the dying surrounding themselves with things that represent ‘life’. 25 B. Sacred good memorialisation Using the death bed model, we can understand sacred memorialisation as activity that takes place beside the (bed) grave, as my data has suggested: visiting the grave is a social event, where family members and friends can be reunited with the deceased or other family members/friends who may visit. It was not uncommon for visitors to locate their dead in the cemetery, but still as part of their social networks of friends and family to visit, exemplified by one visitor who told me: “I always talk to people I come to, tell them different things. I see loved ones as being here.” Survivors’ new identities also reflect wider beliefs about their relationship with the dead. As one participant told me: “I think for some people it’s not just to do this, lay the flowers and that sort of thing. They find comfort, they do, they talk to them, say things, they ask their advice.” Thus, for this person the dead continue to have a continuing social presence in their life, taking on a special - a sacred - capacity in that they have to be visited specifically in the cemetery. C. Medical (modern) good death Control is central to this type of death. The locus of this control is medical intervention that can be applied and manipulated to orchestrate the death. Death is the responsibility of experts, whose technical knowledge means they are the privileged holders of knowledge and their control over the process can be equivalent to, if not greater than, the dying person themselves. In this type of death, location and timing are everything, and is most evident in the hospice or hospital setting, where symptom control is vital. This can further lead to an increasing medicalisation of the dying process and a resulting institutionalisation of practice. 26 D. Modern memorialisation As in the case of modern dying, this type of memorialisation is about control and limitations placed upon visitors by ‘the experts’ - who in

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___________________________________________________________ this instance are the cemetery staff. Emphasis is placed on controlling of expressions of grief through particular forms of memorialisation, and a practical regulation of any expressions that breach the limits of acceptability constructed by the cemetery management and enacted through the cemetery regulations. For example, the City of London Cemetery and Crematorium Regulation 27 number 86 states that: ‘We do not allow curbs, posts or vases in the lawn section’. Regulation 94 further states: ‘We do not allow crosses made of wood, bell glasses, shells, grass wreaths or other moveable or fragile items in the cemetery.’ Thus memorialisation activity is perceived as either abiding by or breaking those rules. The wider meaning or purpose behind it is implied by the enforcement of memorial directives and the need to maintain a controlled landscape overall. Much like Lawton’s 28 assertion that patients were sedated or moved due to the collective nature of wards in the hospice and the distress dying could cause for others, cemetery staff clear graves of prohibited memorialisation in order to ensure that the collective space fulfils their ideal of good memorialisation practice, based on their reading of the public’s reaction – and then incorporated into the regulations. E. Natural good death For Bradbury, the natural good death has a dual meaning: firstly, a sense of death taking place ‘in’ nature, and secondly of it being ‘natural.’ 29 A death may have only one of these elements or both, but it is the notion of acceptance of death that permeates both of these meanings. Primarily, the main focus of this category is the break from, or lack of, intervention and control in death. Whilst this type of dying may incorporate elements of the sacred death, in that rituals and concepts of regeneration may be present, the emphasis is on the individual rather than wider belief systems. F. Natural memorialisation Similar to the ambiguous nature of other items within Bradbury’s typology, this form of memorialisation can simultaneously be seen as about being ‘in’ nature and/or being ‘natural’. Burial could take place in a woodland area or a more conventional municipal lawn section; importantly, the focus is not where the body is buried, but rather it is this theme of intervention that is key here. In natural memorialisation there is an emphasis on the normality of death, an acceptance, and a sentiment towards the individuality of the person, rather than expert technical knowledge. Thus, there may be elements of the sacred and modern in this type of memorialisation, but the focus is on the individual rather than wider frameworks of shared beliefs and values. In this way, it is the

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___________________________________________________________ ultimate late modern act of memorialisation, ‘done my way.’ 30 Inevitably, in a collective landscape, this individuality can cause conflict, as one staff member told me: They still don’t understand that people, you’re not going to never stop people putting things on the grave, what they want on the grave. You can give them rules and regulations, what you can have and what you can’t have, but people don’t want to listen to that. That’s their little memory to that person isn’t it? They want to put on it what they want. Thus, through all these conceptualisations of memorialisation practice, visitors and staff members alike are characterising activity, relating it to their shared and individual understandings of death and bereavement, and constructing wider notions of what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ practice. Similar to the hospice and the good death however, this has led to a routinisation of practice, which has a profound impact upon those individuals who do not conform to ‘good’ behaviour. Similar to how the good death has been constructed in a dichotomous relationship to the aforementioned ‘bad’ death the sacred, modern and natural types of memorialisation practice can be utilised to understand perceptions of ‘bad’ activity within the cemetery. Throughout my data, ‘abandoned’ graves were frequently referred to as ‘being left behind’ or ‘forgotten’, implying that there is judgement being made about what is being done by/left on a grave in terms of ‘bad’ behaviour. This was exemplified by one woman who told me: I don’t like [it] when I see graves looking… I know it sounds silly, but I don’t like them when they’re half falling down and really badly taken care of. I don’t like that. I wouldn’t like to see my Mother’s grave in a big mess, I wouldn’t like that. I think it does matter, if it’s all overgrown. I mean, I know they’re dead already but to see it look in a big mess like that, it needs to be neater and tidy, and taken care of. Like someone’s almost caring for them. In addition, similar to the ideal good deaths constructed by health professionals who see dying on a daily basis, 31 staff at the cemetery construct their own typology of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ memorialisation (independent of the regulations) based on what they perceive to be either

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___________________________________________________________ valuable or unattractive. One staff member was particularly vocal about current memorialisation practices: I can only use one word to describe my feelings [towards memorialisation], tacky. I think the modern ones are often tacky. Colours, lack of imagination in the design of the memorial, strange lines, over polished, the lettering, machine cut, what more can I say? As we can see, staff and visitor perceptions of memorialisation practice around the cemetery are mediated by broad conceptualisations of good and bad practices, which relate closely to Bradbury’s typologies of the good death. These in turn are ‘read’ as indicators of the strength of relationships with the dead, and of how individuals are coping with their bereavement. Unfortunately there is not the scope of entering into this final point in greater detail here, suffice to say, one of the principal suggestions of this paper is that embodied material activity in the cemetery is being associated closely with ‘clinical lore’ 32 conceptualisations of what constitutes ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’ grieving behaviour. 4.

Conflict in the cemetery However, tensions arise as these ideal types of memorialisation sometimes simply do not fit with the actual reality of what happens (similar to Lawton’s experiences of dying not fitting the ideal type in the hospice). This tension manifests itself in the clearing of mementoes from graves if they are deemed inappropriate or dangerous by the cemetery regulations, causing visitors to complain. This conflict has grown to the extent that I was told by visitors to the graves that there were ‘miniHitler’s’ in the cemetery office. On another occasion one woman told me: I don’t know quite how to describe why I think this, but I do sometimes get the impression that someone in control, the manager or somebody, would prefer to have only the people who’ve died and not the people who are living at all. That they’re a nuisance in some way. There a distinct parallels here with Lawton’s data that suggests dying patients feel they are a nuisance or a burden upon their families and the health authority. This perception, particularly in terms of relationships between the professionals and the patient/cemetery visitor is troubling, as it indicates the ideological underpinning of ‘choice’ and ‘individuality’ is not being successfully negotiated in either the hospice or the cemetery. In

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___________________________________________________________ the hospice, this issue is highlighted by the heavy sedation of patients to fit the ‘good death’ model; in the cemetery this is the removal of items from the grave to fit a ‘good’ landscape aesthetic. Concurrently, individuals who do not correspond with the ideal types of dying and cemetery activity are pathologised: excessive noise/smell/pain are discouraged in the hospice; excessive memorialisation is also viewed as disproportionate and actively controlled in the cemetery by removal of what is deemed ‘inappropriate’. Essentially, it is the controlling function of the institutional nature of the hospice and cemetery that is key here, as they impose norms of ‘good’ behaviour and practice upon their residents and visitors that is further internalised by visitors and adopted as the ‘ideal’ way to ‘do’ memorialisation and bereavement practice. Williams 33 has argued that at an institutional level, all societies need to control death. However, this abstract statement needs to move beyond the realm of theory into the lived reality of the two spaces considered in this paper, where we can see that behaviour is frequently mediated and regulated to meet institutionalised (collective) standards of practice and behaviour 34 . McNamara et al 35 believe the institutionalisation of practice in the hospice is particularly problematic, as it undermines the ideological foundation of the hospice: that of patient autonomy, holistic practice and quality of life. 36 To meet the demands of a growing population however, the hospice has had to become increasingly routinised to ensure that it functions efficiently and effectively. 37 This in turn has led to a return to hierarchies of expertise in the hospice 38 and the aforementioned manipulation of dying experiences to ‘fit’ the ideology. 39 Furthermore, this institutionalisation of death practice is not limited to the hospice, as research in other organizations suggests there are similar ideologies being tested. 40 Through transposing the good death typologies onto memorialisation activity within the cemetery, we can see comparable institutionalisation of behaviour in the cemetery landscape, evidenced particularly by the regulations which state what is allowed. By doing this, these regulations are constructing ‘appropriate’ collective memorialisation practices that manipulate behaviour and artefacts left in the cemetery to ‘fit’ the good mourning practice aesthetic. 5.

The cemetery in society Hart et al 41 have expressed a concern over the dominance of the good death ideology in the hospice; my data suggests that this concern is applicable also to the contemporary cemetery. Whilst the ideology of the good death was created in response to the increasing medicalisation of death, it has now become a possible tool through which control over the dying experience can be exercised by experts. Similarly, memorialisation

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___________________________________________________________ in the cemetery is now regulated to conform to a collective ideal – which in reality is problematic and contested. For the dying patient, the routinisation of the good death experience can be accused of pushing the patient to the periphery and enabling the ‘experts’ to dominate the dying experience. Similarly, ideal types of memorialisation behaviour are creating a routinisation and idealisation of bereavement practices, enforced by regulations. So, what does this mean for the contemporary cemetery landscape? It is the principle argument of this paper that due to the constructions of ‘appropriate’ memorialisation practice, the cemetery is as revealing as the hospice in terms of the institutionalisation of death. This institutionalisation rhetoric does not rest easily with typologies of good death/memorialisation, and thus, the cemetery needs to be assessed as under threat from this routinisation of practice as the hospice has been. Practitioners, policy makers and academics alike need to recognise the significance of the controlling of memorialisation practice, and what this actually reflects in terms of wider (late) modernist understandings of life and death. In addition, we need to expand perceptions the cemetery landscape in order to understand its institutionalised role in society and address how this role could change in the future 42 . By doing this, the cemetery landscape could be much more closely linked into the process of living and dying, and accordingly attract more attention from local communities, stakeholders, fundraisers and policy makers. 6.

Conclusion Through exploring these conceptualisations of good memorialisation practice, I have shown how the cemetery shapes mourning behaviour and practice, similar to ways in which activity is shaped within a hospice. There is much scope for a greater integration of the cemetery into local communities, in the way that hospices have been, yet they continue to remain on the periphery of local communities and policy makers’ agendas. This low status has been reflected in research into death-related spaces, with only a few notable exceptions in recent years 43, 44 . However, it is my hope that this will begin to change, as interdisciplinary conferences such as Making Sense of: Dying and Death promote a dialogue between the different researchers and audiences working with death and dying. If we - as individuals, academics, policy markers and practitioners - can begin to develop a constructive acrossdiscipline conversation about our understandings of how people deal with dying, death and disposal, there is a greater potential for providing the best

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___________________________________________________________ and most appropriate space, landscape and service for the dying, the dead, and the bereaved, both now and in the future.

Notes 1

Mary Bradbury, Representations of death: a social psychological perspective (London: Routledge, 1999). 2 David Field, & Neil James, ‘Where and how people die’, in D. Clark, (ed) The Future for Palliative Care: Issues of Policy and Practice (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1993), 6-29. 3 Robert Hertz, Death and the Right Hand, Tr. R. and C. Needham (London: Cohen West, 1960 [1907]). 4 Richard Huntington & Peter Metcalf, Celebrations of Death: the anthropology of mortuary ritual, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 5 Tony Walter, The Revival of Death (London: Routledge, 1994). 6 Jenny Hockey ‘Encountering the ‘reality of death’ through professional discourses: the matter of materiality’, Mortality, 1, 1 (1996), 45-60. 7 S.M. O’Gorman ‘Death and Dying in contemporary society: an evaluation of current attitudes and the rituals associated with death and dying and their relevance to recent understandings of health and healing’, Journal of Advanced Nursing, 27 (1998), 1127-1135. 8 Ibid, 1133. 9 Christine Valentine, ‘Academic constructions of bereavement’, Mortality, 11, 1 (2006), 57-78. 10 Maurice Bloch & Jonathan Parry (ed.s) Death and the Regeneration of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 11 Field and James. 12 Huntington and Metcalf, 25. 13 Barney Glaser & Anselm Strauss, Awareness of Dying (New York: Aldine, 1965). 14 Phillipe Ariès, Western Attitudes towards death: from the middle ages to the present, tr. P.R. Ranum (London: John Hopkins University Press, 1974). 15 Bloch and Parry. 16 Jonathan Parry, ‘Sacrificial death and the necrophagous ascetic’, in Death and the Regeneration of Life, ed. M. Bloch and J. Parry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 74-110. 17 J. Watson, ‘Of flesh and bones: the management of death pollution in Cantonese Society’, in Death and the Regeneration of Life, ed. M. Bloch and J. Parry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 155-186.

