Us and Death: Why the Disconnect?

Being the daughter of a mother who works in health care, I get some pretty frank discussion about getting old and dying - discussion that sometimes results with me yelling "Mooooom oh my god, stop talking! Seriously." I remember, when she worked with the elderly, my mother jokingly asking out loud before reading the obituaries "let's see whether I have any schedule changes for tomorrow." Now that she works in the ER, the stories are much worse. For a long time I wondered how the woman remains cheery and functional when she deals with death on such a regular basis (perhaps she's pocketing so-and-so's meds now and then?) She's seen a dead body -- I have never seen a dead body (aside from the sterile bones in the Anthropology lab, hardly the same thing).

"I touched a dead guy at work today, kids!"

However disturbed by my mother's dinner table conversations (the ones that taught me not to ask "so what did you do at work today, Mom?"), I have been considering something lately, maybe due in part to all the morbid blog posts I've been writing. Perhaps it's not that my mom is a little bit kooky (ok, ya she's totally kooky), but maybe it's our ideas about the dead that are disconnected from reality. Why is it that I get creeped out when she says that it was a patient's "time", or when she tells me exactly what she wants her funeral to be like?

These questions are ones that I have been mulling over this past semester. I think seeing death from an archaeological perspective has showed me that we (i.e. modern, western populations) have an unprecedented alienation from our dead. Our folklore, popular culture, and even our science tell us that the living and the dead should have as much of a divide between them as possible, and however unlikely it is that I will become a mortician any time soon I definitely see this disconnect as something that I wish were different. I feel that, if we were all more like my mother (It's like she's comfortable with the reality that everybody dies or something -- what a novel idea), then people would have a lot less to be freaked out about. Perhaps then we could live by the golden words of wisdom of 1970s Canadian rock band Trooper, "we're here for a good time (not a long time), so have a good time."