Session One: Silence, Art and Ritual
Discussion

CHRISTINA GILLIS: Do the members of the panel want to respond to one another, or to Jodi at this point?

SANDRA GILBERT: I'll make one comment which, though it's still half-formed in my mind, focuses on this issue of looking and seeing. I begin with the idea that we now inhabit a death-denying society. At least--and some people have actually argued that point with me just in the last week--I think we inhabit a death-denying society. Hence I think that any looking, any ritual, any confrontation with death that we can make happen is useful, including the rituals of embalming that we are used to thinking of--as in Jessica MitfordÕs work--very sardonically.

I'll add one other note on a very controversial point: I think that MitfordÕs book, The American Way of Death, which was just recycled in a new version, is problematic because it too, in a way, is a death-denying book. She said somewhere that funerals are just a lot of nonsense and that we ought to get rid of all of that; we ought to just sort of get together and sing a few songs and then shovel the dead person into the ground. But this may be just another form of shoveling death into the ground. So I guess I'll just say that anything we can do--looking, acknowledging, in some sense honoring the existence of death--is important.

JIM GOLDBERG: With my father's death I was there. I was the son and the photographer, videographer. I was there simultaneously in many roles. Since I saw him die, seeing him dead was just the extension of the moments before he died. With my mom, the death was unexpected, and when I got there, she was at the funeral home in the crematorium area. And that, in itself, is a somewhat bizarre place. There were other bodies stacked up in boxes, and there were guys smoking, and there were guard dogs barking. So there was this whole environment of the business of death. And it was very hard for me to photograph her.

Perhaps the difficulty really was that I wasn't there at that moment of my mother's death. And, maybe, as a recorder of memory--and that's what photographers or artists often are--you have to be there during the act. To see my mother dead was very hard. She did not look good. This is not an argument for embalming, but as an artist, seeing her was for me hard to record. I showed you one image that is quite beautiful, but it's more metaphorical, not like the literal image of my father and the watch where we see the moment of his dying. I have much more literal pictures of my dad dying that are shocking even for me to look at.

So of all these pictures that I had taken of my mom, no one wanted to see them. And I don't know if it was because of a denial of death or because they're ugly. Maybe it's a rhetorical question: Why do we look at these things? What is the need of seeing? Or can words sometimes, or pictures that aren't so literal, or imagery that isn't so literal, take the place of actually hitting people over the head with the facts? But sometimes documentary people show so much that we already know that we can ask why we need to see it.

back to top

GARY LADERMAN: I want to hear from others. But I very quickly realized in doing the research for my book [on the development of the undertaking profession] that I'm definitely taking on the denial thesis and saying it's misguided and off the mark, particularly for the period of the first half of the twentieth century. I'm finding all kinds of evidence that speaks not to denial, but to obsessions with the topic of death and the return of the dead. That is what my work on Disney is about, all these early, crazy Walt Disney films that are not so crazy. The death of Bambi's mother is probably firmly emblazoned on most of our minds, in terms of our experiences with death. Maybe we could talk a little bit more about that. The denial thesis is particularly identified with that first half of the twentieth century. It's interesting to think about it too in contemporary culture, where the highest-grossing films deal with the encounter with death and the return of the dead: Sixth Sense, Ghost, even American Beauty. It's like we are the dead. I was hoping I'd get a chance to say that.

TOM COLE: I'm Tom Cole from the Center for Medical Humanities at the University of Texas in Galveston. I'm not so sure that I would agree that dying ends a conversation. A lot of what I was picking up from Sandra--her meditations, personal narrative--was something along the line that death ends the chance of a better relationship, but that it's absolutely essential for the living to make meaning and to come to terms with and memorialize and reword those relationships as long as they are alive. Perhaps the old idea of the denial of death just meant the denial of death as if it were some kind of external reality that's out there in the world. But we all know that that's not true, that death is as much a fact of our imaginations as it is of any existential or objective reality.

So keeping the conversation going, I think, is really essential. When I was really moved by Jim's photographs, I was really struggling with, "How are you doing this? How can you put your watch right here while your father has just died in the background? And how can you be the photographer, and the son, and the experiencer? What is this for you?" Jodi asks what the dying need, but I think the question should also be about what survivors need. We have to tend to both of those questions, I think, to make more headway on the denial thesis.