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Maria Càtedra, ‘Kinds of Death and the House’, in Death, Mourning, and Burial: a cross-cultural reader, ed A.C.G.M. Robben (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 77. 19 Norbert Elias, The Loneliness of the Dying, tr. E. Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985). 20 B. Hart, P. Sainsbury. & S. Short ‘Whose dying? A sociological critique of the ‘good death’’, Mortality, 3, 1 (1998), 65-77. 21 Beverley McNamara, C. Waddell & M. Colvin, ‘Threats to the good death: the cultural context of stress and coping among hospice workers’, Sociology of Health and Illness, 17, 2 (1995) 222-244, 237. 22 Hart et al, 65. 23 Bradbury. 24 Beverley McNamara, C. Waddell, & M. Colvin, ‘The Institutionalization of the Good Death’, Social Science and Medicine, 39, 11 (1994), 1501-1508. 25 Julia Lawton, The Dying Process: patients’ experiences of palliative care (London: Routledge, 2000). 26 McNamara et al, 1994. 27 City of London Cemetery Regulations, 2000 (30th May 2006) . 28 Lawton. 29 Bradbury, 152. 30 Walter, 1994. 31 Beverley McNamara, Fragile Lives: death, dying and care (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001). 32 Tony Walter, On Bereavement: the culture of grief (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999). 33 Simon Williams, Medicine and the Body (London: Sage, 2003). 34 see E.K. Abel, ‘The Hospice Movement: institutionalizing innovation’, International Journal of Health Services, 16, 1 (1986). 35 McNamara et al, 1994. 36 Hart et al. 37 Field and James. 38 McNamara et al, 1995. 39 Lawton. 40 see Carol Komaromy, ‘The performance of the hour of death’, in Palliative Care for Older People in Care Homes, ed J. Hockley and D. Clark (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2002), 138-150. 41 Hart et al.

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Ian Hussein, Paper given at Memorial Awareness Board session, Houses of Parliament, (3rd May 2006). 43 Phillip Bachelor Sorrow and Solace: the social world of the cemetery (Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishers, 2004). 44 Doris Francis, Leonie Kellaher, & Georgina Neophytou, The Secret Cemetery (Oxford: Berg, 2005). Kate Woodthorpe is completing her Ph.D. thesis on Cemetery Conservation in the Department of Sociological Studies at the University of Sheffield, under the principal supervision of Professor Jenny Hockey. Her other interests include Cultural Sociology and the Sociology of Health and Illness, particularly chronic illness and embodiment. This project has been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, the City of London, and the Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management.

Institutional Loss: Dialectical Tensions in Coping with Major Loss Melanie K. Finney Abstract Multiple deaths occurring at academic institutions present interesting challenges for those trying to help others adjust and cope with such losses. This article addresses the characteristics of higher educational institutions that make them vulnerable to extreme forms of grieving, and that may complicate coping with major traumas. In particular, these factors serve to emphasize the dialectical tensions involved in coping with major loss that are present when multiple deaths occur in university communities. Drawing on the dialogism of social theorist Bahktin, five particular dialectical tensions are outlined: (1) tensions between individuals’ needs to remember and institutions' need to move on; (2) tensions regarding the demonstration of private grief and public mourning; (3) tensions between performance of public and private rituals; (4) tensions as individuals move between roles as mourners and consolers; and (5) tensions as individuals struggle to accept pain and move towards growth. This essay considers how institutions must be aware of, and address, the frequently competing needs of the various parties as they encounter these types of losses. Key words: dialectical tensions, grief, institutional loss, mourning, rituals, university communities. As seemingly safe, protected institutions, colleges and universities face special challenges in helping members of their communities make sense of, and come to terms with, emotionally devastating events. This essay first examines the characteristics that distinguish academic institutions from other types of organizations, especially in terms of how traumatic events may affect its members. Additionally, because of these characteristics, administrators may struggle as they consider the needs of the various groups that are affected by major losses. In response to these challenges, I outline five dialectical tensions that may be present as university communities’ grapple with how best to address institutional tragedies. 1.

Universities as distinctive institutions American academic institutions are generally perceived as safe havens, where problems are solved through discourse and debate, not through aggression or violence. Stereotypically, these ‘ivory towers’ are places where the highly educated have chosen to pursue the life of the

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___________________________________________________________ mind, rather than engage in the vagaries of life. Faculty frequently function as observers or critics of social practices, rather than actively ‘getting their hands dirty’ with politics, capitalism, or social disputes. Because university communities are generally perceived as bastions of liberty, democracy, and locations that promote the free exchange of ideas, there is a presumption of safety and isolation from the ‘real world’. Historically, universities have served in some capacity in locus parentis, as parents entrust their nearly grown children into the care of others. Generally speaking, bad things are not supposed to happen on college campuses. Students and faculty should be immune from tragedy or crime. Additionally, colleges and universities are unique types of institutions because of their largely transitory population. Typically, students, who are the largest peer/cohort group in the overall institution, are enrolled only until they meet their degree requirements, generally in the range of four to six years. This is the nature of the institution: students enter, receive training/education, and then leave. While there is less movement on the part of faculty and administrators, some turnover on the part of the employees in educational institutions is also expected. In addition to the transitory nature of colleges, students are a particularly vulnerable population in terms of their ability to cope with traumatic or stressful events due in part to the developmental stage of most students at undergraduate institutions. Young people frequently lack experience in dealing with loss and haven’t yet adopted behavioural scripts about how to cope with traumatic events. 1 Specifically, age itself, especially for those under age 25, is a predictor of complicated or postponed grief. Additionally, as Janoff-Bulman notes, young people frequently have a distorted view of their invulnerability. 2 To co-opt the title of a previously published book, young people generally don’t believe or understand that “bad things happen to good people.” 3 Most college undergraduates are not cognitively or emotionally ready to deal with tragedy, especially when it happens to individuals in their social networks. Thus, when tragedies occur within an academic institution, those most affected are unprepared to confront such losses. A final characteristic of college life concerns the types of bonds that are formed during the college years. Because most young college students are living independently for the first time, they seek out and develop relationships with others. During this developmental stage, many students become strongly identified with their academic community, which frequently continues long past graduation. As students are socialized into their academic institutions, they become loyal fans and supporters, which is one way that universities keep alumni connected. For example, supporting varsity athletics is a major contributing factor in

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___________________________________________________________ creating a sense of belonging and unity for current and former students. Alumni come to define themselves in part by their institutions. For example, students who graduate from Texas A & M University in College Station, Texas are not simply ‘alums’ of TAMU; they are and forever will be “Fightin’ Texas Aggies.” This strong identification with an alma mater explains why, in some cases, people continue to be affected by the events on a campus even after they have left the university. Thus, the collective group of people that are affiliated or identified with a particular institution is very large. University communities are much more than the currently enrolled student body. Clearly then, because of their transitory, young adult populations, coupled with the presumption, or perhaps illusion, that universities are safe havens and places that are above the fray of violent crime or heinous behaviour, as well as the fiercely held loyalties to one’s alma mater, academic institutions consist of multiple audiences and present many challenges for the study of how individuals and communities cope with tragedies resulting from multiple or violent deaths. Addressing those who have suffered a major loss, however, is complicated since not only the support needs of the bereaved change over time 4 but frequently, multiple communities or audiences exist. When dealing with major public tragedies, especially those that involve multiple loss of life, the needs of many and varied audiences become even more intricate. For example, in addition to the profound grief experienced by families and loved ones of the victims, those who may have witnessed the tragedy and survived may struggle with feelings of helplessness or guilt. Thus multiple messages, to multiple audiences, whether in the form of public address, ritual, or memorial construction, require careful attention and development in order to satisfy individual and social needs successfully. The next section more fully considers, from a dialectical perspective, the frequently competing needs of those whose lives have been touched by tragedy. 2.

Dialectical tensions in institutional grief and loss A dialectical perspective is useful for examining the complications inherent in coping with major loss. Based originally on the dialogic work of Mikhail Bakhtin 5 and further developed by Baxter and Montgomery, 6 dialectics explain the contradictions inherent in the study of various social relationships. I later expand this approach to apply as well to issues of grief and loss, and subsequent sense-making, coping, and moving on. In general, however, the theory of relational dialectics concerns the ongoing experience and management of tensions in personal relationships. According to Baxter and Montgomery, there are four

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___________________________________________________________ dimensions of dialectics present in relationships: contradiction, change, praxis, and totality. Contradiction involves the “dynamic interplay of unified oppositions” in relationships, 7 and describes how simultaneous, competing needs require careful management. For example, individuals in personal relationships may have needs for both personal autonomy and concurrently, emotional connection with a partner. The dimension of change indicates awareness of these competing tensions as a means for promoting change and modification to the relationship. Praxis refers to the idea that individuals are simultaneously subjects and objects, both acting and being acted upon, so that actions and reactions are perpetually ongoing. Finally, totality suggests that multiple contradictions or tensions occur together and are not isolated. It is possible, therefore, for several different tensions to be present at any one time, further complicating the desire to respond in a way that helps maintain balance. Overall, this dialectical perspective recognizes that individuals have competing needs that require skilful management, at both the personal and the social level. In a different article, I argue that these same four dimensions of contradiction, change, praxis, and totality are also evident in how individuals and institutions adjust to various dialectical tensions concerning grief and loss. 8 In a grief-related context, Stroebe, Schut, and Stroebe discuss how bereaved people may oscillate between a loss-orientation and a restoration-orientation, and emphasize the need for a ‘dual process model’ for coping with loss. They define these two orientations in the following way: By loss-orientation we mean that a person is concentrating on, dealing with, and processing some aspect of the loss experience. Grief work falls within this dimension, as do rumination and yearning for the deceased, just thinking or talking about him or her, looking at photos, and imagining how he or she would react. Facing up to the loss or crying over the death would also be part of this process. 9 By contrast, the process less familiar, and certainly less explicit, in bereavement research and counselling, is that of restoration orientation. When a loved one dies, not only do we grieve for him or her, we also have to adjust to substantial changes that are secondary consequences of loss. … It incorporates learning to do things alone learning to go places as a single person, not as part of a

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___________________________________________________________ couple and this, perhaps more than anything, may force confrontation again with the fact of loss.) It means establishing new routines, fulfilling new roles, developing a new identity, and adjusting to an environment without the deceased. 10 Thus, when confronted with major loss, bereaved individuals have both a need to ruminate, remember, and grieve the loss, as well as to create a new life and identity without the loved one. While not describing this dual-process model in terms of dialectical theory, clearly this conflicting pull between these two orientations is a type of dialectical tension. Considering the previously outlined complexities within the university context, I suggest that there are at least five dialectical tensions concerning grief and loss that must be managed in these types of institutions: (1) the tension between individuals’ needs to remember and institutions' needs to move on (similar to Stroebe, et al’s dual process model); (2) tensions regarding the demonstration (or not) of private grief and public mourning; (3) the tension between performance of public and private rituals; (4) the tension as individuals move between being mourners and consolers; and (5) tensions as people struggle to accept pain and move towards growth. The first tension is the most significant and potentially longest lasting, as individuals and institutions struggle with the desire to hold on to the past and the memory of the deceased. Socio-cultural assumptions suggest that the more we love(d) an individual, the more difficult it is to ‘let that person go.’ By staying in a prolonged grieving period, some individuals may feel they are showing more honour and respect to the deceased than if they were to begin to ‘move on.’ Frequently heard expressions relating to this dialectic tension include ‘we will remember’ or ‘we’ll never forget.’ On the other hand, people and institutions cannot effectively exist in a perpetual state of limbo. Given the cyclical nature of life in the academy especially, it is imperative that classes continue to meet, students continue to work on meeting degree requirements, faculty continue to teach and conduct research, and administrators continue to oversee both day-to-day and long-term operations. While students frequently get breaks from classes and faculty members earn sabbaticals, it is impossible for an academic institution to simply put its obligations on hold. Life must continue on and institutions must be forward-looking. Thus, there is a strong dialectical tension between needing to remember and needing to move on. This tension is probably most strongly evident

