Life, Death, and the Fear of Zombies

 

“The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.” -Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

As Hawthorne points out, a cemetery is one of the most fundamental parts of any human habitat. Yet, when I visit the cemetery in my hometown, it is almost always deserted, save for the squirrels and the birds. While death is one of the most inescapable parts of life, it seems that in our culture, people would rather avoid the cemeteries than remember to celebrate their residents. Rather than seeing death as a part of living, in our culture people prefer to avoid the specter of death altogether.

It doesn’t have to be this way. In Mexico and many other Spanish-speaking countries, residents celebrate Día de los muertos, or Day of the Dead, to remember their deceased loved ones and to celebrate death as a part of life. Traditionally, part of these celebrations includes gathering at cemeteries. This holiday is not celebrated in fear, but in remembrance and acceptance of death as an inevitable part of life.

In contrast, many people in American culture consume horror stories about zombies, ghosts, and vampires- testaments to the fact that spirits are evil and must be avoided at all costs. These stories continue to perpetuate the fear that many people have about dying and the taboo against speaking about the uncertainty of death.  Since death is such an important part of life, the cultural avoidance of death has quietly pervaded how we live as well. We place emphasis, especially in our health care system, on keeping people alive for as long as possible rather than helping them live in better, healthier ways. This is true at the beginning of life as well as at the end of it. Among anti-abortionists, so much effort is put into keeping unwanted fetuses alive, and very little is done to try to improve their quality of life, even though the reason for many abortions is inability to afford children. More resources are placed into prisons than into schools. Welfare is being cut. The fear of death takes priority over insuring a higher quality of life, and this perpetuates problems in other aspects of society, such as poverty.

When I tell people I like to visit cemeteries and look at gravestones, they look at me in disdain. The fear surrounding death prevents people from understanding its importance and from accepting its inevitability. Many people read books about zombies and grow fearful of the residents of cemeteries. Even Nathaniel Hawthorne, as he admits the necessity of cemeteries, places them next to prisons in the abhorrence of the people living with them. There is a possibility, however, that this fear ends up holding us back from certain parts of life and that the negative consequences of this taboo warps our values of life and are ultimately unhealthy for the people of our society.

Kristen Sibbald 

Staff Blogger Scr ’17