Death’s Impossible Date

The dating of death can be set alongside ideas of the soul and of sensing the presence of the dead, to identify what we call the mortality paradox. This emerges from traditions in which the dead are both dead and yet exist in some other form or domain. Grief may often partner this intriguing dissonance in contexts described here as “triadic moments”, where the dead are spoken of in such a way that they seem to live again. Similarly, the dead may reappear as a form of body-recall as we sense in ourselves aspects of behaviour of kinsfolk. The theoretical notions of dual sovereignty and of paradigmatic scenes are used to frame and explain these means of “dating death”.

and becomes the agent of society in accounting for death. The certificate then becomes a valuable document in how people manage the numerous legalities involving the dead person's estate. Assessing death after the event is, of course, a more complicated medical task and may, if circumstances demand it, require forensic pathology, or even a police investigation of the circumstances surrounding death. In some cases, the dating of a death is an important factor in deciding whether a standard death certificate is used (as for most people), or whether a Certificate of Stillbirth is to be used for those who have passed 24 weeks of gestation, but did "not breathe or show any other signs of life after being completely expelled from its mother". If a child was born alive and lived for at least 28 days before dying, then a Neonatal Death Certificate is required. While such timings of the death of a foetus or live-born child are important for legal and medical purposes, they can carry a different significance for parents who may well have experienced an increasing sense of having been "parents" or "parents-elect" during the ongoing nine months of pregnancy-a status enhanced by scans and photographs of their child in utero.
In British society today, people experiencing a stillbirth, or the death of a baby within that four-week period of birth, encounter a very different parental life-course narrative than the narratives which predominated in the past. Notably, in the case of stillbirths, the parents may well wish to claim their right, as it were, to parenthood. In contrast to the days when a neonatal death might be treated as a "medical waste" issue, with the mother having no contact with the "child", there are now bereavement support networks available and some parents choose to have photographs taken with the "child". The emergence of an appropriate funeral for such births has become one social marker of "lives" whose only biological forms are intra-uterine, but which are accorded social lives through commemoration. Hospital chaplains also sometimes baptise such births, even though in the theological terms of mainstream Christianity, one can only baptise biologically living people (though, as we will see, there is an exception to this in Mormonism). These neonatal death contexts make the question "when is death?" very problematic.

Medically Sustained Life
In our modern, medically-advanced society, prematurely born and terminally ill babies can be nurtured through life-support systems. This also applies to severely ill adults and to aged individuals in ways that raise complex medical, ethical, religious, and philosophical issues over the question "when is death?". There are many people who would have died "naturally" if they had not been treated "culturally" through medical intervention. The distinctive concepts and processes of, for example, "brain-death" and organ donating, clearly raise question marks over whether a "person" is "alive" or dead, or can be given a new lease (and status) of life through replacement organs. Medical practitioners frequently have to make difficult decisions about keeping people alive. For instance, should the victim of a serious accident be kept ventilated and on life-support, even if the victim's brain injuries make any realistic hope of recovery an unlikely prospect? In this scenario, the victims' organs could play a key role in the recovery of otherwise terminally ill people. This, in itself, raises the question: when is death for distinctive body parts, given that hearts may survive for four hours or so and kidneys might be sustained for 36 hours? 1 What forms and timings does life take when it is sustained by the lively organs from a recently "dead" person?

The Departure of the Soul
The theme of animation must also be considered because of the widespread popular idea of death as the absence of the soul, spirit, or life force from the body. As a near-universal perspective on life, human beings interpret death as the removal or loss of vitality, whether in natural philosophy, natural medicine, or natural religion. Given the power of what cognitive anthropologists and others call the "animacy principal"our hardwired capacity to sense agency or "life" in things-people have tended to assume that death occurs when the body no longer breathes, when the breath of life departs. Breath has, for millennia and in many parts of the world, symbolised life, while its absence marked a person's death. The reification of bodily life in breath, and then in soul, has meant people have thought of the soul as having an existence all its own, not least outside, or beyond the body.
Yet, life's departure is seldom seen as instantaneous, in that in life a "soul" may linger around the body; be offended if relatives mourn too much or do not mourn enough; and move on to some new identity in another domain. Today, in Britain, for example, Muslims are buried in such a way that they can sit up shortly after burial to answer key questions put to them by the post-mortem visiting angels. Or again, traditional Rabbinic Judaism echoes the idea of a lingering spirit, alert to the behaviour of surviving family members. This should not be provoked by bodily activities, including sexual intercourse, in which that spirit can no longer participate. 2 These and many other cases suggest that a body/ soul distinction is a means by which death can be thought of as impossible, despite the presence of a corpse.
This impossibility comes from the idea that there is no mortality as far as vitality-force is concerned; "persons" do not die, they change. Belief in the existence of an after-life can be found in countless religious and cosmological traditions, such as the karma-related transmigrations in Indian-derived worldviews and the journey through judgement to paradise in middle-eastern traditions. Even in secular societies, where many people think of death as the complete end of a person's vitality-existence, memorialising behaviours mean that the memory of the dead lives on and influences the behaviour of the living. The "when" of death, in other words, is hard to calculate when the presence of a person is obviously not erased when he/she dies.