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___________________________________________________________ when the needs of grieving individuals and the needs of the institution are in conflict with one another. Second, especially in western culture, there is a strong dialectical tension between the demonstrations of emotion in public versus private settings. Publicly, individuals must grapple with what and how much emotion to display. In some cases, individuals may feel torn between needing to be strong or stoic and experiencing and wanting to express deep pain and loss. In many western cultures, for example, it is generally considered appropriate for women and children to publicly display intense grief, especially during the initial stages of loss. For men, however, and more notably for professional men, emotional displays are considered a weakness. According to Martin and Doka, gendered stereotypes continue to exist about the proper ways for men and women to grieve and adapt to loss. 11 They note that the issue is not so much whether men and women grieve differently as it is that people have different ways of coping with grief, and that “different” does not imply inferior. Nonetheless, the presumptions in many cultures are that weak individuals display emotion publicly and that strong, professional people should present a stoic front and grieve in private. Additionally, there are socially constructed views about the appropriate ways that the deceased may be remembered publicly, but there are fewer restrictions about social appropriateness in small, private settings. For example, privately, it may be appropriate to share personal and humorous stories of the deceased, but one would never do so in a formal tribute. There are clear, albeit frequently unspoken, social rules about how one can celebrate the life of, or eulogize, deceased members of a community in a public setting. Oftentimes, the tension between balancing the public and private demonstration of grief and mourning creates intrapersonal, as well as interpersonal and social conflict. The third dialectical tension is similar in that it concerns the performance of public and private rituals. In some communities, there are precise rituals that must be enacted, regardless of whether the individual participants wish to do so. For example, when a head of state dies, there are certain public rituals, i.e., calling for a day of mourning, having an escorted funeral procession, or a body lying in state, that must be enacted for the benefit of the larger community, regardless of the wishes of the immediate family. Conversely, there may be very personal, private rituals that some may feel need to be performed, yet these rituals may not be understood by others in the community. For example, one of my family traditions is that burial clothes for the deceased should be night or bed clothes, and as such, a family member was buried in a smoking jacket, rather than a formal suit and tie. This private, personalized tradition may

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___________________________________________________________ conflict with norms for appropriate public behaviour. These contradictions can create difficulties for all parties involved, as an institutional loss is in some ways private, as well as public. A fourth dialectical tension exists in the roles individuals must assume following the death of a community member. While many individuals may be affected either directly or indirectly, their needs for offering consolation or requiring comfort may shift back and forth. It is relatively easy to note those needing assistance or comfort: family members of the deceased, those who directly worked with or under the one who has died, those whose lives were personally touched by the individual. However, grief and loss does not simply affect one individual at a time, especially in an institution with diverse populations. Put simply: who comforts the comforters? People may simultaneously be both grievers and comforters. For example, some hospice workers assume a great deal of the responsibility for providing assistance and comfort to a terminally ill patient’s family, yet when the patient dies, they may also experience a profound sense of loss and require comfort as well. This dialectical tension concerns how people balance the desire to comfort others and yet be able to receive or ask for comfort when necessary. Finally, there is a strong dialectical tension as people struggle to accept and embrace pain and move towards growth. In John Harvey’s book, Give Sorrow Words, he approaches dealing with major loss in a way that “loss becomes gain as we heal and particularly as we use our losses and what we learn from them to contribute to others who also suffer.” 12 Pain resulting from major loss is not simply something that is experienced and remains forever so by one person. Pain can bring growth and development as surely as growth begets additional pain. As prior bereavement work suggests, acceptance of loss is a necessary precursor for healing, but individuals may cycle through various phases of pain and healing throughout one’s life. Thus, moving through pain could be recast as potential growth. Simultaneously, producing new growth, especially as the bereaved reach out to others, may necessitate enduring additional pain as well. For example, life-saving surgeries may be quite painful, recoveries prolonged and difficult. Similarly, as those who have suffered a major loss engage with, and help support or care for others, the growth that results may be inexplicably linked with pain and heartache. Thus, major tragedies in academic institutions necessitate balancing many and varied competing needs, notably for many and varied competing audiences. The five dialectical tensions outlined emphasize the need for careful and well co-ordinated communication at multiple levels when tragedy strikes the academy. Pain and suffering resulting from extensive grief and loss may eventually give way to healing and growth,

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___________________________________________________________ but these on-going, intrinsically linked processes require conscientious forethought and action.

Notes 1

Melanie K. Barnes, et al., ‘The Relativity of Grief: Differential Adaptation Reactions of Younger and Older Persons’, Journal of Personal and Interpersonal Loss, 1 (1998), 375-392. 2 Ronnie Janoff-Bulman & Michael Berg, ‘Disillusionment and the Creation of Values: From Traumatic Losses to Existential Gains’, in Perspectives on Loss: A Sourcebook, ed. John H. Harvey (Philadelphia: Brunner Mazel, 1998), 35-47. 3 Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. (New York: Avon Books, 1981). 4 Melanie K. Barnes, ‘A case study approach to support needs following the death of a loved one’, Journal of Personal and Interpersonal Loss, 1 (1996), 275-298. 5 Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). 6 Leslie A. Baxter & Barbara M. Montgomery, Relating: Dialogues and Dialectics (New York: Guilford, 1996). 7 Ibid, 9. 8 Melanie K. Finney, ‘Accommodating Dialectical Tensions in Academic Institutions Following Traumatic Events’ (in prep). 9 Margaret Strobes, Hank Schut, & Wolfgang Stroebe, ‘Trauma and Grief: A Comparative Analysis’, in Perspectives on Loss: A Sourcebook, ed. John H. Harvey, (Philadelphia: Brunner Mazel, 1998), 91. 10 Ibid, 92. 11 Terry L. Martin & Kenneth J. Doka, Men Don’t Cry… Women Do: Transcending Gender Stereotypes of Grief (Philadelphia: Brunner Mazel, 1999). 12 John H. Harvey, Give Sorrow Words: Perspectives on Loss and Trauma (Philadelphia: Brunner Mazel, 2000), 208. Melanie K. Finney received her Ph.D. from The University of Iowa and is Associate Professor of Communication and Theatre at DePauw University, Greencastle, Indiana, United States.

Traumatic Bereavement and Coping: Implications for a Contextual Approach Karola Dillenburger, Montse Fargas, Grace Kelly and Rym Akhonzada Abstract Bereavement responses and outcomes depend on multiple factors, such as circumstances of the death, the relationship with the deceased, individual characteristics, social context, and cultural factors. Responses to natural death differ from those following traumatic death. Death of a child or spouse is most difficult, while age mitigates coping. Social support is important and cultural differences affect funeral rites and coping patterns. Using Northern Ireland as a case in point, this paper explores implications of violent death over time. Northern Ireland lived in civil unrest and political violence, commonly known as the Troubles, since 1969. Over 3,600 people have been killed as a result. In 1994/05, ceasefires were negotiated and since then, violent incidents have decreased dramatically, although they have not completely stopped. In the early years of the Troubles, the impact of the violence on people’s mental health was underestimated and there was a lack of structured support. Since the ceasefires, more attention has been paid to those affected and community support groups have grown rapidly. In this paper, we report data from pre-ceasefire studies and contrast these with newly emerging post- ceasefire research in regard to psychological health, depression, and PTSD in individuals who experienced traumatic bereavement. Quantitative as well as qualitative data will be reported and implications for a contextual analysis outlined. Key words: traumatic bereavement, victims’ groups, Northern Ireland, D.I.S.C analysis, GHQ, BDI, PDS. 1.

Introduction Bereavement is an inevitable and universal experience, although how each individual reacts to the death of a loved one depends on multiple factors. Dillenburger and Keenan 1 suggested that bereavement outcomes and coping are shaped by at least four different yet intertwined contexts: (1) the Death itself, including the circumstances surrounding the death, and how the death was communicated; (2) Individual factors, such as age, gender, relationship with the deceased, and health prior to bereavement; (3) Social circumstances, such as the extent of social support and quality of social network; and (4) Cultural context, including cultural norms and rites, historical circumstances and political situations. In this paper, we use

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___________________________________________________________ their D.I.S.C model to look at traumatic bereavement and, we compare data of the PAVE Project (People Affected by Violence) 2 with data of the first study on violent bereavement in Northern Ireland in the mideighties. 3 Bereavement caused by violence is clearly more traumatic than other types of bereavement. 4 Since 1969, over 3,600 people were killed as a direct result of violent conflict in Northern Ireland. This means that thousands have lost immediate family members, relatives, and close friends in shootings, beatings and bombings. Mass violence is not unique to Northern Ireland, and there are many other examples where people have suffered mass-scale bereavement through war, genocide or natural disasters. The question is, how do people cope in the long-term? Ten years after the ceasefires, one could expect that people have learned to live with their loss, however, recent research shows that many are still suffering twenty, thirty or even thirty-five years after their loss 5 , “for many, the hurt of thirty years ago is just as strong as it was then and remains undiminished by the passage of time.” 6 In 1985/6, a violently bereaved widow said: [my grown up children] say I have to forget him and they think I should be over it after all these years. But I will never forget. 7 Twenty years later, these widows cannot stop thinking about their loss: I know its thirty odd years ago but it seems like yesterday and I still have not got over it and I will never get over it. 8 To me, I would say, inside deeply, I still haven’t snapped out, you know, the death of my husband, I would say it’s still there but, as I say, it will be there until the day I die. It does not go away. It won’t go away. And I have learned to accept that. 9 2.

Impact of traumatic bereavement on psychological wellbeing The impact of conflict in general and violent bereavement in particular is subject of some controversy in Northern Ireland. In the early years, psychiatrists 10 and some researchers 11 believed that most people reacted with astonishing denial or resilience to the continuing violence. Reports that presented a different picture 12 were all but ignored. Support was scant. 13 However, with the beginning of the Peace Process in the mid-

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___________________________________________________________ 1990s, and particularly since the Belfast Agreement in 1998, more research was carried out that confirmed significant long-term psychological suffering. 14 The Government paid increasing attention to victims’ issues, and voluntary support groups experienced a rapid growth. In this paper, we draw findings from the PAVE project, which explores the effectiveness of voluntary services offered to people affected by the Troubles. To-date, 71 individuals, of which 59 were violently bereaved, completed a set of psychological standardised questionnaires (General Health Questionnaire, GHQ-30 15 ; the Beck Depression Inventory, BDIII 16 ; and the Posttraumatic Stress Diagnostic Scale, PDS 17 ). Findings show poor psychological health, high levels of depression, and severe PTSD symptomatology (Table 1). N

GHQ mean (SD) 10.46 (9.8)

BDI mean (SD) 19.70 (13.9)

PDS mean (SD) 25.36 (15.4)

All participants 71 Violently 59 10.05 (9.6) 19.57 (13.7) 24.77 (14.7) bereaved Table 1: GHQ, BDI and PDS means of PAVE Project participants

These data are similar to findings from the mid 1980s when the GHQ-30 mean score for violently bereaved widows was 10.69 (SD 9.4). 18 3.

The death It is widely believed that the circumstances of the death are one of the crucial factors that affect bereavement outcome. Certain circumstances, such as sudden death and lack of anticipation, violence, or multiple deaths, are more likely to lead to more problematic bereavement or to so-called ‘complicated grief’. 19 For example, Kaltman and Bonnano 20 found that bereavement following violent death (accidental death, suicide or homicide) is likely to result in PTSD symptoms and enduring depression. In Northern Ireland, a widow in 1985/6 revealed how her husband was killed and how his violent death affected her: The gunmen had shot him straight into the face. His face was so bad that they just put a plastic bag over it. All I can see when I close my eyes now is that white plastic bag. I cannot even remember his face. 21

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___________________________________________________________ In 2006, a widow explains how seventeen years after the violent death of her husband, the way he was killed still has an impact on her: If there was a door here, we were sitting, I would have to go over and open the door. I can’t bare the door closed. Probably because of the way they came in through my back door and murdered my husband. 22 Another important factor is the way in which the death is communicated 23 . While twenty years ago widows who witnessed the death of their husband scored significantly lower on the GHQ-30 than those who were told by somebody else 24 , today those who were present when their loved one was killed scored higher than those who were told by a third party (Table 2). N GHQ mean BDI mean (SD) PDS mean 28 8.43 (9.1) 17.39(13.7) 20.39(13.2) 8 8.50 (5.9) 13.13 (8.1) 20.71(10.7) 2 5.50 (6.4) 6.50 (4.9) 10.00(14.1) By a doctor 23 13.30 (10.8) 25.45(13.6) 32.55(12.8) Witnessed Table 2: GHQ, BDI & PDS by how the death was communicated By a By the

4.

The individual context Individual factors, such as age and the relationship with the deceased, have an effect on how the bereaved are coping. 25 Some PAVE project participants were children when they lost a parent and this obviously had and still has a huge impact on them: I suppose for a long time we didn’t even talk about the death of my mother, how it happened or how it affected us. I suppose we all just thought you have to get on with it… it was more really as I got older, got into my teens, that would affected me more so, ‘cause I had to listen to my friends saying, ‘oh, I’m off into town with my mammy’ and I thought I can’t do that… or your first boyfriend. I had no mother to discuss it with… and probably to an extent I still resent that. Erm… it’s something you just can’t let go of, I’d like to, but I can’t, you know. 26

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___________________________________________________________ The loss of a sibling can also have detrimental effects on bereavement outcomes, particularly if the bond with the deceased had weaken over the years, as illustrated below: my other brother… sort of way had drifted from [name of deceased] and the bond wasn’t quite as strong.… He said to me, ‘I can’t get him back now. He’s dead. And I don’t have any chance to get him back’. He thought with time, things would change… things can improve… But he was dead and buried. So, I had to carry him for 18 months, as well. 27 Parental and spousal bereavement are particularly difficult. Twenty years ago, a widow explained how she felt: I feel most under stress in the morning when I wake. I cannot help feeling for my husband when I look at his photo. If he was here I could cope better. My son had an accident. I felt so useless. When I see other women with their husbands I feel I have to keep going for my son’s sake. 28 The bereaved widows in the PAVE Project felt no different: I thought I can’t live, and then you look at your daughter… well, what is she going to do? What about that child? There’s a child here! And I think that is the only thing that kept me alive… was… had my daughter there. 29 5.

