The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [30]
One of the reasons, I imagine, for this plethora of death-bed scenes—apart from their intrinsic emotional and religious content—was that it was one of the relatively few experiences that an author could be fairly sure would have been shared by the vast majority of his readers. Questioning my old acquaintances, I cannot find one over the age of sixty who did not witness the agony of at least one near relative; I do not think I know a single person under the age of thirty who has had a similar experience.1
Gorer’s guess about why this transformation occurred was that “belief in the future life as taught in the Christian doctrine is very uncommon today even in the minority who make church-going or prayer a consistent part of their lives,” and that without such a belief, death and decomposition “have become too horrible to contemplate or discuss.” An interesting theory, but what counted most was the observation itself: we were avoiding the subject. There were other calls for attention to death. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s 1969 On Death and Dying generated a whole new vocabulary. Her five stages of grief gave us a way to talk about discreet parts of the experience of dying. She later explained that she did not intend her list—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—to be understood as a neat series of events, just as you could write up the drama of falling in love as five stages but wouldn’t expect a consistent one-to-one correlation when looking at real people’s experiences. The fact that our culture has so mightily seized on her ideas, and for so long, tells us how desperate we are for some kind of script.
Gorer’s comments about the deathbed scenes of theater bring to mind Margaret Edison’s 1999 Pulitzer Prize–winning play, Wit, in which a brilliant scholar of the poet John Donne deals with her cancer and death open to the gaze of the audience. What makes that play work is decidedly not that the viewers had all seen this sort of thing in their real lives. The play is part of a change that took place in response to Gorer and Kübler-Ross, wherein the wise once again try to get us to stop averting our gaze. People seem to find this offer almost titillating. The HBO series Six Feet Under invited people to look at a corpse’s journey from death to burial, and it was enthusiastically embraced by television audiences.
Even with the changes toward more direct conversation about death, the age-old advice to remember death, to keep it in the forefront of our minds for the sake of bettering the life we lead now, is still rather lost in our culture of youth, competition, and vigor. There is, however, one modern-day conviction about the life benefits of remembering death: the axiom that survivors of an almost-fatal experience are understood to be happier than other people.
The idea is that the cancer survivor lives every day in exquisite gratitude. What happens seems so fundamental as to suggest that there is a biological component to it, a change in brain pathways, or chemistry, or something of the sort. Let’s call it “posttraumatic bliss.” There are feelings in this life—good and bad—that cannot be conquered by intellect or force of will. Some are potentially blissful, like romantic love. Most are rough: the sudden loss of a family member, a violent personal assault, a brutal accident—or maybe something you did to someone else—soldier’s remorse, for instance. Trauma flashes back. I am suggesting that almost dying can realign you in a way that is the positive incarnation of trauma: posttraumatic bliss. Throughout history we have tried to induce posttraumatic bliss by reminding ourselves of death. By this downright physiological interpretation, some aspect of self-induced post-traumatic bliss has been