Hardly anyone dies these days. They pass away, or simply pass. But to where? I wonder. What Bali-afterlife or Tahitian-Elysian Fields is awaiting them? 

For believers, I expect the answer is heaven, hell or purgatory. But for those of us who have dispensed with the religious afterlife, where do the ‘dearly departed’ go when they are said to pass away?

The nonsense doesn’t stop here. 

After a person has ‘passed away’ they are then ‘laid to rest’. For those who have been cremated, a bowl of ashes whether cast to the winds or stashed in a mausoleum niche, cannot possible signify rest. And there is nothing restful about the dark interior of an over-priced coffin where the body gradually rots. As for the incorporeal soul, unburied and unburned, there is no proof whatsoever of its existence as anything other than a poetic trope. 

The issue here is of course death, or rather, DEATH. It’s such a terrifying prospect that the very mention of it – death, dying, dead – is shunned. Death is so abhorrent that a new area of medicine that regards death as a treatable illness – euphemistically titled ‘regenerative medicine’ – has recently emerged in the United States. I cannot imagine anything more horrible than a world filled with very old, very rich people with plastic skin and stem-cell and/or digitally-produced organs who spend their life in the time-consuming and very expensive pursuit of not dying.

So many euphemisms to escape death – but not, I would suggest, particularly effective in easing the widespread death-fear. In my 1986 Macquarie Thesaurus, ‘Living’ and ‘dying’ are both key words, but the entry for ‘dying’ is twice as long as that for ‘living’: curtains, demise, sticky end, release, the dearly departed, casualties, the loved one, the fallen, the list goes on and on. So many ways of side-stepping the inevitable end. It’s as if the words themselves, dead and death, will tempt the evil eye and toss us in the ring with not-at-all easeful death. In the 2007 edition of the Macquarie Thesaurus, the keywords of ‘living’ and ‘dying’ have been replaced by ‘life’ and death’, and in the same nod to reality as the earlier edition, ‘death’ is more than twice as long as ‘life’. 

The Thesaurus notwithstanding, the preferred nomenclature, whether on reality TV, in the tabloid press, the ABC, the serious press or just general conversation is ‘passing away’. The best that can be said about ‘passing away’ is that it’s not as grating or as misleading as ‘pass’ and ‘passing’; after all ‘pass/passing’ can be used to refer to traffic, to a horse-race, to a person passing as someone they are not.

One reason for the widespread death-fear is that life is well, so vivacious, and the idea of not living, of not being here, of missing out on the future, is deeply distressing – like a fabulous party to which you were not invited. But the fact remains, as Epicurus pithily stated: Where life is, death is not. And where death is, life is not. And that is the immutable case whether amoeba, wombat, narwhal or human.

A possible solution to the death fear might be to down-grade life, to stop preferencing it over death. Henry James referred to life as a predicament before death, while Ted Hughes in his reworking of Euripides’ Alcestis wrote of death as the birth-cry/… the first cry of the fatally injured. Birth as a death sentence, and life as a rather engaging filling in time would place death as the goal of every moment, every experience, every love affair, a step closer to the finishing line of a long and stimulating Tour de Vivre winding through the Alps of life.

‘Passing away’ suggests a peaceful, easeful leave-taking, like a cloud floating out of sight. Cataclysmic death as a result of insurgencies or semi-automatic weapons or an aeroplane crashing into a skyscraper runs counter to the whole purpose of a euphemism like ‘passing away’. And as it happens, big death doesn’t shy away from the truth. 1000 dead. 3000 dead. No euphemisms here. And mass deaths that occur in numbers that defy comprehension (six million Jews dead in the Holocaust, nine hundred thousand Tutsis dead in  a single month in the Rwandan genocide, hundreds of Sudanese dying right now) also don’t shun the language of death. Similarly with large-scale natural disasters – earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, raging floods, prolonged droughts – where the dead number in the thousands and tens of thousands, no gentle passing away for them. Another exception to death evasion is the war dead – although after the fact: at the time of both world wars, there was a very particular protocol to be followed in reporting the war-dead. While those who have died in wars are often referred to as ‘the fallen’, more commonly the dead are spoken of as dead. Recently, I visited the Western Front and some of the several hundred cemeteries marking the deaths of the tens of thousands of young men killed there during the Great War. So many of these young men were ‘cannon fodder’ – a very evocative metaphor which adds a moral dimension to their deaths – and so different from the euphemism of ‘passing away’ that actually obscures death and drains it of meaning. But then, that’s what euphemisms do. 

It is death that is close, death in the hand, touchable death, that we shy away from; this is the death that doesn’t want to acknowledge itself. These deaths disrupt the weave of family of friendships of daily life, these deaths make living lesser. 

For the dead, death is the end. For the living, death is the great unknown, and, more uncomfortably, the great uncertainty. Death as the great uncertainty? An oxymoron if ever there was one. And yet death need not be so hard. I am an ardent stroller of cemeteries. All those epitaphs are like mini-biographies – the lives of strangers shared with you. And death has inspired great art and literature; from Dante and Shakespeare through to Dickens to contemporaries like Sandra Gilbert, Julian Barnes and Lisa Appignanesi, so many writers have sought to explore death, have portrayed its richness and complexity. And music too, more than 2000 requiems, and numerous smaller enlightenments like Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children). These works of music, of painting of writing bring you up close to death.

            In 1973, Ernest Becker published The Denial of Death. It became a best seller. Becker showed why we deny death and why immortality was so attractive. I find myself wondering if Becker’s book was one of those unread bestsellers like Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, because the denial, in the English-speaking nations of the west is more entrenched than ever, But if all these stupefying euphemisms were to be discarded, death might be seen not as a threat nor as the great fear to be avoided at all costs, but rather a fact of life,