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Philippe Aries (The Hour of Our Death) surmised that the good death--defined by dying in one's bed, surrounded by family and friends, and with opportunity for spiritual reconciliation with God--dates back at least to the Middle Ages (and he concludes that people had been "dying like that for millennia"). That said, all three components underwent change between the medieval and modern eras. The deathbed scene and its rituals were orchestrated by the dying person in premodern Europe. By the American colonial era, family and friends assumed control of the deathbed scene, as David Stannard described. And, as Faust, Mark Schantz, and Gary Laderman have demonstrated, by the mid-nineteenth century, another shift to the control of funeral directors was underway, which culminated in removal of the deathbed scene from the home. The presence of family and friends is far more consistent, although their purposes for being present changed. In pre-modern Europe, they are there for spiritual support as the dying fought to save his/her soul. In colonial America, they served not only to support the dying but to organize deathbed rituals and attend to the immediate mourning family. In both periods, observers sought signs of the dying/deceased salvation, so they served as witnesses as well. Of course, with the shift of the deathbed scene out of the home beginning in the nineteenth century, the presence of family and friends became rarer, so that some scholars and cultural commentators declared 20th-century America a death-denying culture partially based on the distance between dying and living that had taken shape. Finally, the spiritual aspect of the deathbed scene changed most dramatically and had significant regional variations. In pre-modern Europe, the dying faced a contest at the moment of death between hell and heaven. Throughout the deathbed scene, the dying faced demonic temptations while agents of heaven--Jesus, the Virgin Mary, God--observed to see if the dying could withstand those temptations. The rise of Protestantism increasingly offered a more optimistic scenario, so that by the mid-17th century, the dying were not fearing such temptations but instead anticipating heaven. (Martha Ballard's deathbed scene demonstrates this well.) The Puritans, however, did not find similar comfort. Their notion of death as punishment for the sinful and reward for the righteous sustained that deathbed ambivalence found in pre-modern Europe. Consequently, there remained a tension between the fear of death and the ideal of a peaceful deathbed scene into the early 18th century, epitomized by the shift from death-heads to angel-heads on New England gravestones over those years. By the nineteenth century, Romanticism largely erased such ambivalence by emphasizing the reconciliation of family in heaven, contributing to the idea that men could gallantly march off to their deaths in the Civil War since familial reconciliation was a noble and emotionally preferable condition. I know my response is probably more than you wanted, but I am teaching the history of death in America this semester and it is foremost on my mind.--Craig PLEASE NOTE MY NEW EMAIL ADDRESS: craig_friend@ncsu.edu Department of History Campus Box 8108, Withers Hall 368 NC State University Raleigh, NC 27615-8108 phone: 919-513-2227 fax: 919-515-3886
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