This Halloween, Let’s Really Think About Death
My youngest daughter presided over a stack of sticker sheets, sorting the best from the least inspiring. There were pumpkins and ghosts and black cats, but upon the discovery of a set of skulls, she stopped and pointed to a shape on the page she couldn’t identify. “What’s that?”
In general terms, it was a hexagon. More specifically, it was a coffin. I told her it was a special box dead people are buried in (thus its presence among the skulls). She put the sticker set on her stack of keepers.
I was pleased she had taken the news about coffins and skulls so smoothly. This is the peculiar magic of Halloween, the dizzying juxtaposition of the genuinely frightening with whimsy and make-believe. If most major holidays commemorate particular events (think Christmas, Thanksgiving, and the Fourth of July), Halloween memorializes the occasion of death.
Halloween is a cultural institution with an ancient inheritance: It may trace its roots to pagan celebrations of the autumn harvest and the hailing of winter, accompanied by a thinning of the boundary between this world and the next. The holiday also seems to have been influenced by the Christian solemnities of All Saints’ Day—a traditional observance that began as a day of dedication to Christian martyrs—and All Souls’ Day, devoted to the faithful departed. Whatever Halloween’s precise pedigree, it has a consistent historical association with death and the dead.
Death haunts all of the holiday’s typical motifs: It is the core of horror tales and movies, the threat of monsters and witches, the premise of ghost stories, and the source of skeletons, skulls, and tombstones. Human bones in particular have long represented mortality in art: Medieval European artists often included depictions of skeletonized corpses and grinning skulls in memento mori pieces, intended to remind observers of the fact of their eventual death. Later funerary art and architecture in Europe sometimes integrated the image of naked bones into tombs, mausoleums, and headstones, with the same aim as medieval memento mori works—to put onlookers in mind of their own destiny.
[Read: Adult Halloween is stupid, embarrassing, and very important]
People of the past were no more likely to die than we are today—the odds for everyone have always been 100 percent. But denizens of prior centuries were typically more exposed to the brutal realities of death than we are. In her exploration of American dying, The Good Death, the author Ann Neumann writes, “What’s different today is that our experience of death is a simulacrum, a myth, a romance where our loved one gives us a last meaningful look, then slips into a long sleep … Part of the reason we don’t know how people die is that we no longer see it up close.” We modern Americans tend to be comfortably removed from death, in other words, by the professionalization of care for the dying—Neumann points out that 80 percent of Americans die in facilities such as hospices, hospitals, and nursing homes. In this context, death recedes into an abstraction, something distant and anesthetized, devoid of the immediate experience of mortality.
Such estrangement from death leaves people bewildered and unprepared for the realities of dying, Neumann writes. But it also robs us of a certain clarity that the memento mori artists, with their grim preoccupations, grasped very well. Life is short and death is final, and all mortal glory is fleeting. We all labor under a death sentence. The fact of death ought to induce intentionality in our ways of living.
Halloween is no approximation of the firsthand experience of death. But it does foreground the visceral fear of death (occasionally via viscera itself). And it offers an opportunity to engage playfully with the idea of dying, through community celebration rather than solemn contemplation—or jarring confrontations with violence in headlines and images of brutal killings at home and abroad. Halloween’s reminders of mortality may be less explicit than artworks directly aimed at promoting virtue among the living, but they’re perhaps just the right inspiration for a culture as removed from death as we are. The skulls present the idea of mortality, and the jack o’ lanterns and costume parties make it approachable to a society that rarely spares time to consider the passing away of all things.
So enjoy the scares and the silliness, the heady mingling of humor and frivolity with fear and suspense. As the earth prepares for the dormancy of winter, so too can we prepare—in subtler ways than our predecessors—for the eventual end we’ll all meet, something to keep in mind when we wish one another Happy Halloween.