Mormon Death
My previous work on Mormonism suggests that timing death is something that involves the manifestation of "life" in a series of its modes. 3 In Mormonism, each person is thought of as pre-existing as an entity known as "intelligence". That intelligence then comes under the influence of a more advanced intelligence known as Heavenly Father who transformed or engendered "intelligence" into a spirit-child. This spirit then comes into existence in a kind of pre-mortal heavenly domain where it joins with an earthly body to create a "soul". This Mormon terminology is often seen as counter-intuitive by other Christians because it speaks definitively of spirit plus body producing a "soul", rather than speaking loosely of a soul and body as constituting a human being. For Latter-day Saints, however, death is thought of as the spirit leaving the body (meaning the "soul" no longer exists). The soul then passes to the spirit world and the body to the grave until the day of resurrection. At this time, the spirit will engage with a resurrected body in a transformed unity that will now be judged and move into one of a whole series of post-mortal domains, known as kingdoms or degrees of glory.
So, for Mormons, the question "when is death?" is answered on the one hand by the separation of spirit from body when the "dead" body is washed and dressed in sacred clothing before being buried (burial being more usual than cremation in Mormon culture). On the other hand, the spirit now exists elsewhere and will, at a future date, be reunited with its transformed body and move onwards into cosmic glories. However, even this is but a partial picture of life and death, for the devoted Mormon will have spent a significant amount of earthly time performing rituals within the distinctive sacred space of the temple. These are not the ordinary churches found in most towns, but the one or two temples present in most nations into which only accredited and approved church members can gain access. In the intense ritual activity of these Mormon Temples, the living are baptised on behalf of the dead, for whom they have collected family history. As spirits, the dead await the living and avail themselves of the dynamic opportunities available to them once vicarious baptism and other key rites, such as ordination and marriage, are conducted on their behalf. Temple and genealogical work is frequently said to bring the living and those in the spirit world close together, signified by the saying that in the temple the "veil is very thin" between this world and the next (a metaphor materialised by the literal veils which separate different qualities of existence in the temple).

The Mortality Paradox
The Mormon case illustrates the fact that "the dead" are, in a sense, alive for them. In the after-life they wait for the living to engage in the ritual activity that offers an enhanced form of eternal-cosmic life after the Godgiven resurrection of all. The extensive genealogical and ritual work of Mormons on behalf of the dead keep the living in mind, not in the simple memorialist sense of a family tree, but in a pro-active sense of creative endeavour on behalf of forebears. The Mormon case also pinpoints what we might call the mortality paradox. This feature of many religious traditions sets an emotional awareness of loss against a belief in the continuing existence of the dead, albeit in a changed state, "place", or condition. Grief, the result of this dissonance, implies that there is no precise timing to death, only a set of timings to different states of being.
In other Christian traditions, the life of the "dead" person has been variously described in terms of being asleep, or in some post-mortal intermediate state prior to its final destiny with God. Inspired by the early work of Sir James Frazer, anthropological accounts reveal that the mortality paradox is also widespread in non-western societies. 4 For instance, traditional Indian-originating views on birth, dying, death, and afterlife rites speak about the animating force that comes to the foetus in utero via its cranial sutures, and which departs when the skull is cracked on the funeral pyre. The very notion of transmigration of the life-force under the dynamic moral schemes of karma attests to its non-death and samsaric processing from agent to agent over expanses of "time". 5 In many contemporary cultural domains, traditional worldviews have given way to a secular ideology where the mortality paradox takes quite a different form. Here, the "when is death?" question becomes subject to medical judgement and to ethical issues of identity and the dignity of the person's body. In the context of euthanasia, organ donation, and terminal illnesses, people on ethics committees now play roles in the timing of death and declarations of "social death".

