Fear of Death

No, this post isn't about how I'm afraid of getting old and dying and how I never want to die. It's about the fact that these days death is such a taboo subject. Sure, we all have relatives who die and we all know that accidents and natural disasters happen every day, killing hundreds or thousands of people. But our exposure to that death is very limited. When I look at my 'experience' of death, I realise that I have been extremely sheltered. I'm 21 years old and have never been to a funeral. Granted when I was living on the other side of the world to my grandparents, it wasn't exactly easy to ship the entire family back at a moments notice when someone died. But for your average kid who grows up say in a European country with his or her family around, the occasional family funeral is probably all they know about death.

I've been 'lucky' enough to have seen more than that while living overseas - from a body wrapped in cloth floating down the Ganges to a body burning in a funeral pyre to the dead man I once saw on a train station platform with flies all over him while on a school trip.

What I don't understand is why people have this fear of showing death. Obviously it's not pleasant, but there's no point in hiding from it. Looking at the two most recent natural disasters in the world - the cyclone in Burma and the earthquake in Sichuan - there are potentially anywhere between 100,000 and 150,000 people who have lost their lives within the space of merely a few hours. Sure, we hear about the numbers of dead and we see images of rescue operations, but does that actually give us a true picture of the reality of the situation? When it comes down to it, a number is just a number, and rescue operations, as important as they are, are only one aspect of it. I believe it was Stalin who said "a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic". Not that I support his ideas, but he has a point. Consider this: what would affect you more, hearing that 50,000 people died in an earthquake, or seeing a picture of a single child killed by his school collapsing on him? Having lived in Asia for half my life and travelled through Sichuan and South-East Asia, I feel more connected to the disasters than your average European or American, who probably will just see the coverage on tv, say "that's terrible" and then go back to eating dinner.

I'm mentioning this because of some comments I saw here. People call the pictures offensive, but how can a picture portray anything but reality? They can be used to target certain emotions or to get a certain point across, but when it comes down to it, what you're seeing is real stuff folks. Personally I find the pictures compelling and well worth displaying.

It's definitely a cultural issue as well - in Western cultures I find people are far more sheltered from death. I have to say though that when it comes to that, I definitely side with the more Asian view, which although of course it varies from country to country, on the whole displays death but in a dignified and respectful manner.

Blasé attitude?

Last night I got into a discussion with a couple of family members about our attitude to cultural differences. Obviously being a family of ATCKs/highly mobile parents, we have no problem with cultural differences - in fact that's one of the main reasons for moving around overseas. But what we were discussing was our rather blasé attitude to those differences. Clearly if you were to drop me in say the middle of Kazakhstan, or any other country, I would notice that I was no longer in the same country I was in a second ago. But I don't necessarily consciously notice cultural differences anymore.

When I was in Belgium in particular, in an international setting, there were cultural differences all around me, some of which I picked up on. Others however I didn't notice immediately, especially since I've spent quite a few months (probably adding up to about 2 years) over the last decade in French speaking countries (France and Switzerland). But with the other international people I was around, I frequently noticed that they picked up on differences that I may have noticed, but hadn't consciously thought about. Most of these were the subtle differences that, once you've spent some time in one place, you simply don't notice. So I'm a little unsure whether this comes from simply my mobile background or from the fact that I'm somewhat 'used' to the French style culture that I was in.

Examples of the some of the differences I didn't notice were available foods in the supermarkets, locations of shops/other facilities (e.g. train tracks being right next to main roads, whereas in the UK they aren't), styles of greetings (kissing on the cheek or shaking hands, rather than the no contact British approach), etc.

It makes me wonder if, with time, TCKs gradually lose the ability to get as much out of an overseas experience as we used to. Or is it the other way round - do non-TCKs eventually have the ability to get more out of an overseas experience than we do, as a result of their fixed cultural mindset and their relative inexperience with other cultures? Or do we still get as much out of it as we used to - perhaps even more than a non-TCK - we simply don't necessarily notice it immediately?

On the other hand, when I repatriated, even though I was supposed to be living in my own/home culture, I almost noted the differences more than in my previous host countries. So maybe it's more a question of comfort. When I'm in a country where I am clearly not a native, I feel more comfortable than in a country where I'm a 'hidden immigrant' (i.e. I look the same on the outside and have the nationality, but inside I think different and my cultural views are simply not the same). So even though I might feel like I should fit in, I don't - making the differences more stark in my view than the differences I would experience in a country where I shouldn't and don't fit in culturally. In my recent case in Belgium, even though I looked like I could fit in (being white), I knew in my mind that there was no reason real reason for me to be expected to conform to their culture since I'm not Belgian. On top of that, I don't have a Belgian accent (in French) and my French isn't as fluent as a native speaker's - therefore I'm not really a hidden immigrant there. So in theory I could be a hidden immigrant (ignoring the language aspect) - just without the added pressure of feeling like something was wrong for not fitting in.