Death, media, and my weekend.

The latest surprise in my world was finding a dead body. That isn’t to say I’ve never been with someone when they’ve died. As a nurse, that sort of thing is taken for granted. There’s just something very different about stumbling upon a dead stranger in the dark.

Along with two other drivers, an EMT friend and I were the first at the scene of a crash in a rural area this last weekend.  It was sometime around 2am, and to cut a long story short, we eventually found the driver, pulse-less and cool beyond resuscitation.  That is the undramatized version, devoid of all the details that make a moment so real, yet so eerily strange.

Later came the getting over the shock, the “was-that-really-real?” moment of processing followed by guilt at not feeling more sympathetic for the man, then mild horror and sadness for a few minutes before shelving it in our minds with all those other seemingly surreal life events.

What shocked me more than the actual event was the way people I knew responded to the story.  For some reason, to speak about a mildly violent death is somewhat taboo, which I find ironic in a society which has a massive amount of media depicting death and gore of some variety. One of my friends excused themselves mid-story: they felt sick. The very friend who occasionally spends hours per week playing Halo and watching horror films was disturbed by a traffic accident so clean it would have been rated a low PG-13.

While many Americans will see fictional characters die umpteen times, feel distaste for the plight of starving African children, and vote for capital punishment, we will know little to nil of the last moments of our own friends and neighbors.  I will not see photographs of the murder-suicide that happened at the local park.  I will see smiling memorials, a closed coffin, or perhaps a made-up, waxy-clean version of a human shell.   While we could sit through the Dark Knight Rises without feeling squeamish, set Average Joe in a clean hospital room with a dying person, and he will feel numbness, panic, helplessness, discomfort, and horror that no screen can ever convey.

I’ll disclaim here that this is a vastly complex (and fascinating) issue.  We must factor in coping mechanisms, the WAYS in which media portrays death, religion, human nature, general cultural attitudes, the effects of trauma, etc.  It deserves books, and books have been written. Yet for all of our arguing about violent culture, I wonder if we understand raw death less than ever.  We have distanced and sterilized death until it is little more than losing a video game, not a final breaking between body and soul but a sort of clean disappearing act that all humans eventually do and we are allowed to shrug off. 

As real death becomes more and more a mystery, our morbid fascination with this enigmatic instant grows and spills over into our conversation, our humor, and yes, our media.  Eventually, these distant reenactments, these far off representations we have grown comfortable with, become our only knowledge of death itself. Meanwhile, our own impending deaths become increasingly awkward, frightening, and taboo subjects.  Do not bore us with another television story about murder, for we have seen it once already, seen them all. Yet allow a shooter into my theater, allow me to stumble across an unfortunate driver, force me to spend hours listening to death rattle breathing of a loved one, and any numbness I’ve felt towards death must eventually melt away for a little while. Is it any wonder that during weeks after 9/11/01, church attendance spiked?

Old statistics predict that by the age of 18 you most likely will have seen anywhere from 18,000 to 26,000 movie murders, if you are a near-average American [1].  Yet for many, one dead body with almost no blood on the side of the road remains a traumatic experience.  Violence, murder and death are all blights which have stalked us since Cain killed Abel, and I do not think our attitudes towards them ought to be dismissed with simple explanations. However,  I wonder if at times our callous jokes, our glorification of violent villains, and our ability to shrug off war photographs  does not spring from our saturation with death knowledge, but a near-adolescent lack of firsthand experience with it. 

I spent 20 minutes waiting for the police in the dark with a dead man this last Friday. Even for someone who sees death at a higher rate than most, this unnerves me a little in retrospect. Death left its procedural hospital, and found its way into my lake shore weekend.  Does violent media numb us to this? I’m not sure.

In such moments, a screen does not protect us from reality.

Sources cited: [1] Senate Committee on the Judiciary.  Children, violence, and the media: a report for parents and policy makers. September 14, 1999.