Being with the Dead

February 1, 2023 | Zeki Tan PM ‘25

image description: ars moriendi artwork

I was only three when my grandfather died on a remote mountain top in China. I remember climbing on his coffin as it was being lowered, trying to get one last glimpse of his face. The mourners gasped as my quick-thinking mother pulled me away before I joined him in the grave. With tears in my eyes, I strained to view his coffin as he descended further into the ground, disappearing completely.

Perhaps my attempt to remain with my grandfather’s corpse is a little extreme, but it reflects a human desire to be among the dead. The mourning process can be described as an attempt to re-constitute our relationship with the living when they have transitioned into a different state of being. Our loved ones may pass away corporeally, but they somehow live on—in the art they created, the memories they imprinted on the living, and the possessions they left behind. 

In my home country, the Philippines, it is common for people to visit their deceased loved ones on All Saints’ Day, set up tents and picnic blankets, and spend the night sleeping next to their tombstones. Philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff rightly understood that “we live among the dead, until we join them.” [1] Even in New Haven, thousands of miles away, I regularly stroll through the Grove Street Cemetery, a stone’s throw away from my residential college, to be with the dead. In this eighteen-acre “city of the dead,” thousands of souls ranging from nameless infants to world-renowned academics rest in immaculate plots tended by a platoon of gardeners. [2] The dull, lifeless gray tombstones contrast sharply with the lush, lifegiving green plants surrounding them.

The desire to cling to our dead seems so intrinsic to the human experience, which makes the prevailing culture so unusual for attempting to push the dead away. We use euphemisms to numb the experience of death, saying that someone has “passed away” instead of “died.” We move the resting places of the dead farther away from the dwelling places of the living. The Grove Street Cemetery is one example. It was established in 1796 to replace the New Haven Green as the city’s primary burial ground. The Green marked the town center, whereas the Grove Street Cemetery was then on its periphery.

In a way, modern medicine fulfills the same purpose. Hospitals and nursing homes cordon off the sick and elderly for health reasons, separating them from the people they love and trust most. This culture of isolation was on full display during the Covid-19 pandemic, in which many people died alone in the hospital, their families denied visitation under lockdown rules. How did these people feel as death approached? Perhaps they still had dreams to fulfill, places they wanted to visit, or people they wanted to see when Death came knocking. When my grandfather died on that mountain top, gasping for air, what was on his mind? Did he regret making the trip my father had advised against? Did he wish he could see his children and grandchildren one last time?

In the mid-15th century, two texts were published that spawned an entire genre of religious texts called the ars moriendi–the art of dying. In a society where the next plague outbreak, war or famine was never too far away, ars moriendi texts provided a degree of comfort and stability to people anxious about their mortality. Ars moriendi texts, while offering useful advice, were not so much about ensuring that the dying had extra-soft pillows, hot tea and their favorite books at their bedside (although who wouldn’t want those things?). Rather, ars moriendi texts were an exhortation to cultivate virtues over a lifetime. 

The ars moriendi texts outlined five common temptations faced by Christians throughout their lives, but especially near death: lack of faith, despair, impatience, spiritual pride and avarice. Christians could be tempted to renounce their faith in God as they lay dying; they could also lose hope in God’s ability to forgive them of their sin. They might become hostile and bitter toward others as they lost the ability to bear their suffering patiently. They might fret about how they would be remembered, and thus become too proud of their achievements while overlooking their sins. Finally, attachment to earthly possessions could prevent medieval Christians from accepting their mortality and instead make them more anxious and uncertain about the afterlife. To resist these five temptations, the ars moriendi texts provided advice on how to adopt opposing virtues. Faith instead of unbelief, hope instead of despair, patient love instead of impatience, humility instead of pride, and generosity instead of avarice. 

Some may say that ars moriendi texts only made sense in an era where death was always at the forefront of people’s minds. With the advent of modern medicine, people no longer need to worry about making it to the next week. The vast majority of people alive today are now expected to live well into their eighties and nineties. Modern medicine has ushered in an age of vastly improved health and material comfort, giving us the illusion of immortality. Rather than using the extra time to prepare for death, however, many would rather forget that it will one day happen. Yet pretending that death is avoidable does nothing to alleviate our natural fear of death, nor does it prevent it from actually happening. A brief glimpse of Sheol–an illness, an accident, or a natural disaster–easily rekindles such fears. 

We must acknowledge our mortality as an inevitable outcome of our present condition, and thus acquire all the guidance and support we can get as we approach death. Dr. Lydia Dugdale writes that “we are relational beings, and dying is a community affair. It takes a village to flourish while dying.” [3] Family, friends, priests and physicians–connections and conversations with people we can trust are absolutely vital to prepare us for death. A community can also be guided by those who came before–tradition, or what Chesterton called the “democracy of the dead,” [4] expressed through rituals that show us “what to do when a living person becomes a corpse.” [5] Death rituals provide physical representations of ars moriendi to a community. The mourning clothes, the prayers, and the flowers create a familiar atmosphere so that those still living can rehearse for their own death. Even my periodic walks through Grove Street Cemetery are a ritual reminding me of my mortality. The liturgies, prayers, and rituals outlined in ars moriendi texts weave death into a community’s social fabric, linking past, present and future through a common understanding of our demise. 