Social context The social context, in particular the level of social support, is an important factor in terms of bereavement outcome. Twenty years ago, bereaved widows relied almost exclusively on support from family and friends, as very little structured support was available: Friends of my husband helped me. Two in particular… They kept encouraging me. My mother, my sister, my brother and my husband's niece helped me by looking after the children and by

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___________________________________________________________ loving and caring for me and in other ways I cannot find words to express. 30 Today, the memories are still raw: There was no help whatsoever, no help for me and my daughter. And… the last… person we seen coming down the road, it was my husband in a box and the door was shut. There’s… nobody ever comes to say… how are you coping? Can I help? Nothing whatsoever. 31 Most bereaved PAVE project participants (40 out of 59) had received some support from support groups (n=19), family (n=14), and friends (n=5). Being able to talk clearly mitigates poor psychological health, depression, and PTSD (Table 3). GHQ BDI mean PDS mean mean (SD) (SD) (SD) Able to talk with 41 8.24 (8.5) 16.75 (12.6) 21.49 (14.9) Not able to talk with 16 15.69 (10) 28.44 (13.2) 33.44 (10.1) Table 3: Questionnaires score means by being able to talk with family N

Today, voluntary support groups are considered a fundamental part of the recovery process: I would have been lost if I hadn’t have had here, when I had the second daughter… But it’s sort of funny coming up here like at this time, because you are thinking, ‘Survivors… Oh, my God! What does that mean? And I’m not one of them’ or whatever. And then, when you do come in, and you do start talking to people and like… we are all in the same boat, you know. Maybe some haven’t had it as bad as others, or maybe they have a completely different reason why they are here, but everybody… it’s the same stuff muddle on through together, you know what I mean. 32 However, some of the services offered by the groups seemed to be more helpful than others. Those who were availing of indirect services (such as courses or advocacy), counselling, storytelling, yoga, aromatherapy, massage and advice and information tended to score lower

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___________________________________________________________ in all three psychological measures than those availing of psychotherapy, reflexology, support groups and respite care, although most of the differences were not statistically significant. Participants explained which services found most helpful. Many highlighted the importance of trust, getting out of the house, and being amongst people who had similar experiences. I think that this was great to get away together, talk about it, and… chatting and doing things like that. So, it grew from there on, then, the… pantomimes and shopping trips, weekends away… And everyone in the group really, really, really enjoyed it. And still does. 33 There’s a girl in here, G, and she does like… reiki, and aromatherapy and all this stuff, and she does this other thing, sounds or something… but like I found maybe six weeks I did it for, the difference was unbelievable. And I never would have said like, I had a problem or I find it harder, until I done that with G… And when I came out of that, I says, ‘G, my face is sore’. And she says, ‘Why?’ and I says, ‘Because I never really must smile’. All I did was smile the whole day after I came out of it. 34 The financial situation of the bereaved is another factor that can affect or complicate their grieving process. In Northern Ireland, a large proportion of the deaths of the Troubles occurred in socially deprived areas 35 . This means that many bereaved individuals and families, apart from having to cope with their loss, had to live in a context of extreme financial hardship. We found that those participants who had worries about money (n=32) scored higher in all three psychological measures than those who did not have such worries (n=25). 6.

Cultural context The effect of cultural and political contexts on the bereavement process is difficult to assess. Because of dramatic political changes over recent years, Northern Ireland supplies an intriguing example. During the early phase of the Troubles, shootings and bombings were nearly daily occurrences. The effect on people’s coping is reflected in this quote from a widow:

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___________________________________________________________ Whenever I listen to the television and another terrorist attack happened I feel most under stress. I switch the television off. I just cannot stand any more murders. 36 In the late-1990s, remarkable political changes occurred and violent death decreased dramatically, while awareness of victims’ issues increased. The effect of these contextual changes meant that those still violently bereaved were more isolated, as a bereaved brother explains: But this is after the Good Friday Agreement, after the ceasefires were on, you know, when everybody said ‘The war’s over. We are finished with it’. And everybody sort of said, ‘We don’t have to look over our shoulder every five seconds’. And basically people were walking in the street thinking that this would never happen. 37 Intriguingly, however, when pre-ceasefire and post-ceasefire data are compared, psychological health did not improve. Violently bereaved widows in Dillenburger’s pre-ceasefire study scored well above the threshold for psychological health with a GHQ-12 mean score of 4.6 (SD 3.9), whereas post-ceasefire bereaved PAVE project participants scored about the same, 4.61 (SD 4.1). These scores are similar to those of people affected by Bloody Sunday 38 (GHQ-12 mean score of 4.9 (SD 4.27)), twenty-five years after the event. Many are concerned about the changes that the Peace Process has brought, including early prisoner releases, and feel that justice has still not been done. These feelings of injustice, frustration, and powerlessness have obviously an impact on bereavement outcomes, as illustrated below: I think… the innocent victims should be looked after better by the Government. So, there’s another hurt there that you are getting from the Government… and they were never caught the ones that murdered my husband… No one was ever brought to justice. 39 There is one thing that… would be a big burden off my shoulders. It is to see the ones that murdered my husband in a courthouse, and be punished for what they did… The Government keeps them people… They chose to go out and murder my husband, and they should be made pay for their crime. It’s not fair on me

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___________________________________________________________ that they can walk about ten foot high, laughing, and I have suffered over them. 40

7.

Summary Traumatic bereavement amalgamates the effects of trauma and grief. 41 Data reported here opens an extensive range of questions for trauma and bereavement researchers and practitioners. How do those who have lost a loved one in violent circumstances cope over the years? What needs to happen for them to move on? Why do some people cope better than others do? Why do some bereaved individuals still suffer twenty or thirty years after their loss? In this paper, we argue that a holistic approach is needed in order to address these questions. Coping with traumatic bereavement does not happen in isolation and we explored Death-related, Individual, Social, and Cultural (D.I.S.C.) contexts in order to illustrate this process.

Notes 1

Karola Dillenburger and Mickey Keenan, ‘Bereavement: A D.I.S.C Analysis’, Behavior and Social Issues, 14 (2005), 92-112. 2 Karola Dillenburger et al., ‘The PAVE Project’, Victims and Survivors Newsletter 2nd Edition, (Belfast: Victims Unit, OFMDFM, 2005). 3 Karola Dillenburger, Violent Bereavement: Widows in Northern Ireland (Aldershot: Avebury, 1992). 4 See: Janice L. Genevro, Report on Bereavement and Grief Research [report on line] (Washington DC: Center for the Advancement of Health, 2003, accessed 15 July 2005); available from the Center for the Advancement of Health: http://www.cfah.org/pdfs/griefreport.pdf/; and Colleen Murray et al, ‘Death, Dying, and Grief in Families’, in Families and Change. Coping with Stressful Events and Transitions, ed. Patrick C. McKenry and Sharon J. Price (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2005, 3rd Ed.), 75-102. 5 see Karola Dillenburger, 1992; Peter S. Curran et al., ‘Psychological Consequences of the Enniskillen Bombing’, The British Journal of Psychiatry 156 (1990), 479-482; Patrick Hayes and Jim Campbell, ‘Dealing with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: The Psychological Sequel of Bloody Sunday and the Response of State Services’, Research on Social Work Practice 10, 6 (2000), 705-721; Dermot O’Reilly and Mike Stevenson, ‘Mental health in Northern Ireland: have “the Troubles” made it worse?’, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 57 (2003),

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___________________________________________________________ 488-492; Ed Cairns and John Mallet, Who are the Victims? Self-assessed Victimhood and the Northern Irish Conflict; NIO Research and Statistical Series, Report No.7 (Belfast: NIO Statistics and Research Branch, June 2003); and PAVE Project, 2005/6. 6 Michael Potter, In Their Own Words: A Research Report into the Victims Sector in Northern Ireland (Belfast: Training for Women Network, April 2004), 4. 7 Widow in Dillenburger, p. 91. 8 A., widow, January 06. PAVE project. 9 M., widow, February 06. PAVE project. 10 Morris Fraser, Children in conflict (Norwich: Norfolk Pelican Book, 1973). 11 Alf McCreary, Survivors (Belfast: Century Books, 1976); and Ed Cairns and Ronnie Wilson, ‘The impact of political violence on mild psychiatric morbidity in Northern Ireland’, The British Journal of Psychiatry 145 (1984), 631-635. 12 Curran et al., 479; and Dillenburger, 1992. 13 John Darby and Arthur Williamson, eds, Violence and the Social Services in Northern Ireland (London: Heinemann, 1978). 14 see Marie Therese Fay et al , The Cost of the Troubles Study. Report on the Northern Ireland Survey: the experience and impact of the Troubles (Belfast: INCORE, 1999); Hayes & Campbell, 705; Karola Dillenburger and Mickey Keenan, ‘Islands of Pain in a Sea of Change: Behavior Analysis and Bereavement’, European Journal of Behaviour Analysis 2 (2001), 187-207; Cairns and Mallet, Who are the Victims?; O’Reilly and Stevenson, 488. 15 David Goldberg, Manual of the General Health Questionnaire (Windsor: NFER-Nelson, 1978). 16 Aaron T. Beck et al., ‘Psychometric properties of the Beck Depression Inventory: Twenty-five years of evaluation’, Clinical Psychology Review 8, 1 (1988), 77-100. 17 Edna B. Foa et al., ‘The validation of a self-report measure of posttraumatic stress disorder: The Posttraumatic Diagnostic Scale’, Psychological Assessment 9, 4 (1997), 445–451. 18 Dillenburger, 1992. 19 Therese A. Rando, The treatment of complicated mourning (Champaign, IL: Research Press, 1993). 20 Stacey Kaltman and George A. Bonnano, ‘Trauma and bereavement: Examining the impact of sudden and violent deaths’, Journal of Anxiety Disorders 17, 2 (2003), 131-147. 21 Widows in Dillenburger, pp.91-92.

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M., widow, February 06. PAVE Project. E. Kirschner, ‘Data on bereavement and rehabilitation of war widows’, Series in Clinical & Community Psychology: Stress & Anxiety, 8 (1982), 219-224. 24 Karola Dillenburger and Mickey Keenan, Some suggestions for a behaviour analysis of bereavement and loss. Behaviour Analysis in Ireland, 25 years Anniversary Conference, Maynooth, Ireland, 5 May (2002). 25 Dillenburger and Keenan, 92. 26 C., bereaved daughter, March 06. PAVE Project. 27 D., bereaved brother, March 06. PAVE Project. 28 Widow in Dillenburger, p. 71. 29 M., widow, February 06. PAVE Project. 30 Widows in Dillenburger, p. 89. 31 M., widow, February 06. PAVE Project.. 32 S., bereaved daughter, March 06. PAVE Project. 33 M., widow. February 06. PAVE Project. 34 S., bereaved daughter, March 06. PAVE Project.. 35 Paddy Hillyard et al., Bare Necessities: Poverty and Social Exclusion in Northern Ireland (Belfast, Democratic Dialogue, 2003). 36 Widow in Dillenburger, p. 71. 37 D., bereaved brother, March 06. PAVE Project. 38 Hayes and Campbell, 705. 39 A., bereaved widow, February 06. PAVE Project. 40 M., bereaved widow, January 06. PAVE Project. 41 Kaltman and Bonnano, 131. 23

Can the Dying Mourn? Kate Powis Abstract Seale, in identifying the late modern patient-centred ‘scripts’ adopted by the hospice movement, has declared that the dying themselves can now play the role of chief mourner. For the aware dying, it is proposed that some of their grief is anticipatory and the manner in which they mourn their prospective death will offer guidance and even hope to those who will have to negotiate their own bereavement after the death of their loved one. This paper will examine the psychoanalytic roots of mourning theories to be found in Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ in order to determine how appropriate it might be to apply psychological models of bereavement to the dying. While there can be no doubt loss is a major feature in the experiences of the dying, meaning that elements of such models may have relevance, I will propose that a key feature of Freud’s foundational theory cannot be available to the aware dying, thereby rendering the notion that the dying can ‘successfully’ mourn untenable. I go on to suggest an alternative account of what may be intermingled with the experiences of loss for the dying: the fear of annihilation. Key words: mourning, aware dying, psychoanalysis, narcissistic satisfaction, annihilation, powerlessness, nothingness, meaninglessness. 1.

