F or the vast majority of those in the industrialized, affluent west, death was – until the recent Covid pandemic – something exotic, foreign and outside of everyday experience. This distancing from death – and our expectation that we will enjoy a long, healthy, happy and pain-free life – is, so far as I can tell, an anomaly in all of human history. The luxury of viewing death as remote and “other” seems to be unique to our particular time and place.
As recently as the 19th century, death and dead bodies were frequently encountered in everyday life. The average life expectancy in the US in 1860 was around 40 years of age, and in the first decades of the 1800s, as many as 50% of children died before they reached adulthood. Death was closely experienced and familiar: it was common to butcher one’s own animals, deadly epidemics were rampant, and it was not out of the ordinary to die from a surgery or during childbirth.
For our ancestors in the 19th century, a good death was considered one in which you died at home, in bed, surrounded by your friends and family, including the children. This was an era before old-age homes and hospices, when people tended to live in extended families and die in the home. After death, the body would be cleaned, prepared and dressed by (usually female) family members.
It would then be laid out in a coffin in the home parlor for viewing, and possibly a wake. The body would be surrounded by flowers, which not only created a feeling of be.