On its own, integrating death into our daily lives through ritual feels distressing. For all of us who have lost loved ones, death rituals may bring back painful memories of loss and trauma. Ars moriendi texts only make sense when they are framed within the Christian narrative of God redeeming humanity and giving us hope for eternal life. One cannot contemplate a meaningful death without first having hope in their resurrection through Jesus Christ. Secularization, however, has shattered that worldview, creating a spectrum of unsatisfying alternatives. Some fight tirelessly to evade death through determination and ingenuity. For instance, Jeff Bezos has reportedly invested in Altos Labs, a biotechnology start-up attempting to prolong lifespan–perhaps indefinitely–by reprogramming cells worn down by stress, disease and genetic mutations. [6] Never mind that we are, as Tolkien writes, fighting the long defeat, waging war against an enemy who appears to be gaining ground every day and who will eventually prevail over us. [7]

On the other hand, there are those who acknowledge their mortality and believe in a syncretic version of reincarnation and the afterlife. For instance, a 2017 innovation that made headlines on international news was the tree burial pod, in which one’s corpse is buried in a biodegradable, egg-shaped capsule. [8] On top of the capsule a tree is planted to absorb the nutrients from the corpse, ensuring that the deceased lives on in the tree. In 2020, a Korean documentary featured a grieving mother who interacted with a digital recreation of her deceased daughter through a virtual reality headset. [9] The virtual girl’s physical features and voice did not exactly match the original, yet she was “real” enough for her mother to say goodbye and move past three years of mourning. In a way, this digitized copy brought the dead girl back to life, but only in a virtual environment. 

These narratives all possess some fragment of truth. Those who try to extend lifespan through human innovation correctly believe that eternity is a part of the good life, and death is not. On the other hand, those who find ways to keep the memory of their loved ones alive rightly recognize that death is intimately connected with new life. Yet these explanations seem unsatisfying. An indefinite lifespan in a world plagued by evil and violence would be tormenting. Burying our dead in tree pods and claiming they create life dances around the question of why people die in the first place. If we’re being honest, we don’t really want the tree. Nor do we want digitized copies of our loved ones. We want our dead in material, bodily form. Three-year-old Zeki wants his grandfather back.

Ultimately, it is the Christian narrative that fulfills, rather than negates, these secular alternatives for what follows death. The Scriptures affirm eternal life as a desirable thing promised to us–God would not have placed the Tree of Life in the center of the Garden of Eden if it were otherwise. Yet eternal life is not attained by fruitlessly attempting to extend human lifespan, or by conjuring false, inadequate “resurrections” through technology. Rather, it is by giving up such meaningless striving, instead patiently waiting for a future where Jesus Christ, who has overcome death, makes all things new. It is a future in which our mortal, sickly bodies are transformed into immortal ones that do not get sick, experience pain, or pass away. We must be with the dead, not away from them, to prepare ourselves for this future. Therefore we should not lock the gates of the cemetery at night. We should allow people to die at home with friends and family instead of being left to die on their own in nursing homes and hospitals. We should cease shrouding the experience of death in euphemistic language, instead having open conversations with our community about it. Life is our first and only rehearsal, but we have the opportunity to rehearse death many times over a lifetime, and rehearse we must.

I may never know if my grandfather died believing in the Lord. I struggle to reconcile his lifestyle with my own understanding of the good life. He lived to excess, smoking two packs a day and drinking heavily, sometimes falling asleep on the roadside. He gambled away his meager wages on mahjong. Throughout his life he pursued pleasure over virtue. However I think even he borrowed unknowingly from the ars moriendi playbook. He sought community, dying in the company of his drinking buddies. He knew his time was short, which drove him to spend his limited time doing what made him happy. He did not strictly adhere to all the ars moriendi virtues, but I know he was a generous man, at least to me: when I turned one he hurriedly bought me an oversized trike with the little money he had. When he climbed that mountain to die, he was performing a ritual in which he saw himself ascending toward the heavens. Perhaps he did die well, in a way he saw fit.

In the end, maybe the precise wording of our prayers or the hymns we sing do not matter as much in facilitating a good death. I am comforted most by the distinctly Christian hope in which ars moriendi is rooted, rather than the rituals. Yes, we go through the motions of life, our first and only rehearsal. With only one rehearsal, we won’t perform very well. Yet it is worthwhile to strive for a more virtuous life, rehearsing death many times over a lifetime, because the Scriptures promise bodily resurrection through Jesus Christ. This is why the entrance gate to the Grove Street cemetery reads: THE DEAD SHALL BE RAISED. As T.S. Eliot succinctly wrote: “In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning.” [10]

[1] Nicholas Wolterstorff. Lament for a Son. Published 1987.

[2] Grove Street Cemetery. https://www.grovestreetcemetery.org/ 

[3] [5] Lydia Dugdale. The Lost Art of Dying. Published 2021.

[4] G.K. Chesterton. Orthodoxy. Published 1908. https://www.chesterton.org/democracy-of-the-dead/ 

[6] Antonio Regalado. “Meet Altos Labs, Silicon Valley’s latest wild bet on living forever.” Published September 4, 2021. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/04/1034364/altos-labs-silicon-valleys-jeff-bezos-milner-bet-living-forever/ 

[7] J.R.R. Tolkien. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Published 1981. 

[8] Paula Erizanu. “The biodegradable burial pod that turns your body into a tree.” Published January 11, 2018. https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/03/world/eco-solutions-capsula-mundi 

[9] Caren Chesler. “AI’s new frontier: Connecting grieving loved ones with the deceased.” Published November 12, 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/11/12/artificial-intelligence-grief/ 

[10] T.S. Eliot. “Four Quartets.” Published 1943. http://philoctetes.org/documents/Eliot%20Poems.pdf