Death is an inseparable part of human existence. Everyone claims to know that they are mortal although many behave as if life has no end. Recent decades have shown people‘s views about death as having changed dramatically.
Looking at the Icelandic history back to the 18th and 19th centuries shows an undeveloped society in a particularly harsh country. The population was haunted by pandemics, erupting volcanoes and huge earthquakes. Natural disasters and sickness together with unbelievably infant mortality caused the population to stagnate from the turn of the 1700 until the last decades of the 19th century. The population totaled about fifty thousand and did not grow in number by the same token as the neighboring countries experienced. Such repeated misery and the high mortality rate resulted in death always being nearby in the daily lives of people. Young and old died from disease and misery literally amongst the other people of the household.
Hence, death was like any member of the household, sharing the faith of others there. Death was always present, strongly affecting people’s way of thinking and their position towards life. Death was like a state within the state. It came and spread. Everyone was equal to death and its power. Various traditions occurred in people’s views to death. A deceased person was watched over for different periods of time, and dead persons were washed in a certain way. The deceased’s assets and bed were arranged in accordance with certain rules thereon. Various kinds of superstition and prejudice, as well as rooted belief in destiny related to death and had done so way back to the beginning of the settlement of Iceland.
Children were raised having people dying in bed next to them. Fishermen who drowned and found were brought to church where they laid out awaiting burial in plain sight of everyone.
The first hospitals in Iceland were built in the 19th century. They were both small and the number of beds low. People continued dying at home as a result of poverty and lacking in daily needs and care, this continuing until way into the 20th century. The tuberculosis pandemic at the beginning of the century saw the construction of a TB sanatorium and soon more hospitals were built in Iceland. Gradually, death moved from the general households with patients being confined to special institutions. The infant mortality decreased and the average age of people increased with the mortality rate stopping to cut into the lower age groups.
As the century passed most people died in hospitals or institutions and thereby death ceased to be an inseparate part of the daily lives at people’s homes. This changed people’s position towards death as it became distant and unreal. A great number of people around fifty years of age had never seen a dead body and thereby had no conception about the finality of death. This explains in part the conclusions of research about people’s position regarding euthanasia. A large majority of young people is considerably in favor of euthanasia, whereas support for it decreases as people grow older. Elderly people know life and death on grounds of own spirit and experience and seeing death becoming closer and in terms of time life becomes valuable. Death as seen by young people is like a distant travel companion in a popular pop song.
Even though death has moved somewhat from the daily existence of people into special institutions, death is constantly close in the news media and as a part of entertainment materials. The news media is showing bodies being dug out of the ruins caused by explosions or who die in the field of battle. People find this terrifying, yet unreal. All of the dead persons seem to be a part of an interesting layout on a movie scene from Hollywood. Criminal movies contain murders with death being nearby. Death is the leading factor in computer games with hundreds of people being killed just through a light touch on the screen with a computer mouse. Death images go berserk on the Internet through numerous paths and channels of interested players. Cognative phenomenon like reaching out to the deceased with the assistance of mediums are highly popular. All kinds of narcotics are used to lead people into their own spiritual state where fear of death prevails.
People’s interest in death is indeed extensive yet it still protects its boundaries particularly well. The modern person with all his/her technology ; in fact the modern person actually knows as little about death as did the forefathers. This proximity of death in people’s minds and in the social media still make it even more unreal. Many therefore find it difficult to comprehend the finality of death. People get the impression of death being a distant yet unrealistic destination by a mystic travel organizer.
Many people regard statistics in a very ignorant manner and feel that such statistics ensure human longevity. When people die at a young age an effort is always made to try to find some scapegoat to blame the death on because people are not supposed to die until after a certain age has been reached. Modern people want to control and confine death as well as control various modern sciences. Death, however, will not take orders. It backs out or withdraws for awhile, however, it always returns. The ancestors were much more respectful of death and its unforeseeably. The position of today’s modern person is symbolized by a denial of death. The old Latin academics said: Omis homo moriturus – every person is mortal. All of the world’s ignorance and denial do not change this fact. □