SARAH LIU: Sarah Liu, Department of English, UC Berkeley. My question deals with an individual dying, and how different individuals will do different things. It seems to me that in some ways we are a culture obsessed with death, but obsessed with producing the idealized death. For example, this Tuesdays With Morrie book. I thought it was wonderful that Morrie got to die in such a nice way. He was coping, he was humorous, he made dying easy with his family, so on and so forth. And yet our culture's celebration of this type of death implies that there's a good death versus a bad death. And that if you're dying, and you're bitching and moaning all the time, and you're complaining, or if you don't want to talk, you don't want to open up, somehow you're not doing it right, you're not dying well.

back to top

CHRISTINA GILLIS: So in other words, Morrie really did get to "make the last presentation"?

SARAH LIU: He died on his own terms, which is fine. But having his terms apply to everyone else seems wrong. And so maybe what the dead want is to be seen as individuals, not as examples of "there is one way to die and this is it."

GARY LADERMAN: Speaking of burials in the contemporary period--although I haven't really gotten there yet in my book--I think that what we've seen in the past few decades is an increasing effort to personalize and customize funerals, so that they reflect individual traits. This is different from the first half of the twentieth century, where funerals were pretty uniform. So, again, all this is historically contingent. There are cultural scripts about the good death that every culture has, and these set up perhaps an idealized image that can lead to a lot of disappointment or confusion.

CHRISTINE FINN: I'm an archaeologist, and I've had the experience of discovering, disposing and dismantling bodies, or skeletons, which is a very profound experience in itself. But what I'm deeply interested in at the moment is accidental embalming. I'm looking at 2,000-year-old bog bodies that have been found in Northern Europe. I put some photographs up on the board outside, taken by a photographer in his role as archeological photographer of a museum. He took them, really, as pictures of record. But what happened to the photographs is that they're playing a role in a different kind of dialogue, one that has been picked up by the poet Seamus Heaney, amongst others, and various artists and sculptors and filmmakers whom I've been speaking with.

When I show these images at lectures, depending upon whom I'm speaking to, I get very different responses. If the people are attached to the artistic community--poets, writers, artists, filmmakers--they say, "Wow, how amazing, we can look at a face that's 2,000 years old and it looks like someone I know." I think those in the more scientific community become a bit more reluctant; people stand back and say, "I don't get that, I don't like that, I don't like that image."

back to top

SANDRA GILBERT: What do they mean when they say, "I don't like that image?" Does that mean they don't want to look at it, they find it disturbing?

CRISTINE FINN: They find it disturbing instead of moving. It's as if it's not in the right context. What they see is a forensic piece of evidence that's being shown in a lecture which includes poetry and art.

SANDRA GILBERT: I guess this brings me back to the whole issue of death-denial in our culture. That we make lots of movies about the dead coming back is not to say that we aren't a death-denying society. It's precisely to say that we are. We have movies in which Mickey Mouse is run over by a truck, but he jumps up again and there he is.

What's interesting is that there's a tension between the arts, poetry, certainly, as I see it now, and the culture that makes movies about dead people coming back; between people who want to look at pretty images of dead people, and poets who want to talk about real particulars, who want to testify or bear witness to the real particulars of death and dying, or who want to take photographs, or who want to uncover the secrets of the medicalized death and make art out of them. And it seems to be that for a contemporary poet, death is the kind of dirty secret that's being outed from the cultural unconscious, you know, like sex. We all talk about sex now, but we do have trouble with death as the actual, the sort of documentary details of death, or the vision of the person as a particular person.

CHRISTINA GILLIS: Gary, do you want to make any comment on that?

GARY LADERMAN: Well, my position there is that the death-denial thesis doesn't get the whole story. It's partially true, definitely, but there's more going on than just denial. As you were saying, this kind of a generalized comment doesn't capture the nuances of what I think are the cultural expressions of obsessions with death.

back to top

CHRISTINA GILLIS: Anyone else on the panel want to respond to that?