Introduction Constructivist theorists studying this topic have proposed that the ‘aware dying’ have recourse to social scripts that allow them to negotiate their way through the dying trajectory. One such script has been transplanted from psychological theories of bereavement and mourning. Such accounts have been developed into stage theories, identifying a path through the mourning process, and in turn allowing those accompanying the bereaved, and indeed the bereaved themselves, to assess how successful they are in working through this process. The efficacy of these theories in the area of bereavement, based as they are on profound psychoanalytic insights and an understanding of infant experiences of loss and separation, has meant that attempts have been made to transpose the model to the dying themselves; the most well-known, indeed some would say notorious, being that of Kübler Ross. The purpose of this paper however is not to launch yet another broadside against Kübler-Ross’s ‘Five Stages’, 1 or propose an alternative modelling for the dying process. Instead I will examine the psychoanalytic roots of mourning theories to be found in Freud’s ‘Mourning and

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___________________________________________________________ Melancholia’ 2 in order to determine how appropriate it might be to apply psychological models of bereavement to the dying in the first place. While there can be no doubt loss is a major feature in the experiences of the dying, meaning that elements of such models may have relevance, I will propose that a key feature of Freud’s foundational theory cannot be available to the ‘aware dying’, thereby rendering the notion that the dying can ‘successfully’ mourn untenable. I go on to suggest an alternative account of what may be intermingled with the experiences of loss for the dying drawn from the work of Freud again, and two contemporary psychoanalysts: Hurvich and Grotstein and their analysis of trauma and the fear of annihilation and the trinity of powerlessness, meaninglessness and nothingness. 2.

Seale and the dying ‘expert’ Clive Seale identifies late modern ‘scripts’ adopted by the hospice movement that draw on medical and therapeutic discourses of ‘patient-centred’ treatments. The development of these, he claims, has led to the construction of “dying and grief as orderly experiences, guided by a knowing expertise.” 3 The “knowing expert” in this case is the dying themselves, who are acknowledged within such scripts to be experiencing an anticipatory grief, that is to say they are grieving their own death in advance of the actual event. In such a role, Seale claims, they have become the chief mourner and can offer guidance and even hope for the grieving processes of those around them. 4 The conceptualising of a ‘journey’ of grieving in the dying, with the dying person acting as trail blazer for those who will be their bereaved, draws on psychological literature that describes the unfolding of an inner process. Drawing on psychological analyses of mourning, such as Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, and Bowlby’s attachment theory, 5 psychosociological treatments of mourning present mourning as a process with a purpose. Versions of these accounts, often over-simplified, have become central to what Wortman and Silver have termed ‘clinical lore’ in bereavement counselling. 6 The purpose of mourning, according to Walter, is presented by such texts to be the reconfiguration of an autonomous individual, one who has managed to detach themselves from the deceased and is now able to form new relationships. 7 This end is sought by a process which involves a ‘working through’ of a gamut of emotions, often represented as ‘stages’ in order to come to terms with the loss and ‘move on’. As already acknowledged, the doyenne of such theorising as it might be applied to the dying themselves is Kübler-Ross. Although in her own writing she admits that the reality will be far more complex than a

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___________________________________________________________ matter of simply moving through each stage as though on a step-by-step programme, her model of five stages: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, 8 in some cases has been adapted to clinical practice where the dying may be ‘diagnosed’ as being ‘stuck’ at a certain stage, say anger or bargaining, and need to be helped to move on and through the subsequent stages. When examining classic texts on bereavement such as Freud and Bowlby however, one can discern a richer depiction of the complexities of mourning, one that might admit to the need for the bereaved to form a deeper understanding of the deceased in order to re-negotiate a continuing and meaningful presence of the lost loved one in their lives. This is a more complex understanding of the processes of mourning than the idea of simply ‘letting go’ of the dead in order for the living to go forward in their own lives. Seale acknowledges this but realises that: Stage theories have inspired professionals working with dying and grieving people…because they offer a classificatory system with which to organise disturbing experiences… They offer professionals - and sufferers too - a sense of direction and purpose as well as a job to do in the face of threats to basic security. 9 I believe that such classificatory systems offer not just a means for action and purpose in negotiating the mourning processes in dying, but a distraction from the ultimate source of that ontological threat, both to the aware dying and indeed those accompanying them. However, before we examine what this threat might be, the reality of losses that the dying face should first be acknowledged. 3.

Dying and bereaved Sociological and psychoanalytic literature that broaches the subject of mourning tends to focus on the normal conception of bereavement: the permanent separation from oneself of a loved object. These bereaved, however, will survive the loss and mourning can be the process that helps them make that survival more than just a survival; helping them find a new way of living with that loss. The term ‘bereavement’ has however been used by one Jungian psychoanalyst, Joy Schaverien, in reference to the losses undergone by the dying: In the psychotherapy literature on bereavement the focus is usually with the bereaved relatives. Far less attention has been paid to the bereavement

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___________________________________________________________ experienced by those facing death. This is odd because a person who is dying is on the verge of losing everything. 10 ‘Aware’ dying involves confronting the reality of one’s own death: the loss of a future, the loss of witnessing the futures of loved ones, the loss of health, the loss of autonomy, the loss of friends, the loss of work, the loss of social status. Unlike the bereaved relative, the dying do not survive the loss because ultimately all these losses amount to the end of their life. If they were to mourn these losses where would their mourning be oriented? Can they re-negotiate a continuing and meaningful presence of these losses in their lives, in the same way that those who have lost an external presence may be able to use the processes of mourning to re-formulate that presence into an internal one? How appropriate is it to transpose concepts derived from those grieving the loss of someone other than the bereaved person to what might be experienced by the dying themselves? To return to Schaverien’s appropriation of the term bereavement for the experience of loss in the dying themselves, it strikes me that this highlights a certain dissonance in the comparison between the two forms of experience here. Although I welcome her acknowledgement of the paucity of psychotherapeutic literature around the losses experienced by the dying, using the term ‘bereavement’ and thereby importing the literature surrounding that topic does not, I feel, seem to answer the problem at hand for the dying’s experience of loss. In order to explore my misgivings about the theorising around this topic I will examine the seminal psychoanalytic text on mourning. 4.

The ‘engine’ of mourning Freud’s paper ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ has formed the most influential psychoanalytical account of mourning, which he seeks to differentiate from a condition that he sees has some associations with it, melancholia. For Freud, mourning can be understood as “the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one”. 11 The phenomenon of mourning shares with melancholia the distinguishing features of “painful dejection…cessation of interest…loss of capacity to love…inhibition of all activity” but melancholia has the unique addition of “a lowering of self-regard”. 12 Thus Freud can distinguish between the two by declaring that for those in mourning “the world has become poor” by the removal of a cherished object, whereas for the melancholic “the ego is impoverished” 13 because it is deemed uncherishable. Another central distinguishing feature of

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___________________________________________________________ mourning is that it is a conscious process – the loss is focused on consciously, whereas in melancholia the lost object is lost even to consciousness, but nevertheless this unconscious experiencing of loss presents somatic as well as psychological features. The purpose or, as Freud has it, the work of mourning is again to test reality: to come to an acknowledgement that the loved one no longer exists, thereby allowing the libido to withdraw its attachment to the lost object. This work is done in the face of intense opposition from the libido that seeks to turn away from the reality of the loss of the loved object, clinging to it through “a hallucinatory wishful psychosis”. 14 Each memory and association with the lost object has to become the focus of a hypercathexis, an extremely painful and time-consuming process. With each step of this reality testing the ego is “confronted…with the question [of] whether it shall share this fate [i.e. the fate of the lost object].” 15 It is only through this process that the ego can be persuaded via “the sum of narcissistic satisfactions it derives from being alive” 16 to sever the attachment to the lost object. It is as though each moment of “narcissistic satisfaction” provides a little bit more momentum through the process of mourning, hence the appellation I have given this feature of Freud’s theory: the engine of mourning. Freud’s recognition of the source of energy provided for a painful and time consuming process must raise the question of how can the dying successfully and viably go through such a process entailing ‘narcissistic satisfactions’ that cannot be open to the aware dying? 5.

An example of narcissistic satisfaction: The Death of Ivan Ilyich Leo Tolstoy presented evidence of this mechanism at work even before Freud himself identified it. In ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ 17 the story opens with colleagues of Ivan Ilyich discussing the news of the death of their associate. On hearing this, each one present considers the advantages that might accrue to them in the form of promotions or transfers. In these discussions, Tolstoy notes, “the mere fact of the death of an intimate associate aroused… in all who heard of it a complacent feeling that ‘it is he who is dead, and not I’.” 18 When they observe custom and visit the grieving family, two of them exchange glances as though to say “Ivan Ilyich has made a mess of things – not like you and me.” 19 However for one, Piotr Ivanovich, the sight of the dead body shakes him: “There was reproach…and a reminder to the living. This reminder seemed out of place to Piotr Ivanovich, or at least to have nothing to do with him. It gave him an unpleasant

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___________________________________________________________ feeling…” 20 and this unpleasant feeling intensifies when he listens to the widow’s account of the final days of her husband: ‘Three days and nights of awful suffering and then death. Why it might happen to me, all of a sudden, at any moment,’ he thought and for an instant he was terrified. But immediately he could not have explained how, there came to his support the old reflection that this thing had befallen Ivan Ilyich, and not him, and that it ought not and could not happen to him… 21 Admittedly Tolstoy is interested in exploring the hypocrisy of complacent Russian bourgeoisies but nevertheless I believe that here he has exposed the workings of certain defence mechanisms that we are all prone to when facing a particular death. And what precisely is it that Ivanovich is terrified of when he hears of the terrible suffering at the end of his friend’s life? If it was simply the obvious fear of undergoing the same form of suffering then perhaps empathy and compassion would figure more here. But what if there is a stronger and more primal source of that fear that calls forth the defensive manoeuvres in Ilyich’s friends, and indeed family? 6.

Trauma, danger and annihilation And now we return to Freud, and this time to his analysis of anxiety. 22, 23 He believed that anxiety could be traced to two sources: the direct experience of a traumatic situation, and the anticipation of such an experience. 24, 25 A traumatic situation for Freud consists of overwhelming stimulation, either internal or external, that cannot be discharged or in any other way processed. The experience, therefore, is one of absolute helplessness. Freud postulates that birth is the prototype for the traumatic situation and therefore it is one of the primary functions of the human organism to avoid any over-stimulation, as it threatens to overwhelm. Anxiety therefore recreates the sense of mortal danger that originates in the associations of extreme and unpleasurable bodily sensations during birth. The second source of anxiety is the anticipation of being in a traumatic situation which Freud called a danger situation. He sees it as a “recognised, remembered, expected situation of helplessness.” 26 I believe that it is this that terrified Piotr Ivanovich: the anticipation of such overwhelming suffering in the face of death and the accompanying helplessness that his friend Ivan Ilyich had undergone.

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___________________________________________________________ For Freud, a danger situation may be triggered, for example, by fears of loss of a loved object, or the actual loss of love. However, in his discussion of Freud’s analysis of these phenomena, Hurvich believes that neither the prospect of the loss of a loved object, nor the loss of love itself can be constituted as the source of either state of anxiety. Rather it is the fear of being overwhelmed, annihilated, that is best understood as the basic danger. The trauma triggered by loss refers back to the prototypical situation of annihilation anxiety: the overwhelming over-stimulation of birth. In this model the primary and secondary, anticipatory form of anxiety constitute two poles of “a series of potential responses”. 27 At one pole there exists an unprocessed organismic panic, while at the other pole thought-like processes are possible, reducing the affective element of the experience. It then becomes obvious that at the primary end of this scale of anxiety there can be no recourse to a conscious analysis as the experience harks back to the preverbal condition. Unable to explain the ‘reason’ for the terror, to ourselves or to others can only increase the panic and the sense of being utterly overwhelmed. However I would tentatively suggest that this model of a spectrum of responses between primary and secondary sources of anxiety offers the hope of a shift from panic to the capacity to process the trauma induced anxiety. What is necessary though is for others around the sufferer to at first acknowledge and stay with, or to use Bion’s term ‘contain’, 28 the panic and the sense of powerlessness - of both the sufferer and those accompanying them. 7.

Power and powerlessness Thinking again about Clive Seale’s realisation that mourning scripts offer ways to classify disturbing experiences, I think that the nature of the ontological threat constituting these experiences has become clearer. We are driven to find something ‘to do’ to fend off the panic of this primal anxiety. But, as we have seen they are based on Freud’s concept of the process of mourning which posits ‘narcissistic satisfaction’ as the source of power in working through this process. Without access to this the dying are without the necessary power - indeed are ultimately powerless in the face of their losses. What role might powerlessness, as the dialectic of power, play here? James Grotstein identifies the cultural debt that Freud owed to the German Romantics’ celebration of the potency of Nature on the one hand and the power of science and logic on the other, the combination of which gave birth to psychoanalysis and its emphasis on the power of the instinctive. 29 However, in a later article, a seminal influence in certain areas of current psychoanalytic theory, Grotstein goes on to introduce powerlessness, twinned with meaninglessness, in just such a dialectic role.

