Why people didn’t used to fear death

People used to know when they were going to die.

If you’re like me, and the majority of Westerners, you don’t think of or encounter death very often. We live in a largely death-less world. Death is hidden away in brightly lit hospital rooms and dark corners of senior homes. Funerals are now a ‘celebration of life’ and an open casket is something I’ve only seen in American movies.

Yet, every time I think of the end, my heart skips a beat, and I quickly bat the thought away. Death is a feared unknown that I pretend will never come.

I am clearly not alone. Looking at you Bryan Johnson…

Some, like Bryan here, go as far as to drink their children’s blood in their quest to conquer death. Ok, I don’t think he actually drank it, but still, how scared do you have to be of death to take your son’s blood in the hopes of becoming younger?

In my own, less vampiric, quest to deal with the fear of dying I read Philippe Aries’ ‘The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes Towards Death Over The Last Thousand Years’. An academic work but well worth your time if this topic tickles your fancy. Aries spent three decades crafting his magnum opus in which he masterfully unmasks the mysteries of death and how Europeans regarded it in the last millennium. He shows that fear and denial, a hallmark of our attitude to death today, was not always the response to death.

Death used to stalk the everyday. It was an expected, accepted, and embraced part of life, which an ordinary person would come into contact with frequently, making the unknown of today rather ordinary.

People knew when death would come

In the early medieval period, the common, ordinary death didn’t come as a surprise. Its essential characteristic was that it gave advanced warning of its arrival. Presentiment of death was widely accepted and believed by most Europeans up until the nineteenth century.

Stories like that of Madame de Rhert, a matriarch from eighteenth century France, were common. Mme. de Rhert organised her funeral, had Masses said for her soul ahead of time, put all her earthly belongings in order and organised help with all the tasks she performed in the household. She then died on the day she had indicated. This level of clairvoyance wasn’t afforded to everyone, but nearly all had some premonition as to when death was near.

Death was a necessity, somewhat frightening, but expected and unsurprising.

Contemplating the unsurprising quality of death I am reminded of my grandmother on the last day I saw her, mere hours before she passed. She could no longer form words, in what would shortly become her deathbed, but her eyes seemed distant, looking at things I couldn’t see. She seemed at peace, ready.

I had been studying abroad and came home with my fiancé to get married. Before I returned home I would often talk to her of the wedding and my husband-to-be. I knew she was unwell but each time we spoke she was adamant she had to see me one more time. She kept saying “darling, I have to see you just once more to say goodbye.” I came to her almost straight from the airport and she died later that afternoon.

Perhaps, today some of us too can feel death nearby. Perhaps we just don’t talk about it. Perhaps we are too drugged up to know that death is coming.

Death was public and familiar

It’s hard to estimate the percentage of people in the West today who reach their late twenties and never see a dead body. All I can say that, barring those in medical professions nearly everyone I know hasn’t.

A few centuries ago, it would be hard to find such a person. Death was commonplace and public. As late as the 19th century, a person walking the streets of a European town could upon hearing a church bell announcing someone’s impending death walk into the dying person’s home and watch them receive the holy sacrament. Even absolute strangers could come into people’s homes to observe the last sacrament being taken.

The public element of death was highly desirable. Dying was decidedly not a private act. Many were more afraid of dying alone than of dying itself. Madame de Montespan in 1707 for example kept the women keeping vigil chatting around her to ensure they didn’t doze off. If they did fall asleep, she would wake them up every few minutes, so she wouldn’t be alone in her final moments.

Mme de Montespan would find it harder to get someone to keep her company were she to die today. She, like most of us, would likely perish alone in a hospital bed.

Solitude has its positives, but facing the unknown alone is scarier than having a friendly face keep you company.

To die was to sleep until the Second Coming

Death wasn’t a violent transgression in the past; it was more like a peaceful transition into a sleep of indefinite duration.

In the Middle Ages atheism was essentially unknown. Nearly everyone in Europe believed in the Christian God and the Second Coming. The dead would rise again to be judged. In the meantime they would be in a state of ‘sleep’.

This belief is well demonstrated by the popular medieval legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, where seven martyrs, persecuted in the 3rd century AD by the Roman Emperor Decius, had their bodies sealed in a grotto. Centuries later God ‘woke them up’ to counter heresies doubting God’s power of resurrection. The martyrs were described as thinking that they had been asleep but one night, when in fact it had been hundreds of years. One of the martyrs compared their state to ‘the child [who] lives in his mother’s belly without feeling any needs, so have we been living, resting and sleeping, without experiencing any sensations.’

The image of sleep is the most popular and most constant image of death from antiquity onwards. It is this belief that’s behind the language of ‘resting’ in peace upon dying that we still use today.

When you couple the belief of death as being a form of sleep with the belief in the Second Coming, death becomes altogether less scary.

You go to sleep everyday, so dying is not as unknown. The sleep just may be a tad longer, depending on when Jesus makes his re-appearance.

To fear death less find Jesus, a friend, a morgue and say no to drugs?

Clearly, if I want to fear death less, finding Jesus and getting in on the Second Coming would be great. That is for now very much work in progress.

Next, I should see about being exposed to death more. I might look into visiting a morgue or two. Is that even allowed?

And to have company while dying? I shall speak to a younger friend about making a be-at-my-deathbed-pact in the hopes that I go first.

Oh, and I really should write a medical directive to avoid being drugged up, and highly emphasise a wish to die at home among the familiar places and (hopefully) faces. That might help too.

*Great thanks to Philippe Aries for his masterful work The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes Towards Death Over The Last Thousand Years on which I based most of the above. I highly recommend it!