2023-10-07 19:00:10
“Mass” (2017), installation by hyperrealist Australian sculptor Ron Mueck, composed of one hundred fiberglass and resin skulls, each measuring 1.5 to 2 meters. A child plays in front of the work during the opening at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne (Australia). GETTY IMAGES VIA AFP
There are many situations that force us to talk about death: a serious illness that is looming, a vital prognosis that is beginning, an inheritance to be planned, unrelievable suffering that pushes us to ask to die, funerals to organize, condolences to present, a heavy mourning to bear, or simply a provident temperament, a question from a child.
Yet on so many occasions we struggle to find our words. When death comes up in a conversation, uneasiness often sets in. We no longer know how to talk about this reality that we have taken care to shield from the gaze of society, in hospitals too busy healing to sufficiently support dying. The public debate on end of life has created, over the past year, a key secondary benefit.
This article is taken from “Special Issue Le Monde – Death in the Face, 2023”. This special issue is on sale at newsstands or online by going to on our store website.
On the sidelines of the debate on the legalization of assisted dying, more and more voices are being raised to denounce the taboo of death and its deleterious consequences: fear accentuated by ignorance of the subject, end of life lived without saying it , last wishes, instructions or unspoken words of love. Because as every taboo affects language, that of death makes its words sick.
The words that hide…
If words are supposed to help us say, they can also be used to circumvent a reality that is too frightening. To leave, to die out, to rest in peace, to join the stars, to bow out… the list is long of euphemisms which describe death by invoking gentle and peaceful imaginations which make the brutality of death more bearable. They allow us to shape a personal representation of a reality that will always be inaccessible to us. They help us to coexist with the unthinkable of nothingness, by filling it with images or beliefs that keep the dead somewhere in the world of the living – this is how we can imagine them sleeping forever, or to join their fathers.
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As in everyday language, the word « mort » is also circumvented by the legislator: no more than in the Leonetti law of 2005 it does not appear in that of 2016where only the word appears ” death “, end to the medical and legal connotation which notes death by distancing its emotional dimension.
However, one expression keeps coming up: end of life. But do we all understand it in the same way? According to a survey for the National Center for Palliative and End-of-Life Care, it is as much associated with the last years of life as with its last moments. By its polysemy, it leaves a vague source of potential misunderstandings. But above all, by the absence of personal pronoun preceding the word « vie », it dehumanizes. To say of the one who dies that he is in end of life prevents us from thinking in the singular, and therefore from being too directly referred to the end of our life. We thus maintain in ourselves this “unconscious animal that still does not know that it must die” that Edgar Morin mentioned in Man and Death (Threshold, 1970).
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