PRESENT TENSE:IF YOU were so inclined, you could get up this morning, turn on the television and watch women giving birth for the rest of the day, writes SHANE HEGARTY
You would have a selection of channels on which to watch it, and a variety of methods.
Water births, standing births, Caesarean sections, emergency births, routine births, American births and British births.
You will not be able to watch deaths. You will not be able to find entire channels dedicated to helping people face up to the end of their life. There are none that offer advice to family or friends; that follow the last moments of the terminally ill so that you might better appreciate how it will be when your time comes. Death happens about 150,000 times a day, and will happen to each of us. But there is no Death Channel.
So, you may now be thinking, welcome to a column that is intent on stating the obvious. However, Nuala O'Faolain's interview on Marian Finucane's radio programme last weekend brought a rare national acknowledgement that we really don't talk about death as honestly or as regularly as we should. And by death, we mean ordinary, everyday, unblinking, unfair, scary death, which cares little for your retirement plans, your dignity, or your family.
But as we consider that, we need to be honest ourselves. Do we really want to talk about death, to think about it, to actually see it in its raw, unsentimental reality? Because if we do, then it needs to become almost as commonplace in our culture as birth now is.
In certain respects, death is everywhere. But when it's in the news, editors tend to shield us from it, giving statistics rather than corpses.
Newsreaders regularly describe people as having "lost their fight for life", so confirming our need for reassurance that they passed away with dignity and bravery.
In fiction, we get sweetened, heroic deaths, in which people are given not only last words but halting soliloquies through which they can pass on their final wishes or a chin-up message to their lover. And although plenty of art has dwelled on the issue, aesthetics can too often put us at a remove from the realities.
The death faced by O'Faolain is a type that is extremely common, yet is rarely seen publicly. There are, though, a growing number of exceptions, even if their scarcity still makes them such novelties that, in the case of televised deaths at least, they tend to make the news bulletins.
In 2000, the death of a cancer patient, filmed for the BBC's The Human Body, broke such a taboo that it became a national event. However, when ITV last year followed the last days of an Alzheimer's sufferer in Malcolm and Barbara: Love's Farewell, the discussion became diverted by a row over whether the channel had hoodwinked viewers into believing the death had occurred on-screen, when it had actually happened when the cameras were not present. The maker of that film, Paul Watson, will be returning to the theme, this time concentrating on what he calls "natural death", for a future documentary that will be filmed in Ireland.
Alan Gilsenan's landmark documentary series The Hospice last year traced the final months of terminally ill patients. It made for moving, vital television because it emphasised the realities of terminal illness, both for family and patient.
Away from television, it's worth looking at the photography of Walter Schels (www.wellcomecollection.org), which is currently on view in London. The German took photographs of his subjects before and after their deaths, and accompanies the images with a brief interview. The pictures are compelling, but the words are particularly challenging. Some of the people were combative, hopeful, content. Others were angry, scared, resentful. All arrived at the same destination, but the variety of their responses forces you not only to think about your own mortality in an unflinching way, but about your life too, which, perhaps, is among the reasons we only sporadically have the nerve to face the question.
It says a lot about our culture that each time death becomes a topic of public conversation we refer to how little we talk about it. If we are really to continue a public discussion about death, it needs to be an almost daily one. Otherwise, it risks becoming fitful to the point of becoming a fashion, as occurred with the turn-of-the-century glut of cancer memoirs, led by John Diamond's
C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too.
Unlike death itself, these turned out to be a trend, eventually pushed aside on the shelves and in publishers' catalogues by memoirs in which an individual's horrific upbringing is survived and conquered. The problem with death, of course, is that it does not offer happy endings.
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