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For him, powerlessness in this case must be understood not as mere “static emptiness but as an implosive, centripetal pull into the void” 31 , analogous to the black hole of astrophysics. Close kin to powerlessness is meaninglessness; that is content either without meaning or deprived of meaning. The Kleinian analyst Bion had identified the “beta prime elements” of the “container” of meaninglessness: “nameless dread”. 32 Grotstein offers a further distinction in his conceptualisation of meaninglessness, identifying primary and secondary forms. The primary form takes place before experience - and here he refers to the “Darkness of the Deep” in Genesis. It consists of a ‘primal’ void that anticipates content and realisation via experience. The secondary condition emanates from a turning away from experience and a return to emptiness, but this time it is not the immaculate void, but rather a “black hole” that evacuates meaning. 33 Alongside powerlessness and meaninglessness is a third phenomenon: nothingness. Indeed, for Grotstein psychic trauma “ultimately consists of meaninglessness… in an atmosphere of nothingness”. 34 Nothingness here can also be identified as primary and secondary conditions. The first is the Sartrean notion of an emptiness, a base condition that must be undergone in order to create meaning, while the second consists of the negation of being: the no-thing. There is a link here to the secondary form of meaninglessness, with secondary nothingness as the “black-hole” breaking down and sucking out meaning, leaving only the Bionian “beta elements” and the “nameless dread” 35 - a dread of being stripped of our thingness, of nothingness overwhelming our existence. At bottom, this is the fear of our annihilation. 8.

Conclusion My starting point in this paper has been a doubt around the efficacy of a wholesale transposition of mourning theories to the predicament of the aware dying, albeit that this inevitably involves a range of losses. With this doubt came a suspicion that what prompted us to rely on these theories was an unwillingness to examine the ultimate source of anxiety in dying, the fear of annihilation. This may be seen as defensiveness on both an individual and a social and cultural scale. Even psychoanalysts have recognised that their discipline may be prey to this; Hurvich acknowledges that it is a relatively undeveloped concept in the literature, with no comprehensive definition. 36 He cites Langs who suggests “classical psychoanalytic theory and technique has been designed to some extent as a defence against such primitive anxieties.” 37 I believe that Grotstein’s discussion of powerlessness as the dialectic of power offers one answer as to why this might be. In a culture that is driven to

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___________________________________________________________ holding and maintaining power on an individual, social and global scale, the ultimate relinquishing of it that all humans must face is a terrible threat indeed. And finally, to return to Ivan Ilyich: I wish that there had been time and space to do more justice to this work, but I will end with a brief glimpse of the predicament of Ivan himself. He faces terrible despair that racks up the pain and suffering he must endure as he realises that all he has valued in his life is meaningless. His powerfully connected friends, status hungry wife and self-regarding doctor can offer him no way out of his agony. The only person who can bring temporary ease is his serf who cheerfully stays with him and supports his legs to make him more comfortable. Finally, an hour before his death, Ilyich is shrieking desperately. His young son comes to him and kisses his hand and bursts into tears. It as at this point that Ilyich finds relief, can turn away from bitterness and looks with compassion on his family, and at last relinquishes fear. The two least powerful figures in the story are finally the ones to help.

Notes 1

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying (London and New York: Routledge, 1973). 2 Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917) from On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Volume 11 of The Penguin Freud Library, Standard Edition edited by James Strachey, present volume compiled and edited by Angela Richards (London, Penguin, 1984), 251-268. 3 Clive Seale, Constructing Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 118. 4 Seale, 118 -119. 5 John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss. Vol. III: Loss: Sadness and Depression (London: Penguin, 1980). 6 C.B. Wortman and R.C. Silver, ‘The myths of coping with loss’, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology: 57, 3 (1989) 349-57. 7 Tony Walter, ‘A new model of grief: bereavement and biography’, Mortality 1, 1 (1996), 7-25. 8 Kübler-Ross, 34-121. 9 Seale, 107. 10 Joy Schaverien. The Dying Patient in Psychotherapy: Desire, Dreams and Individuation (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 125. 11 Freud, 1917, 252.

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Ibid. Ibid., 254. 14 Ibid., 253. 15 Ibid., 265. 16 Ibid. 17 Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, tr. Rosemary Edmonds (London: Penguin [1886]1960). 18 Ibid., 102. 19 Ibid., 103. 20 Ibid., 104. 21 Ibid., 107. 22 Sigmund Freud (1926) ‘Inhibitions, symptoms and anxieties’ from The Standard Edition 20, edited by James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1959), 77 -175. 23 Sigmund Freud (1933) ‘Anxiety and instinctual life’ from New introductory lectures on psychoanalysis (Lecture 32), Standard Edition 22 edited by James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1933), 81-111. 24 Freud, 1926, 162. 25 Freud, 1933, 94 -95. 26 Freud, 1926, 166. 27 Hurvich, 312. 28 Wilfred Bion Learning form Experience (London: Karnac, 1984). 29 James Grotstein, ‘The psychology of powerlessness: Disorders of selfregulation and interactional regulation as a newer paradigm for psychopathology’, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 6 (1986) 93 -118. 30 James Grotstein, ‘Nothingness, Meaninglessness, Chaos, and the ‘Black Hole’’, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 26 (1990), 257- 290. 31 Grotstein, 1990, 257. 32 Bion, 1962b. 33 Grotstein, 1990, 267. 34 Ibid., 264. 35 Bion, 1962b. 36 Hurvich, 1989. 37 Langs, 1981, cited by Hurvich, 1989, 318. 13

Kate Powis is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology, at the University of Essex, UK. This paper was presented with the financial support of the departmental Small Grants Fund. She is also a consultant lecturer on a part time basis at St Helena Hospice, Myland Hall Education Centre.

The Death of Innocents: Noncombatant Immunity vs. the Divine Foetus Lloyd Steffen Abstract This paper argues that one of the reasons the abortion issue is so intractable is that a metaphysical notion of ‘innocence’ has attached to the foetus, thus subverting our ordinary, morally framed understanding of how and why abortion can be justified. Attention is focused on the refusal of some anti-abortion advocates, including the moral teaching of the Roman Catholic Church, to accept that a pregnant woman can justifiably abort a foetus if that foetus poses a threat to her life or health. The just war notion of ‘non-combatant immunity’ is offered as a non-absolutist point of contrast with absolutized notions of innocence that would value the foetus over the pregnant woman. Key Words: abortion, just abortion, just war theory, religious innocence, non-combatant immunity, foetal death. 1.

Introduction Why has the abortion debate been so intractable? I suggest in this paper that the reason may involve people talking past one another over issues that have not been fully presented for reflection and critique. One such issue is that of foetal innocence My argument is that invocations of foetal innocence have elevated the foetus to a peculiar metaphysical status even beyond the moral category of person; and to expose this development I shall contrast this metaphysical claim with more accessible moral notions of innocence as they arise in non-sectarian moral thinking. The just war idea of ‘noncombatant’ immunity will serve to expose this moral notion of innocence. The contrast between metaphysical and moral ideas of innocence will illumine the meaning of foetal death as it arises in the debate over abortion. 2.

Moral innocence In our ordinary moral discourse, we make reference to ‘innocent’ persons. We acknowledge in the moral life the threat to innocent lives posed by a terrorist or armed bank robber who may be panicking; and what we mean innocence in such situations is that persons so threatened, all of whom possess a right to life, have been positioned by unwanted life circumstances, to be in harms way. These persons are agents and capable of action; their right to life is protected by their inclusion in the moral category of personhood; and it would be morally wrong to intentionally

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___________________________________________________________ kill one of these innocent persons. The duty to protect them may lead others, say, the police, to use deadly force to protect them. This idea of protecting innocent persons because they are persons and possessed of a right to life which it is a moral duty to protect has been enshrined in what we know as just war theory. Just war has always made appeal to the idea of restraint of force, and underwriting just war as a policy tool is a moral framework - a structure for moral thinking - that is, I believe, enormously practical and helpful for thinking through moral issues and dilemmas. Just war, as a moral perspective, presumes reasonably that force ordinarily ought not to be used to settle conflicts, then imposes various tests of justice that must be satisfied if that presumption against using force is to be lifted so that a use of force then could make a reasonable claim to being morally justified. The tests of justice - he jus ad bellum criteria so familiar to us - deal with such matters as competent authority, just cause, announcement of intention, last resort and so on; and in the classic jus in bello requirements for the actual use of force once a use of force has been justified and is underway, two other constraints, a proportionality requirement that the use of force must be proportionate to the end of peace (this deals with weapons that are disproportionate and ought not be used); and a ‘non-combatant immunity’ provision. What this provision says is that the actual use of force requires that persons not engaged in the conflict must be protected - they are not to be directly attacked. Non-combatant immunity makes reference to what we typically call ‘innocent persons.’ What do we mean by this? Combatant and non-combatants are all persons and all possess a right to life; but non-combatants are immune from the use of force and it is presumptively wrong to directly use force, especially lethal force, against them. They are innocent. They are bystanders in the bank that is being robbed, they are in the line of fire when warring parties unleash urban mop-up operations; they are in office buildings and subways when terrorists strike. Directly intending to harm and kill non-combatants, those not party to a conflict where lethal force is being used, is, according to just war ethics, morally wrong. Targeting civilians to achieve some end is wrong; using terrorist tactics, which by definition are directed at civilian non-combatants, at innocent persons, is wrong; and every effort must be made, just war wants to say, to prevent harming these ‘innocent persons.’ The only thing that would make the killing of an innocent person permissible is if every conceivable effort was made to prevent such killing and when such killing did take place it happened as a regrettable and foreseen - but always unintended consequence of a morally legitimized use of force. The doctrine of double-effect has been devised in the natural law tradition to take note of the messiness

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___________________________________________________________ of moral life and the possibility that even innocent persons may be put in harm’s way and killed as an unwanted and regretted consequence of a conflict where force is being used. I suggest that immunity from harm identifies a reasonable notion of innocence. The use of force always poses some threat of harm, even non-violent force. Martin Luther King used to worry enormously about starting non-violent boycotts, because they would harm innocent persons not directly involved in the conflict. King, like Gandhi, understood nonviolent force to be a use of force and followed a non-combatant immunity provision by seeking to avoid inflicting harm on innocent persons in conflict situations where even the force of non-violent resistance was to be used. In summary: In the moral life, we acknowledge that persons not party to a conflict should be immune from direct action that would cause them harm. No mantle of absolute protection can be thrown over the innocent bystander or innocent civilian, however, and in the application of justified uses of force the death of an ‘innocent’ may be ‘justifiable’ if every reasonable effort has been made to avoid inflicting such harm. In the moral life, then, the idea of innocence is attached a duty that falls on the parties in conflict to respect the lives and well-being of non-combatant, innocent persons. The innocence is not absolute and can even be rendered justifiable, even if always regrettably so. 3.

Abortion and the innocent foetus Having examined the idea of non-combatant immunity as a presumptive protection of person that is not an absolute protection, I want now to turn to the abortion issue and consider the matter of foetal innocence. If we were to use the model of ‘non-combatant immunity’ from the just war ethic, we could say that a foetus is deserving of protection as a developing form of human life. But even if one should go so far as to regard the foetus as a person, that status does not provide an absolute immunity or prevent the killing of the foetus under any and all circumstances, if, in fact, a conflict of values leads to the conclusions that this immunity can be overridden and justifiably so. In the abortion debate, people who defend abortion rights would argue that because the foetus is not a person-the argument could be that the foetus does not possess the attributes of recognized members of the moral community, self-awareness, ability to use language or whatever criteria for personhood one would present - the foetus does not enjoy the protections afforded persons and can be aborted, killed, without that killing amounting to a moral offence. (This is Mary Ann Warren’s classic

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___________________________________________________________ argument 1 ). Pro-life persons, who are not absolutists but who acknowledge foetal person-hood, would reasonably acknowledge certain cases where abortion could be justified, those situation typically being incest, rape, and ‘to save a woman’s life.’ Since rape and incest have been losing support from pro-life supporters, my focus will be turned to ‘save the pregnant woman’s life.’ This ‘exception’ arises even for reasonable pro-life supporters as they acknowledge that pregnancy is a medical condition that can itself pose dangers to a woman. The foetal ‘person’ can present itself to a pregnant woman as a material aggressor that cannot form intentions and is not an agent. In the moral life, a woman facing such a threat has a right; others would actually claim a duty, to protect herself from this threat even if it cost the life of the ‘innocent’ foetus. Whatever ‘innocent’ means for those who ascribe innocence to the foetus-as-person, reasonable persons would allow innocence is not absolute, that foetal innocence can be overridden by other values, such as the life of the pregnant woman; and that a foetus could be aborted and justifiably so for just cause, say, for reasons of self-defence. It is beyond this point that things get interesting. What about those who hold that abortion is never permissible - absolutely impermissible - and invoke foetal innocence as the reason for this claim? My case is that in the moral life, this move cannot really be made rationally and coherently, for conflicts in value, even conflicts involving the value of life, are possible, and life cannot reasonably be thought of as an absolute value that will always and in every situation trump other values when life as a biological reality becomes party to a conflict, else we would be morally obligated, for example, never to terminate life support so long as we can keep life going regardless of the patient’s condition. Reason and morality would assert that foetal life ought to be valued but not in an absolute sense that it would trump a woman’s life when her pregnancy was threatening her life; and this would hold I think even for those committed to the view that the foetus is a person and itself possesses a right to life. I make this case even by appealing to a tradition of thought in the Roman Catholic moral tradition, which has ironically preserved and developed through the centuries just war theory and non-combatant immunity provision that is a non-absolutist idea of innocence. Roman Catholic moral teaching, however, has absolutized the value of the foetus, even though that same tradition has over the centuries tried to avoid absolutism and create, if I may as an outsider describe this feature of the Roman Catholic tradition, loopholes in the interests of justice and in recognition of the impossibility of acting purely or being god-like in our