lIfe-course narratIves
A high proportion of our lives are taken up by talking about the lives of others: from family and friends to strangers and celebrities, humans generate social narratives by speaking, gossiping, writing, consuming media, praying, and so on. One way that people engage with others who are deceased is through the notion of a "continuous present". In his famed essay on funerary rites, Robert Hertz argued that "[s]ociety imparts its own character of permanence to the individuals who compose it: because it feels itself immortal and wants to be so, it cannot normally believe that its members … in whom it incarnates itself should die". 6 Despite all the criticism that can be laid against Hertz's Durkheimian reification of "Society", he offers a powerful image of how individuals are entangled with society; this idea undergirds practically all social theory concerning identity but also, by extension, theories of grief. Immortality, according to Hertz, is not an absence of death: rather death is timed according to a sense of value derived from the experience of relationships, not in terms of chronology as such. When, for example, Scots toast "the immortal memory" of Robert Burns at innumerable Burns Night Suppers across the world, they are referring to his cultural value and its identity-generating capacity, rather than his timelessness. At the family level, too, this happens when many ordinary families possess a sense of three or four generations from a set of ancestors, but can still speak of their dead as inhabiting some "timeless" realm. Hertz, then, brings our analysis of death and time into the world of social relationships, identity, and embodiment. What he says of death raises similar questions about life, for societies have differed over the age at which they accord some firm identity to "first-life" (i.e., to a child), especially in cultures where infant mortality was common and where, we might say, no cultural energy would be invested in an infant until it looked as though it would become a valuable social commodity. This is not to say that mothers, or others, might not grieve over an infant's death, but it is to note the attitudes of social networks into which infants are only more clearly drawn over time. We have already indicated the significance of medical technology in contemporary Britain, enabling pre-birth images to ascribe the foetus its own kind of social personhood. In other words, the question "when is death?" is now haunted by its double: "when is life?".

"Grief Mean Time"
What, then, of bereavement in life-narratives? One way to think about the timing of death is through the notion of a "Grief Mean Time" (GMT), a standard orientation point of loss in time that is nonetheless experienced by people in different ways. Here care is needed lest the mind fly too rapidly to Elisabeth Kűbler-Ross, whose stage theory of bereavement was adopted as a chart-index with its "denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance" phases. 7 While extensive criticism of the schematized version of this perspective reveals an absence of a solid empirical base, its popularity reflects how important a narrative journey is for the bereaved. 8 Another 1960s volume, Geoffrey Gorer's Death, Grief, and Mourning (1965), described grief as a "long-lasting psychological process with physiological overtones and symptoms", especially "disturbances of sleep and weight loss". For Gorer, this GMT begins before death, as in cases of incurable illness when "a great deal of mourning may take place during this period so that the eventual death is felt emotionally, as well as intellectually, to be a release". 9 The question "when is death?" thus becomes "when is grief?"-a question that pivots on shared understandings of the staged timings of bereavement. Grief can commence when a person dies socially, long before biological death occurs. For instance, the issues of identity-loss and recognition in Alzheimer's disease highlight the bio-cultural nature of death, suggesting an increasing arc that may plateau out in the social path to death, but also falls as biological life is maintained whilst a person's social significance declines.
In terms of theories of grief, Gorer's encompasses both the attachment-loss theory of grief and of the "continuing bonds" tradition. The qualitative nature of time in emotions is also evident in Peter Marris's 1956 study of 72 working-class widows in the East End of London, Widows and Their Families. This offered a "three stages of loss of contact with reality" that moved from an "initial period of shock", to "violent grief and disorganization" (of about 6-12 weeks in Britain), and a final "longer period of reorganization". 10 These stage-theories of grief suggest that death's "mean time" is experienced as a series of emotional patterns that may come and go or re-pattern themselves in the time before and after the biological death of a loved one.

Experiencing the Dead
It is important to recall that we experience the presence of the dead every day. As phenomenologists frequently argue, we live in a world of multiple realities constituted by our interactions with places, minds, and bodies. The dead feature in these interactions in popular concepts like nostalgia, homecoming, and ghost-seeing. Indeed, in a major research project published in 1995, 1603 people were interviewed in their homes and asked if they had experienced a sense of the presence of a dead person after they had died. 11 A sizable minority of people-roughly 35%said that they did have such an experience, as Table 7.1 indicates.
The relationship to the deceased person is given in Table 7.2 (the reason why the total percentage comes to 40% and not 35% as above reflects the fact that a few experienced the presence of more than one relation). The experiences were said to have taken place mostly at home or at a relative's home (approx. 54%). Other contexts for the experience included, in a dream (4%), when ill or in hospital (3%), in association with a pen (3%), at a Spiritualist meeting (2%), at a graveside (1.6%), or when driving a car (1.4%).
While these analytical categories are far from perfect, they indicate an aspect of life that is easily ignored by outsiders, but can be profound for the bereaved individual. The fact that 23 individuals said they were not sure if they had had such an experience suggests an inability among some people to establish hard lines between memories and emotional awareness. Indeed, this is a hard thing to do because, apart from palpably sensing presences in a supernatural or unexplained way, every day millions of Britons look at photographs of the dead or think about people they have lost (see Table 7.2).

