The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

by Michael Easter

Ignoring death wasn’t always the American way, said Gary Laderman, PhD, a death historian at Emory University. “In the nineteenth century and before, Americans were much more intimate with death and it was much more a part of everyday life—death was family and community based. It was homespun and homegrown. When someone died the corpse was right there. “The key turning point is Abraham Lincoln’s death and funeral. Lincoln becomes the most public figure ever to be embalmed, and the process is described in newspapers,” Laderman told me. “Embalming then becomes mainstream and the funeral industry grows and expands. For some it’s the way to keep death distant, a way to not see death or face it.” This coincided with “the rise of the modern hospital. Funerals and hospitals began to kind of take over the process of dying and the dead body,” said Laderman. A sick person goes into the hospital, then to the funeral home, then into the ground—the process is off our hands. “Hospitals leveraged knowledge and expertise to bring death out of its former intimacy.”