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___________________________________________________________ moral knowledge or moral action. Just war theory itself is a model of such hesitation in the face of absolute certainty. The Roman Catholic tradition has addressed the idea of foetal innocence in different ways, and just as there has been change underway in movement toward absolutizing the foetus in, say, the Republican Platform of 2004 where ‘rape, incest and to save a mother’s life’ were for the first time dropped out of the anti-abortion plank, the Roman Catholic position has similarly changed. Consider how American jurist and moral philosopher, John Noonan, rehearses the history of the Catholic moral tradition in its non-absolutism: In Catholic moral theology, as it developed, life even of the innocent was not taken as absolute. Judgments on acts affecting life issued from a process or weighing.... Even with the foetus weighed as human [as ‘person’ in the moral sense I have been using, LHS], one interest could be weighed as equal or superior: that of the mother in her own life. The casuists between 1450 and 1895 were willing to weigh this interest as superior. Since 1895, that interest was given decisive weight only in the two special cases of the cancerous uterus and the ectopic pregnancy. In both of these cases the foetus itself had little chance of survival even if the abortion were not performed. 2 This understanding of the moral tradition asserted a strict protection for the foetus but not an absolute protection. Contrast this with a statement from Pope John Paul II: The moral gravity of procured abortion is apparent in all its truth if we recognize that we are dealing with murder and, in particular, when we consider the specific elements involved. The one eliminated is a human being at the very beginning of life. No one more absolutely innocent could be imagined. In no way could this human being ever be considered an aggressor, much less an unjust aggressor! Then quoting from ‘Instruction on the Respect for Human Life’, John Paul continues:

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___________________________________________________________ The human being is to be respected and treated as a person from the moment of conception; and therefore from that same moment his rights as a person must be recognized, among which in the first place is the inviolable right of every innocent human being to life.... 3 The papal statement regards abortion as murder and the justifying notion for that characterization of the abortion killing is that the human being is innocent - absolutely innocent, the Pope emphasizes. Recognizing the foetus as an absolutely innocent is designed to remove the foetus from a moral framework where even an innocent foetus regarded as a person could conceivably be killed in the face of a conflict where some other value might trump that of the foetus right to life as a person. Noonan identifies one such situation - only one - in which the pregnant mother’s right to life supersedes that of the foetus. The Roman Catholic moral teaching denies that a mother has any right to directly intend the killing of the foetus; and even to save her own life such a direct killing cannot be sanctioned. Noonan calls in his article for the Church to reassert the mother’s right to save her life if threatened by medical complications in pregnancy, and does so against the papal statement. In John Paul’s statement, abortion is always murder, and the life of the foetus always trumps the mother. And that is the normative Roman Catholic moral teaching. 4.

Absolute innocence: the metaphysical trump I have been contemplating these questions for some time, and the insight I am going to offer came to me when I was a visitor in Japan. When I visited the ancient capital of Nara, Japan a couple of years ago, my guide informed me that deer are sacred in Nara. He then proceeded to tell me that in recent memory, a driver had accidentally hit a deer and killed it. The accident was particularly nasty, for the driver was himself killed. Despite the tragic loss of a human life, the state intervened to sue the survivors of the now deceased driver. With the law reflecting a Shinto valuing of sacred being, in this case the kami of sacred deer, the family of the dead driver confronted both religion and law: killing a sacred deer is a terrible offence, a religious violation that it carries with it a stiff, legally imposed fine. Taken to court in metaphysical absentia, the driver was tried for killing a sacred deer, found guilty, and his survivors were required to pay the fine. This situation was created by the way the deer was valued, and be clear: the deer was recognized as spirit-filled, and protected because it was divine. Any injury to it was a religious offence apart from

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___________________________________________________________ being a legal offence. The dead deer was enshrined with a religiously conceived, numinous sense of innocence so profound that even if it had caused the death of a person, any injury to the deer - however that injury might have actually occurred - always imputed guilt to the one who caused the injury. Moral meaning folds in the face of religious valuation, though it is somewhat rare to find in the modern world the law of a nation bend to religious propriety and the metaphysics of the deer’s status this way. Japanese law required that the violation of the sacred must be addressed and requited even when the deer was responsible for creating harm to a human being, even when that harm was so serious as to be the loss of a human life. Clearly the religious point of view trumped the moral point of view: the deer was worth more than the human being, and its loss imposed a debt beyond rational moral proprieties Here’s the connection. What the pope has done in absolutizing the foetus is not at all unlike what the Shinto inspired legal proceeding did to the family of the deer-killer: it has identified an offence wherein the object of the offence is sacralized, regarded as sacred or holy - even divinized. I use the Shinto example because it is easier for those not Shinto to see this kind of elevated sacralizing divinizing valuation in another culture than in one’s own. Were we able to step outside our Western framework and see what is happening with the ascribing of absolute innocence to the foetus, we would, I suggest, draw a similar conclusion about the papal view of what cannot be anything but a divine foetus. Lest this conclusion seem outrageous or implausible, let me ask a question about absolute innocence as part of the Christian, and especially the Roman Catholic, faith tradition: where do we find absolute innocence? Who is to be regarded as absolutely innocent? The answer: for Christians it is God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, and for many Christians, Mary, Mother of God. These are all absolutely innocent, and in the religious context, metaphysical innocence when absolutized identifies sinlessness. To assure Jesus of such metaphysical innocence, a Roman Catholic doctrine pronounced ex cathedra regarding Mary’s own Immaculate Conception guaranteed that Jesus would not contract the condition of original sin not only in utero but also post utero. Whatever the specifics of theological understanding, it is clear that the foetus not only cannot act but cannot sin, so that its status is metaphysically pure. The foetus trumps the pregnant woman when the medical condition of pregnancy is posing a threat to the mother’s life either because the mother is not a person and the foetus is; or because the pregnant woman is a person, and the foetus is something higher - god-like, God. That is what absolute innocence means - that the foetus is God. No

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___________________________________________________________ wonder the foetus cannot be a material aggressor: it is innocent – it is divine. It is akin to the deer in Nara - a religious, sectarian valuation has removed it from the rational constraints of the moral life and reframed the meaning of its status outside the rational framework of moderate moral thinking and evaluation. The abortion debate becomes divisively intractable at the point where moral argumentation is engaged with a sectarian religious position, where moral issues are simply superseded. The divine foetus trumps even the life of the pregnant woman, a position that poses enormous difficulties for practical reason and the moral point of view. The moral point of view does of course allow that the foetus should be valued, but not so much as the mother who is a fully endowed member of the moral community; and even if regarded as a person that foetus cannot be protected absolutely against every and all possible challenges, not from the moral point of view. Religion deals with ultimate power and absolutes, and ‘pro-life’ religion that deems the foetus inviolate confers absolute value on the foetus, rendering it sacred, holy, and numinous - outside the categories of moral thought and discrimination. This is a suppressed dimension of the abortion debate, but identifies the source of the passion some people have that seeks to protect the foetus even at the expense of the pregnant woman’s life. Granting the foetus power to trump a fully endowed member of the moral community in every situation for the sectarian reason that its metaphysical status is superior to the woman’s moral status as person renders the foetus divine - at least that is how the moral point of view would interpret this shift from moral to some kind of extra or supramoral valuation. Killing the foetus is abhorrent because it is akin to killing God. If absolutely innocent, a foetal death killing can never be justified. At this point, the debate about abortion is not a moral debate, but a religious proclamation about the foetus against which the moral point of view can exercise little if any influence. 5.

Conclusion Invoking a sectarian notion of foetal innocence is socially dangerous especially in a pluralistic society where different religious views are held about such matters as abortion rights and no one religious view should receive official sanction as privileged and commanding and authoritative over all. Furthermore, to hold that the foetus is absolutely innocent is to create a divine foetus that is also, for purposes of religious valuation, also interpretable as an idol, and idol making for some religious people violates clear prohibitions on such activity. The injection of a sectarian metaphysics has the effect of devaluing the pregnant woman as agent and decision–maker because the god within her subverts her

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___________________________________________________________ autonomy as person, as agent, as decider. She is the Nara family member who must pay a terrible fine for killing a divine deer. The meaning of that killing reaches beyond moral meaning and is superseded by religion. The abortion debate is intractable because the terms of the debate are not commensurate - it is a debate over moral apples and theological oranges. . The debate over abortion ought to be a moral debate conducted by reasonable people respectful of women as persons, as fully endowed members of the moral community. The problem is that a sectarian viewpoint, represented by the idea of ‘absolute innocence’ has skewed the terms of the debate and made rational conversation difficult and in some contexts impossible. Those who want to affirm an absolutely innocent foetus should be free to do so. The moral community situated in a pluralistic society condones this absolutizing tendency to its peril. The moral point of view centres on the imperfections of existence and the conflicts that arise over goods and values. It advances the view that even life itself ought not be considered ‘an absolute good’ that trumps every other value. Such a viewpoint reflects a commitment to a religious purity the moral life cannot sustain and ought not to accept as normative; for the religious viewpoint is powerful and dangerous enough to create moral chaos.

Notes 1

Mary Anne Warren, ‘On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion’, The Monist, 57, 1 (1973). 2 John T. Noonan, Jr., ‘An Almost Absolute Value in History’, reprinted in Christina Sommers & Fred Sommers, eds., Vice and Virtue in Everyday Life, 7th edition, (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2006), 391. 3 John Paul II, ‘The Unspeakable Crime of Abortion’, from Evangelium Vitae, March 25, 1995; reprinted in Thomas Mappes and David DeGrazia, Biomedical Ethics, 6th Edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006), 458. Lloyd Steffen is Professor and Chair of Religion Studies, and University Chaplain, at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA. Among his books is Abortion: A Reader and Life/Choice: The Theory of Just Abortion.

Do We Have Moral Obligations to the Dead? Liz McKinnell Abstract Much has been written about moral obligations to future people. 1 In this piece I look at the related area of our obligations to past people (the dead). Past people have some morally relevant similarities to future people. Neither group of people exists at the present time. There are also some interesting differences: We can do things that affect the identities of future people, not with dead people; and we can do things which affect the experiences of future people; but again this is not the case with the dead. I address the question of whether there can be a wrong done against someone when we cannot affect his experiences. I conclude that this does not present us with a major obstacle to having obligations to the dead, and identify the biggest problem as lying in the fact (if it is a fact) that the dead do not presently exist, and therefore do not meet the ‘existence condition’ for harm. 2 After exploring a number of responses to this, I conclude that we can wrong the dead, but by a process of ‘backward signification’ (distinct from backward causation) we wrong them while they are alive. Key words: death, ethics, existence, identity. 1.

Introduction The intuition that we have obligations to the dead is at once a very strong one and a very old one. There have always been moral beliefs about what we owe to our ancestors, just as there always have been about what we owe to our descendents. Our culture’s respect for these traditions is no exception. For example, institutions such as wills are held as very important, and on a more personal level, we often feel we owe something to those who are no longer around. However, as we shall see, the notion of having an obligation to someone who has died can be metaphysically puzzling. 2.

Are past people like future people? For me, the question of what we owe to people who no longer exist arose out of research that I have done on future people. Discussions of intergenerational justice inevitably encompass past people as well as future people. It might be appealing to think that there is symmetry between our moral relationship with the dead and our moral relationship with the not-yet-living. In both cases there is no presently existing person who we can affect or have obligations to. This is the main root of the

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___________________________________________________________ problems concerning the moral status of future people and indeed of the dead. However, when we compare past people with future people the asymmetries are more interesting than the symmetries. One of these asymmetries is that we can affect the conscious experiences of future people, but we cannot affect the experiences of the dead. When I talk about my obligations to my great great grandchildren, I am probably talking about things that I can do that will affect their lives, such as preserving the environment or refusing to sell the family silver. When I talk about my obligations to my great great grandparents I cannot mean the same kind of thing, since their experience of life has already been played out and determined before I even appear on the scene. This is a difficulty with obligations to the dead that does not arise with future people, whereas the other major asymmetry between past and future people poses a problem for obligations to future people, but not to the dead. This relates to Derek Parfit’s ‘Non-identity problem’. 3 The crux of the non-identity problem is that by making decisions about the future, we affect which individuals will come to exist. This, Parfit suggests, means that making a choice in order to benefit future people is essentially self-defeating, because we cannot identify anyone who has been benefited or harmed. This problem does not apply to the dead. Winston Churchill, although dead, was a specific person. We can refer to him and be referring to a particular individual, and (unless we believe in bizarre science fiction scenarios) we cannot do something that prevents him from having existed. So the idea that past people have moral status has one advantage and one disadvantage over the view that future people are morally significant. The ‘advantage’ that the dead have over the not-yet-living stems from the fact that their identities have been determined and cannot be affected by what we do now. Their ‘disadvantage’ is that their conscious experiences, likewise, have been determined and cannot be affected by what we do now. 3.