Liturgical Time and Death: Triadic Moments
In a separate study focused on Anglican churchgoers, it was found that approximately 36% of people who attend the Holy Communion Service said this helped give them a sense of presence to their dead. 12 That, we might, suggest is not an unexpected finding for a formal ritual that normatively names the dead, prays for the departed, and speaks of a united community on earth and heaven. The liturgy of the Eucharist-one of the most long-lived and cross-culturally widespread of all human ritual behaviour-is especially important for the "when is death?" question since its very nature is embedded in the notion of the historical death of Christ, coupled with belief in his resurrection from the dead. Those dynamics then frame the life, death, and promised eternal life of believers participating in the rite of Holy Communion. Communicants participate in the complex ritual symbolism of the Eucharist every time they eat and drink the body and blood of Christ. These are elements that stand, at one and the same time, for the death of the Saviour whose "living presence" frames the devotional piety of Christians. Given that the saintly dead, as well as those who might have died recently, are often named during the Eucharist, and given that churches often also conduct the funerals of the dead at the same time as the Eucharist, it is not surprising that Christian churches foster the mortality paradox.
In her research on bereavement, Christine valentine recounts interview situations in which, as one person talks about the dead, a period would arise in which it seemed as though the deceased person was actively present to interviewee and interviewer. 13 This kind of third-party "presence" is, I suspect, likely to be familiar to many who engage in pastoral work with the bereaved. Here, narrative comes into its own as it generates a form of momentary transcendence. The story of a dead person told to others, in other words, creates a presence from the absence. Talking to the bereaved reveals a triadic relationship: an interviewer becomes aware of the intensity of your relationship with someone who lives in your life-narrative in such a way that the third-party assumes a kind of invisible social presence. As for narrative accounts of the dead, we have already mentioned that the time of death may be largely ignored in medical-legal certification, but such timing is often quite different in lifecourse narrative where relatives detail the story of a death, of their own presence or absence, and of the time of day. When and where their relative died is significant: perhaps in the early hours of the morning when they were at the bedside, perhaps the fact that they managed to get there in time, or arrived too late. In such contexts, time matters more than dates, and in this death-bed sense, death is usually marked with specificity. Moreover, the mortality paradox seldom seems relevant, or emerges in a distinctive way, as relatives comment on the fact that the body that now lies there is no longer the "person" they knew and loved. In the moment, death's all too evident date also marks life's departure, and it is often through such moments that popular beliefs about the mobility of the soul seem self-evident.

Body-Recall
A related form of sensed presence comes in what might be described as "body-recall". By this, I refer to the experience of seeing in one's physical form something one recalls from their deceased parents' bodies. This could be an ageing face, a mode of walking, the sound of a cough, or indeed any number of things that remind us of our dead parent or blood relation (I stress such consanguineal kin precisely because of genes and body shape). At this moment of body-recall, the memory of the dead is activated in my living body and may, or may not, be a reminder that I am aging and will die. Such experiences are linked to another distinctive body technique, where the recall of another person's bodily deportment is evoked by my own body. In one striking case, a retired Anglican bishop who was interviewed for a study, indicated a pen that happened to be at hand and said that whenever he wrote with it he recalled his father in the act of writing. 14 Perhaps the most interesting factor of such "memories of the flesh" are that they require both the death of the parent, and the aging of the child to be close to the adult age of the dead parent.

Old Graves
In the final survey of this section, I return to the Report on Popular British Attitudes, mentioned above. In this study, 1603 individuals were specifically asked: "What do you think would be a respectable time lapse before an old grave might be used for new burials by a different family?" Respondents were free to give any number of years they wished, and of the total sample, only a slight majority 55% (or 875 individuals) did feel able to give an answer. Among these, a 50-year period attracted approximately 20% of support, and a 100-year period 39%. 15 Another question asked for reasons why there should be a time lapse before a grave is reused. The responses included: that there would be no one left to tend a grave (44%); that the dead should rest in peace and not be disturbed (24%); that the body would be decomposed (9%); and that time is needed to grieve (7%). If not providing an absolute answer to the "when is death?" question, these responses do provide a sense of how long it might take for people to redefine their relationships with bodies in graves. Here, images of continuing bonds combine with processes of separating from the dead. These responses show that "when?" is marked not by a specific date, but by change over time and, in that sense, we are reminded again of the narrative nature of death within its cultural frame.

