Nagasaki Journey: The Photographs of Yosuke Yamahata

Afterimage, Summer, 1996 by David L. Jacobs

Where adults see grays, young children seem able to recognize and deal with death with disarming aplomb. They are drawn to the look and feel of death, and want to explore it as avidly as their own sexuality. Charles Dickens's Little Nell was completely at ease with her famous mid-nineteenth-century illness, strung out over months when The Old Curiosity Shop was published, chapter by chapter from 1840 to 1841, and read avidly by most of the literate population of England. Nell thought only of others, and never of her own malady; she was the epitome of the selfless, childhood angel, ready to meet her Maker. The adult reading population, on the other hand, held their breath for what they hoped wasn't the inevitable, and many implored Dickens to spare her. They wanted to defy in fiction what could not be denied in real life, which is understandable given the mortality rates of the period. In Manchester, England, for example, 57 out of every 100 children died before the age of five in 1840, and during the same period the English gentry lived to an average age of only 44, which dropped precipitously to only 22 years for laborers.(1) Little Nell died despite thousands of entreaties, but Dickens bestowed upon her the ultimate "beautiful death."(2)

The Victorians who wept at The Old Curiosity Shop (or Henry Peach Robinson's 1858 photograph Fading Away) had seen some of their children, nieces and nephews die as infants. Sometimes the same hands that cut their umbilical cords cleaned their bodies before rigor morris set in. They knew the smell of a deathbed, the breath of a dying grandparent, the dust in a shaft of light seeping through curtains, the passing of a mother in childbirth, the heft of a coffin being hoisted from a wagon and lowered into the ground. Throughout human history, death, like birth, had been close at hand, an everyday experience.

But the twentieth century brought with it revolutionary changes in the Western theory and practice of dying, as Philippe Aries has argued:

In the course of the twentieth century an absolutely new type of dying has made an appearance in some of the most industrialized, urbanized, and technologically advanced areas of the Western World. . . . society has banished death . . . Society no longer observes a pause; the disappearance of an individual no longer affects its continuity. Everything in town goes on as if nobody died anymore.(3)

The "banishment" of death is stunning in many respects, not least in the way it has taken such a strong hold on our society in such a short period of time. In a span of three or four generations, American society has so pervasively distanced itself from death that practices that previously were exceedingly common - like memorial portraiture - strike many late-twentieth-century people as twisted or perverted. Throughout history, to die at home, surrounded by family, friends and neighbors, was the norm. In our own time, most of us confer our rights of death and dying to the professionals, and die amidst doctors, nurses and blinking machines. In 1940, 70% of all deaths occurred in the home, but only 40 years later 80% take place in hospitals or nursing homes.(4) Death is kept at bay: tending the dying and dead is customarily given over to a whole professional sub-class of medical, funeral and legal communities who transact the theory and practice of death. If terminally ill patients want to die at home, they and their family often have to fight the medical establishment for the privilege, so radically have conventions changed. As Michael C. Kearl suggests, "with modernization, medicine has replaced religion as the major institutional molder of cultural death fears and immortality desires."(5)

If it is a rarity in our society to experience death in its moment, our mediated selves consume it daily through TV and film. Ever since Viet Nam, our living rooms have been the sites of death and destruction. The nightly news nearly always begins with stories of local gore - traffic fatalities, drive-by shootings, rapes. When fortune brings the networks a new war, flood or famine, we are treated to pictures of the "real thing," with grave voices that provide little in the way of context, but much advice about how to feel. In films and television shows countless bad guys writhe operatically before succumbing to the final horizontal, and Kung Fu is readily available on late night cable for those who need a close before bedtime. The National Institute of Mental Health recently estimated that by the age of 16, the typical American has seen some 18,000 homicides on television(6) - which works out to an average of three deaths per day - exclusive of newspapers and movies. Mediated death occurs across town or over oceans, but always elsewhere; it might be frightening or sad, but ultimately it's someone else's problem. Safe death, safe sex - if the pronouncements about cyberspace are any indication, our society is only just beginning to concoct ways of living in an airless remove.