PARTICIPANT: I would also like to get back to the original question that was posed about what does dying mean? We've gone around it, but haven't addressed it as much. I think Jim's photographs were fabulous, from his father's point of view. You saw two sides of it. You saw Jim responding: he desperately wanted to get his father in the chair, which is what his father wanted; and you saw his mother, who desperately wanted his father to live. What do the dying need? I haven't heard, and I want to hear more about that.

CHRISTINA GILLIS: Let's open that up to everybody.

GWEN ANDERSON: My name is Gwen Anderson from the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics. And I think my comment will relate to that. I want to take us back to the images of the people in the nursing home, specifically, some of their comments that help us to realize our assumption that life is so precious, that we do want to have life right to the very end. Some of those comments helped us to see that life is not that precious to everyone, and, in fact, there is death within the living, and that there is a living that is preparatory for death. What is it that we could possibly help those people with? Their comments are not something that we necessarily want to hear. So how we facilitate or how we shut down that conversation I think is particularly important for us to think about. And Jim's photographsÑand the combination of the photographs and commentsÑ show us where the person is at in his or her life, and draw our attention to the fact that there is dying and living in the process of dying. And for those who voice the need that they don't necessarily want to live anymore, how can we possibly help them toward that dying?

JODI HALPERN: I just want to say one thing because I think that is an important question. Thinking about death and dying, in light of thinking about people who have suffered traumatic losses, suggested to me that the risk of shame, which has come up in different places, is very important. So that at the very least, whatever else is involved, it seems that to be seen in a kind of objective cold way, visually, could be shaming. But that is not of course what I see in Jim's photography. Also, part of our thinking about this issue of the choices beyond just extending life at all costs has to do with this issue of the acknowledgment of the self that has lived and that is meaningful, that hasn't been destroyed as a self.

GWEN ANDERSON: I think it's part of the integrity of self and the wholeness of self. And even though it may appear that life is not worth living, or that that person wants to move toward death, that in and of itself is part of the integrity. And we want to respect, value, honor and celebrate that.

back to top

MAURITA GRUDSON: I'm Maurita Grudzen, Stanford School of Medicine, and also Pacific Lutheran Seminary. In seeing your images of the nursing home and reading the quotes following up, I thought of the people who need to be there as caretakers. They need to be people who can hear the integrity, which it seems is the essence of spirituality, and also can see the beauty that is in the wholeness right there. There's the ugliness, but there's the beauty, the beauty of the soul. And I couldn't help but flip back many centuries to the first hostels and hospices that were in the context of monasteries. I also come out of that experience. So I ask, what kind of training do we need to provide to be attuned to that spiritual self, which is beyond religion?

BETTY DAVIES: My name is Betty Davies, and IÕm from the School of Nursing at UCSF. My comment has to do with your question about what it is that the dying need. And I certainly don't claim to have the answer to that, but one of my thoughts is that I believe, based on my experience and my research, that it's not so much death that people fear oftentimes, it's the dying. And it's the process of dying that your photographs portray that sometimes can be so painful and so ugly, and is not beautiful always. I think in our society that sometimes we fear or we avoid anything that is ugly. I'm not sure we're obsessed with death; I think we're obsessed with beauty, the beautification of things. And so when people are dying, they become ugly in a physical sense, they become helpless, they suffer. And when people are grieving, they become ugly, physically ugly--their faces contort, they feel the pain, and they express that pain. And we want to avoid that discomfort and that ugliness that's just part of life. We talk about death and maybe to accept death is part of life. But I think we need to accept ugliness as part of life, that that's how it is, and we're not always happy and beautiful, and we cannot be. And so your work, I think, portrays some of that ugliness. And when people are old and helpless and ill and ugly, what it seems to me they need is someone who can overlook that, somehow to deal with the repulsion that we feel when we see that, and still be there.