exIstentIal antIcIPatIon
In this section, I survey the theoretical ideas of dual sovereignty and paradigmatic scenes. 16 The first idea, dual sovereignty, concerns forms of authority in human life that are balanced between jural (legal) authority and mystical authority. In terms of death, mystical authority ranges from the ancestral capacity to bless or curse descendants to modern society's concern with ideas of respect, dignity, and a "good send off" for the dead. Its complement, jural authority, also covers a spectrum of existence including what ecclesial or civic authorities allow to be inscribed on gravestones; legal decisions covering the duty of care; and issues of harm, murder, and suicide. In terms of the "when is death?" question, these dual forms of authority are non-controversial together in situations where, for instance, medical certification of death complements a family's desired funerary provision. Problems emerge if and when, for example, a religious group might want a rapid burial of a dead body (meeting its mystical authority), while the state requires much more time for full authorisation. Another flashpoint concerns assisted dying. If I think I have the right to choose assisted dying, but the law in Britain prevents it, the dual sovereignty balance is upset and a certain social disease ensues. This problematic ethical, medical, and religious topic leads immediately to the complementary theoretical issue of the paradigmatic scene. In a media-flooded world where photographic images carry powerful significance, paradigmatic scenes (e.g., icons, art, and statuary) sustain the core messages of religious traditions, not least in terms of death transcendence. In terms of the "when is death?" question, people imagine an apartment in Switzerland where a person goes to die, or the image of an old-age home, a television and a circle of arm-chaired and relatively inattentive viewers. Each is a paradigmatic scene capturing core values and reflecting the demise of vitality; in the one, a life is intentionally ended because it is felt no longer to be a flourishing; in the other, life seems interminably protracted and lacking in vitality. By contrast, another paradigmatic scene, one framed by a balanced dynamic of dual sovereignty, is that of the "woodland", "natural", "green", or "ecological" burial. Emerging in the UK in the mid 1990s, these kinds of burials now occur in about as many sites as there are crematoria. Here, people generate a paradigmatic scene in a kind of hospitable garden-centre-like locale where the body is thought of as passing into the natural environment. 17 Such an anticipated context resets the "when" of "when is death?" as a "where" of an anticipated merger of self and world. This kind of shift in discourse is not unique in relation to death in Britain: it occurred both in the late nineteenth century with the innovation of modern cremation and in the 1970s in terms of how cremated remains were dealt with. conclusIon "When is death?" strikes me as a question that has something of the character of a koan about it. The koan is a Zen Buddhist presentation of a problem "insoluble by, and nonsensical to, the intellect". It is aimed at "breaking through intellectual limitations" to produce "a flash of insight". 18 For example, the popularised koan "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" temptingly provokes a logically consistent "answer", rather than being taken as a verbal form aimed at catalyzing a different form of understanding. 19 One such shift in understanding might involve the difference between the dual classification of things (as in "two hands"), and the singularity of things ("one hand"), all as part of a reflective-meditative tradition of self-understanding. Committing to such word-play practice can, experientially, shake the easy confidence that the everyday use of language confers. When reading the thoughts of philosophers on death, I am often possessed of an eager anticipation that soon passes into disappointment. It is as though I am sure that each sentence will lead to another in a logical flow that will end in satisfaction: the conclusive key will open the safe to reveal the desired sight. However, while sentences help set the scene, and offer some glimpsed novel vista, the horizon remains shrouded in mist.
If "when is death?" stands as a question grounded in the ideas of both mortality and time, then my title, "death's impossible date" stands as something of a different logical type. This is why no answer can be given to the question, and why the koan motif provides both a constraint on answering and a freedom not to answer. It provokes a shift in understanding. So, I conclude with a formulation rather than an answer: death attracts some emotional affect to render it as a value; for some, this value enters into a person's sense of identity and thus becomes a belief; and for some others this belief constitutes a sense of identity and becomes a religious belief. Death has an impossible date because the "when" of death is not coeval with "the time of not being". Death can mean the beginning of a sensed presence of the dead, or of an eternal God with whom a sensed affinity seems to guarantee one's own immortality. Experience counts, and behavioural acts frequently foster experience. This is where philosophy is at a disadvantage since its westernised manifestation knows no ritual but the lecture and seminar. Theology, meanwhile, possesses the advantage of being able to ritualise its utterances in liturgy or in private prayers. These may prompt an insightful awareness of mortality and vitality in "death's impossible date".