Conscious experiences and harms You may now (quite rightly) accuse me of neglecting the idea of an afterlife. If conscious experience continues beyond life on earth, then it is at least theoretically possible to affect the conscious experiences of ‘the dead’, but by at least some views that accept the idea of an afterlife the difficulty might remain. It could be theologically difficult to claim that the torment of hell can be assuaged or the joys of heaven diminished by what a mortal does on earth, since it would give us the ability to moderate divine justice. It might also be claimed that any afterlife is simply ‘beyond this world’ and that events that happen here and now are simply

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___________________________________________________________ insignificant to it. So the argument that we cannot have obligations to the dead because we cannot affect their experiences is by no means confined to the realms of the atheist. If the main problem with obligations to the dead is that we cannot affect their conscious experiences, this means that there must be a problem with labelling anything wrong if it does not affect the conscious experiences of the person who is said to be wronged. This view would not just pose a problem for wronging the dead, this is the notion of wrong which in many people’s understanding underpins the badness of sexual infidelity, lying and cheating. Of course, we have all heard the adage ‘the crime is getting found out’ and we might argue that it is the possibility of discovery that makes unexperienced wrongs wrong nonetheless. Perhaps it is wrong for us to commit an act of deception because there is always at least a remote chance that the deceived individual will discover the deception and be distressed. Of course, if this is what is wrong with deception, then we can argue that the dead cannot be harmed in the same way. Not only do dead people not know what we do or say about them, it is in fact impossible for them to know about it. This would mean that, while we can accept that there are some wrong actions that do not affect the conscious experience of the one who is wronged, there can be no wrong without some risk of discovery. However, there are a couple of reasons why I think this isn’t the case. Firstly, if it is a risk of being caught that makes a deception bad, then presumably the smaller the risk, the less serious the wrong. It would be strange to have a moral theory that relied on risk in this way without taking account of the fact that some risks are greater than others. This would make the coldly skilful adulterer’s actions less bad than those of the honest husband who cannot hide his terrible lapse from his wife. If the possibility of getting found out is what makes the action bad, then we seemingly lessen our crimes by becoming adept at disguising them. A second point arises when we examine why the wronged person’s feelings are hurt if they discover the wrong. When someone discovers that they have been deceived, ridiculed or lied to, they are not upset because they have discovered that this has happened, they are upset because it has happened. The adulterer’s wife does not cry because she has found out about her husband’s adultery, she cries because he committed adultery. Given these points, we should not reject the notion of obligations to the dead on the grounds that we cannot affect their conscious experiences. Whether their experiences have already been played out from

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___________________________________________________________ start to finish, or whether they dwell in an afterlife beyond the reach of our actions, we cannot use this as a reason to deny our obligations to them. 4.

Is there a problem of non-existence? Any problem that uniquely affects obligations to the dead must relate to the fact that their lives are confined to the past. A simple, but perhaps very serious point that can be made is that if dead people no longer exist, then there is nobody to whom we have an obligation. At the heart of this problem is something that Fred Feldman terms the “Existence Condition.” 4 This condition states that something can only be good or bad for a subject s at time t if s exists at t. This condition would only pose a problem for those who do not believe in an afterlife. If a person’s consciousness continues after death, he continues to exist, and there remains an individual who can be the subject of good and bad events, and to whom we can owe an obligation. This is the case even if a person in the afterlife cannot be consciously affected by what goes on in the world. What is important is that they meet Feldman’s existence condition. If a subject s has eternal life, then for any time t after his birth s exists at t. Those who do not believe in an afterlife must have a response to this argument if they wish to defend the intuition that we have obligations to the dead. How can we have obligations toward them when they do not exist? This relates to a wider metaphysical worry which David-Hillel Ruben terms a “puzzle about posthumous predication”: In order for something to happen to an object it must acquire or lose a property; and to do that it must exist… A suitable slogan might be: No properties can be had or acquired by things at times at which the thing in question is not there to have or acquire a property. That is, (4) If, at t, x has the property P, then x exists at t.

5

It is clear how this problem relates to the ‘existence condition’ which states that something can only be good or bad for a subject s at time t if s exists at t. Ruben’s ‘puzzle’, similarly, states that something can only be a property of a subject s at time t if s exists at t. In fact, if ‘being wronged’ is a property, then the existence condition is arguably very similar to the puzzle of posthumous predication. I will assume here that ‘being wronged’ is a property, although there probably are good grounds to question this.

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___________________________________________________________ There are several ways that we can attempt to avoid this problem. We can try to show that the dead do, in some sense exist to be wronged at the time that they are wronged, and that therefore there is no puzzle in the first place. Alternatively we can challenge the assertion “(4) If, at t, x has the property P, then x exists at t”. A final answer might be to argue that the property in question (being wronged) is one that is instantiated by the person before they died, and that time t when the property P was instantiated was in fact a time when s existed. 5.

Do dead people exist? It is important to note that the believers in an afterlife who want to believe in obligations to the dead have already got their way. The problem of affecting conscious experiences, in as much as it faces those who believe in an afterlife, has been dealt with. The problem that we now face (that dead people do not exist to be wronged) is not one that concerns the believer, since he believes that the dead do exist. But what if the nonbeliever can employ a similar line of defence? Can a person who does not believe in the conventional concept of life after death still argue that the dead do exist in the present? There are various linguistic devices, which seem to imply that a person does not cease to exist at the moment of death. We talk about a person being ‘immortalised’ through his work. It can be responded that these turns of phrase are just that. It seems reasonable to say that a human life ends at the point of death, and that the language of ‘immortality through our work’ is employed metaphorically. The sense that ‘immortality’ in this context is not real immortality is nicely summed up by Woody Allen, who said, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work… I want to achieve it through not dying”. 6 But does this mean that we need to dismiss the idea of ‘living on’ through one’s work, projects or relationships as insignificant to our topic? Not necessarily. It is true to a greater or lesser extent that a person is defined in terms of their most closely held projects, relationships, goals and beliefs. These things are not simply external factors, they are intimately entangled with who and what we are. Since we are so entangled in these projects, and they are so involved in our personal identity, then it might be arguable that, even after our biological life has come to an end, some of the constituents of our identity carry on in the form of our projects and relationships. If this is true, then perhaps there is no puzzle of posthumous predication when we talk about the property of ‘being wronged’ in one who has died. I am going to leave this idea as a mere suggestion, since it would require an entire theory of personal identity. So for now we should simply

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___________________________________________________________ note that, as with the idea of a conventional afterlife, if we can hold a theory of personal identity that allows people (in an unconventional, nonconscious sense) to exist after their deaths, then we can escape the puzzle. 6.

Must someone exist to be wronged? Let us recap. Faced with the thought that dead people no longer exist, we encounter a difficulty in accounting for how they can be wronged. Dead people being wronged (if being wronged is a property) is a specific example of Ruben’s ‘puzzle of posthumous predication’: (4) If, at t, x has the property P, then x exists at t. But do we have to accept this ‘puzzle’? It is true that, in the case of most properties that we ascribe, it is nonsense to speak of something having that property if that something does not exist. This is what is wrong with sentences like ‘The current King of France is bald’. There is no current King of France, so we cannot say that it is true that he is bald. So in terms of ‘normal’ properties like being bald it is true that a nonexistent person cannot instantiate them. However, it can be argued that being wronged is not like ‘being bald’. Ruben suggests that, while we cannot ascribe properties in the everyday sense to things that no longer exist, we can say that they are the subject of ‘Cambridge changes’. Cambridge changes are relational changes that, while they may be a real change in the one of the relata, are not a real change in another one of the relata. To put this a little more clearly, when my first nephew was born in 1998, I underwent a Cambridge change. No real change occurred in me, and yet I became an aunt. Ruben argues that this kind of change can occur in the dead. I am inclined to agree. Joe’s grandmother Ethel died before he was born, even though, while she was alive, Ethel was not his grandmother. If this perfectly sensible assertion is true, then there must have been a point (Joe’s birth) when Ethel underwent the change of becoming Joe’s grandmother, even though at that point Ethel no longer existed. Ruben also points out that: To predicate a Cambridge change of an object may be to predicate of it a phoney change, but notice that it is to predicate of the object a perfectly good property. To say of some person that he has acquired a new cousin upon the birth of a child to his aunt or uncle, is to ascribe a perfectly genuine property to that person, but it is not to ascribe to him a perfectly genuine change. 7

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___________________________________________________________ This would also seem to apply to Ethel, who becomes a grandmother posthumously. However, the problem here would be to see why a ‘phoney change’ like this can have any real moral significance for the person who ‘is wronged’. If they no longer exist to be the subject of a real change, it seems that they no longer exist when they come to instantiate the property ‘is wronged’. After all, we might accept that a fictional character can have certain properties, but their non-existence would make it difficult to claim that we can have obligations toward them. Cambridge changes seem to lack the moral force that obligations to the dead would require. 7.

When is a dead person wronged? Until now we have assumed that the time at which the dead person instantiates the property ‘is wronged’ is after his death. It is certainly true that if I defame Winston Churchill in July 2006, I am wronging Churchill after Churchill has died and (we shall assume) no longer exists. However, it may be the case that my act of wronging Winston Churchill is not identical with his instantiation of the property ‘is wronged’. If this can be possible, then perhaps the time t at which x instantiates the property of ‘is wronged’ is in fact during x’s lifetime, and so it is undeniable that x exists at this point. I do not think that there is any particular problem with someone’s wronging of x and x instantiating the property of ‘is wronged’ occurring at different times. We might compare this with me shooting at someone and that someone being shot. I shoot at them the moment I pull the trigger, but they do not instantiate the property ‘being shot’ until the bullet hits them. This analogy makes it clear how, by separating the wronging from the property ‘is wronged’, we can make sense of the two events happening at different times. This certainly makes sense of how we can wrong future generations. Remember that (as with the dead) they do not exist at the present time, so they would also be subject to something rather like the puzzle of posthumous predication (a puzzle of prenatal predication?). If I wrong someone at a particular time, and then at some other time they are wronged, this might make sense of how I can wrong future generations before they come into existence, and when my life does not overlap with theirs. I can exist to wrong them, and they can exist to be wronged at a different time. This is entirely consistent with Ruben’s formulation of the ‘puzzle’: (4) If, at t, x has the property P, then x exists at t.

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___________________________________________________________ However, this solution is rather more counterintuitive when it comes to the notion of wronging the dead. This is because, if the dead person is wronged during his lifetime, I actually wrong him after he is wronged. This starts to look rather worryingly like backward causation, a concept that all but the bravest philosophers are keen to avoid. However, the relationship between wronging someone and their being wronged is not necessarily causal. It has been suggested that what goes on when the dead are wronged is not backward causation, but rather backward signification. Geoffrey Scarre writes “While a person cannot be pleased or pained by what he never knows, occurrences after his death can cast a backward light or shadow over his life”. 8 It is this notion of ‘casting a shadow’, not an instance of efficient causation that is meant by backward signification. Pitcher has a beautiful example: If the world should be blasted to smithereens during the next presidency after Ronald Reagan’s, this would make it true (be responsible for the fact) that even now, during Reagan’s term, he is the penultimate president of the United States. 9 If signification, not causation is what connects the act of wronging with the instantiation of the property ‘is wronged’ then it becomes possible for it to be made true, after a person’s death, that they instantiate that property during their lifetime. This means that they do exist at the time that they are wronged, giving the act of signification (wronging them) genuine moral importance. This notion needs more work, but if it can be supported, backward signification may well open the door to obligations to the dead.

Notes 1

The prime example being Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984). 2 Fred Feldman. ‘Some Puzzles about the Evil of Death’, The Philosophical Review (1991), 205-227. 3 Parfit 351-381. 4 Feldman, 205. 5 Ruben, David-Hillel. ‘A Puzzle about Posthumous Predication’, The Philosophical Review (1988), 213. 6 Oxford Dictionary of Quotations 4th ed., (1996). 7 Ruben, 224.

Liz McKinnell

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Geoffrey Scarre. ‘On Caring about One’s Posthumous Reputation’, American Philosophical Quarterly (2001). 9 George Pitcher. ‘The Misfortunes of the Dead’, American Philosophical Quarterly (1984)