Death - A Taboo Subject

The tragic death of a Steinbach teen last week has been front and center in the news media. Jaymar Bergen, a former student of mine at the SRSS, died in a fiery car crash and everyone is talking about the tragedy.  A Facebook page where the public is invited to comment on Jaymar’s life and death has been set up and several hundred people have already registered on it. Looking through the Facebook comments on Jaymar’s site I was struck by how North Americans talk so openly and with such emotion and honesty about death. This is certainly not true of the Chinese community in Hong Kong where I have lived and worked for four years.

                Death is an almost forbidden subject in Chinese culture. A person should not say the word ‘death’ because it brings bad luck. The word for the number four in the Cantonese language sounds almost exactly like the word for ‘death’.  This is why many buildings, including the apartment block where I live, do not have a fourth or fourteenth floor. I moved recently and while my husband and I were looking for a new place to live in Hong Kong we discovered that apartment blocks located near cemeteries or crematoriums have lower rents, because people aren’t eager to live close to places associated with death. I took my school students to a military cemetery in Hong Kong when we were learning the history of the city and many were nervous about entering it.  In their book Death, Dying and Bereavement in Hong Kong, Cecelia Chan and Amy Chow say that ‘thanotology’, the study of death and the mechanisms for coping with it, is gaining popularity internationally. However, in many Asian cultures the subject of death is still taboo. Chan and Chow claim many Asian people will go out of their way not to talk to someone who has recently experienced a death in their family.

              A Japanese film called Departures is coming soon to Winnipeg’s Globe Cinema at Portage Place. I saw it several months ago when it opened in Hong Kong theatres and could readily understand why it won the Academy Award for best foreign film of the year.  It deals with the subject of death in a moving and honest way. The film examines both the need to talk openly about death and the natural tendency of people particularly in Oriental cultures to think of death as something to be feared and avoided. A young man loses his job as a cellist in an orchestra and desperate to find employment ends up working for a company that prepares bodies for burial. He is shunned by his wife and friends because of the new career he has chosen. They are repulsed by his close association with the dead. The movie helps us see how different families deal with death and how the rituals surrounding death can provide comfort, healing and closeness to those who have lost a loved one. The main character in the movie has been estranged from his own father for many years. Called upon to prepare his father’s body for burial he is able to forgive his Dad and realize that in his own way his father loved him. Eventually the man’s wife and friends come to respect and understand the importance of the new career he has chosen.

         The movie Departures tries to show that death is an inevitable part of life and that the rituals surrounding death can bring new understandings, and heightened intimacy and openness to relationships. Hopefully this is what will happen for the family and friends that Jaymar Bergen has left behind.