ARTICLE


be prepared for the trial to come. When physical death took place the duty of the dying person’s society was to provide the requisite emotional, psychological and spiritual tools to ease that transition for all concerned, not only the departing one but also his/her immediate family and the society at large.


In our modern secular society our health services are run with a paradigm that excludes the possibility of the continuity of consciousness after death. A consequence of this is that death is now often seen as a medical failure and the dying of an individual person as an essentially meaningless act. This devaluing of dying and death has subsequently allowed our natural tendency to fear and deny death to become so dominant that we are hardly aware of it.


For an explanation of this, we can turn to Patanjali who produced the Yoga Sutras circa 500BCE and wrote of the five kleshas, the obstacles to freedom,which include abhinesva – the fear of loss and the clinging to life. Sutra 2:9 reads,“Even for those who are learned, there is an ever flowing, firmly established love for continuation and a fear of cessation, of death.”


This basic fear, which even those with an intellectual understanding of impermanence suffer, can take many forms including fear of dying, fear of the afterlife, fear of the death of others (including one’s children), fear of losing some elements of life, fear of losing identity, fear of change in general, a reluctance to interact with the dying, ageism, enjoyment through acquisition and the seeking of gratification in wealth. Projected out in the world, as it in modern society, it means an unwillingness to give meaning to death, a fear of dead bodies, disgust with and scapegoating of the elderly, and an inability to be empathetic and communicative with those suffering loss.


Because death and dying have become professionalized, medicalized, marginalized and made meaningless, our familiarity with the whole process is less than it used to be. However, the increase in older people, coupled with a health service on strained budgets, means that the care of the terminally ill and of those affected by loss will be thrust back upon the community to provide. If the community, (that’s you and me), is unwilling to look death in the face because of unacknowledged fear then, unlike societies of


the past, it will continue fail to offer the emotional and spiritual support required by the dying and the bereaved.


Days of the Dead are opportunities for communities to positively engage with death and loss. Once a year the dead come to visit and to party with those who loved them.The mood is celebratory. Humour predominates, the senses are indulged and the usual boundaries, social and spiritual, between people and between worlds, are lifted. For thousands of years societies have used times like these to communally enter a liminal state, a state of altered group consciousness through which the society is reformed and renewed, mundanely and magically.


The Glastonbury Day of the Dead will include parties, talks, exhibitions, procession and ritual. Although loosely based on the Mexican ‘El Dia De Los Muertos’, the day invites contributions and participation by all individuals, groups and traditions. The Celtic festival of the dead was called ‘Samhain’, the Romans had Lemuria and the Christians celebrated All Soul’s Day.As times change we discover and invent new and appropriate ways of delving into what death means to us.


This day will be an extension of Halloween for the kids, a melodramatic theme for the creative, another excuse to party for the energetic, a meditation for the spiritual, a rare chance to be included for the dead, a release for the grieving, an education for many, and an opportunity for all to take part in one of the most fundamental rituals that bind societies, the group remembrance of loss and the coming together and repairing after death.


According to the mystics, such as Abraham a Sancta Clara, ‘He who dies before he dies, does not die when he dies.’ This too is the ultimate goal of Patanjali’s yoga, to surrender the fear of death in order to experience eternatity. Once more, therefore, we would like invite you to join our celebration of life and death.


Dominic Quarrell MA MSc is a bereavement counsellor and co-creator of the Glastonbury Day of the Dead. For further information contact:- info@glastonburydayofthedead.com or info@talkingaboutdeath.co.uk.


London & South East Connection - August/November 2012 15


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