JOHN GILLIS: John Gillis, grateful spouse. I think what Ms. Davies just said is really quite profound because it struck me, in all the talks, that we're really dying as we live. I was struggling to find the insight that you just provided, that is, that virtually all our life rituals are built around idealizations, that we're always prettying up life, whether it be at birth, at birthdays, at weddings and so on. The ugly parts of our lives we have found no medium to portray. We don't photograph divorce proceedings; we don't, as far as I know, ritualize the ugly moments in our lives. So this is not a plea, somehow, for the beautification of those ugly events, quite the contrary. It would be to find some aesthetic that does not rely on beauty alone, but honestly confronts and represents, say, through photography or poetry, that which in our day-to-day lives we're not facing either. We're very practiced at this perfectionism, at this idealization. And it's not at all surprising to find the the end of life so problematic.

back to top

JOHANNA WEINBERG: Johanna Weinberg, UCSF. It struck me that we've spent a good part of the last part of the twentieth century talking about autonomy and patient autonomy. And it became so clear, Jodi, when you were talking about this experience that you had, that it almost could have gone either way. That is, you know, the patient tells you about this terrible thing that's happened, and, in some ways, you could say, "Well, she's deeply depressed and she shouldn't be allowed to give up treatment if she's so depressed because that could be treated." The doctors who come in don't see that side of it; they simply see, "We must let her live as an autonomous being." Their way is one that we've developed to cope with some deaths. We say, "All right, it's autonomy." We are giving the individual autonomy, but we haven't really been able to balance that with the need also to give what the family or the rest of society needs in terms of the coping process. And I think that the combination of the technology that's available and this tremendous assertion of individual autonomy has made it in some ways more difficult for us to understand what death is about.

JODI HALPERN: That's a very important point, and I would argue that we don't really know what we mean by autonomy by itself. Because if the conditions for autonomy, even in philosophers like Kant, have to do with being able to imagine your future, my argument is you can't imagine it. For someone who's dying in Hospice, it's a very immediate future that becomes bearable or tolerable. I want to emphasize that compassion, relationality--those are conditions for exercising autonomy.

TONY BARKER: I'm Tony Barker, an oncologist from the University of Washington. And I wanted also to respond to this last thread in our discussion. I mean, your question about what the dying need is a really profound one, and in the story that you told, I was really struck by the parallels of all that to the trauma survivors, who have, you know, lost a part of themselves and are really struggling to regain that. I see the same kind of thing. I've been interviewing people who are really seriously pursuing physician-assisted suicide, and you see some of the same issues for some of them, who have to think in terms of reconstructing a new self that isn't based on having a beautiful body, a fabulous career and so on. And some people can do it--maybe Morrie, for instance--and other people just decide they can't, and they decide that this is the end of it.

I'm also thinking of Jim's photograph where the guy said, "I'm all gone." We actually have interviewed people like that in our study, who have really felt as if their selves were destroyed in such a way that they were just not recoverable. And they really were at the end of their lives, and some of them actually had what their families considered a wonderful death. So it's all a challenge.

The other part of that question that I think I wanted to bring up raises the issue of what we need from the dying. If we're going to ask what the dying need from us, the thing that comes up is what we need. Some of the comments, I think, have reflected what we as other people in that conversation need.

back to top

CHRISTINA GILLIS: I think we have time for maybe one more question. I hate to cut this off, but I'm sure we will revisit these questions.

ALEX McCLOUD: I'm Alex McCloud from the California Institute of Integral Studies, and I've come here as an artist and someone with an interest in aesthetics. And now I have a couple of comments. One is this question of beauty. Having recently read Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just, I think, actually, that the issue is the kind of cultural imperialism that we may put into beauty. If, for example, we create the ideal "good death," then everything else becomes scaled against it.

My other question concerns Dr. Halpern's second point, which intrigued me because it had implicit in it a question about what the existential status of the dead is. You spoke about how the conversation ends. And yet in Dr. Gilbert's comment, I heard very much about the presence and the continuation of that conversation. And it strikes me that what we may imagine the existence of the dead to be, as well as the nature of our spiritual beliefs and personal experiences, would very much affect how we would engage this question. You spoke about projecting our feelings onto the dead; I might say we should talk to them. It seems to me that was an unspoken assumption that we might not all share. And I don't know how that might affect the conversation.

JODI HALPERN: I'm very glad you said that, because in no way was I trying to foreclose these various models, just to suggest the thought that provokes me, which is that we never get to hear back in a certain sense.

CHRISTINA GILLIS: Nor am I ending this conversation. We're coming back, and there is a lot more to talk about. I want to thank the panel and all of you for a wonderful morning.

back to top