Douglas Davies - Death and the myth of the individual

What does death reveal about who we really are?

This week I'm joined by Professor Douglas Davies, Director of the Centre for Death and Life Studies at Durham University and one of the world's leading scholars of death, ritual, and belief. His work spans decades and disciplines — from the anthropology of funerals to digital legacy, from woodland burial to the theology of grief — and his central conviction runs through all of it: the dead live within us, and recognising that can help us live better.

We talk about the ways death strips away the myth of the self-made individual, revealing that we are fundamentally relational beings — shaped by the people, places, and memories we carry. Along the way, we cover the full arc of how societies and individuals make meaning in the face of mortality.

We talk about:

• Résumé virtues versus eulogy virtues — and why the gap between them matters
• The concept of "dividual" personhood, and why the idea of a fixed, separate self breaks down when we actually look at how people live and grieve
• How grief theory has shifted from letting go to continuing bonds — and what that means for how we mourn
• Why funerals work: their role as social containers for emotion and meaning
• The rise of celebration of life services and direct cremation, and what those trends tell us
• Woodland burial, the scattering of ashes, and the pull of relational places
• Dying alone, shame, dignity, and what COVID forced us to confront about community
• Digital death platforms, online memorials, and why offline ritual still does something different
• New body disposition options, including alkaline hydrolysis
• Pets, suicide, and the ways love complicates every tidy theory of grief

For further reading, Douglas's book Death, Ritual and Belief: The Rhetoric of Funerary Rites (now in its third edition) is a rich and authoritative guide to everything this conversation touches — available from Blackwell's and other independent bookshops.

If this episode resonated with you, the best thing you can do is share it with someone. Word of mouth is genuinely how the podcast finds new listeners. And if you haven't already, leaving a review is hugely appreciated.

Transcript

Eulogy Virtues And What Matters

SPEAKER_01 0:00

We are inhabited by our dead. Your dead are never really dead. Your dead live within you.

Kenny Primrose 0:08

The writer David Brooks makes a distinction between resume virtues and eulogy virtues. Resume virtues are those things that appear on our TVs, our qualifications, achievements, jobs, and status. Eulogy virtues are something quite different. They're what people say about us when we're gone, the kind of person we were, how we treated others, the relationships we had, and what we meant to those around us. Brooks' point is that eulogy virtues matter far more than resume ones, and perhaps that's why funerals can be such powerful experiences. Listening to a eulogy often clarifies what we truly value in life. Things that can easily be obscured by the busyness of everyday life. In today's episode, I speak with Douglas Davis, professor of anthropology in the theology department at Durham University, and one of the world's leading scholars on death, dying, and bereavement. I had the chance to visit him in Durham and for an hour or so feel like a student again, sitting in his booklined office beneath the shadow of the magnificent Durham Cathedral. As you'll hear, Douglas has a wonderfully melodic Welsh accent, one that could probably make discussions of mortality sound comforting. But this is not a bedtime story. It's a conversation about how death reveals what matters most to us, how it exposes the limits of individualism, and how thinking seriously about mortality can help us understand what it means to live well. As ever, I hope you enjoyed the episode. Do please leave any feedback or reviews, that's always much appreciated.

The Myth Of The Individual Self

Kenny Primrose 1:36

Professor Douglas Davis, it's such a privilege to be speaking to you and getting your expertise for the exam of life. As I explained a little bit, we use questions to kind of pay attention to those things that we might be missing. And in the current series I've been making, we're talking about death and dying and loss and grief and that constellation of themes around it, which is an area that you have expertise in. You're a kind of a world authority on death as an academic, and you're also a human being. So this stuff kind of matters to you. I wonder if there's a question that kind of bubbles up for you that you think this is of real value for us to be asking.

SPEAKER_01 2:14

Yes, there is one question above all others that has become increasingly important for me over the last, I don't know, six or seven years, maybe ten years. And it all hangs on the difference between the concept of the individual, with which we're all familiar to some degree, and a concept that some anthropologists in their own way, and others in their own way, have come up with, and that is the notion of the dividual or dividual, or speaking of complex personhood. What this essentially means is that in the West, when we think and think abstractly and theoretically, we think a great deal of and talk a great deal about the individual. And this is fostered tremendously by business, sales, and by what some people would call the neoliberal commercial world. And such people want you to believe that you are very special, that you are individual. It's my body, and I can do what I like with it. And it follows on from what some would would talk about in terms of a postmodern situation. I think this is very misguided, because although that would seem to be the case when we speak abstractly or philosophically or in a seminar, what happens when the philosopher goes home? What about her husband or wife or partner? What about their children? What about their dog? Because once we start analyzing personhood in many parts of the world, this originated, this idea of the stress on dividual, complex personhood, came from an anthropologist called McKim Marriott, who was working on India. And he basically said if you want to understand India, don't start with a notion of the individual. You're part of a family, you're part of a kind of a clan, you're part of a caste.

Kenny Primrose 4:39

Similar to the African notion of Ubuntu. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 4:43

And it takes a village to raise a child, or turn it around a bit, and that person has the village within him, within her.

Kenny Primrose 4:52

So the individual is like the self-contained unit, and you think this might be uh a myth. And the individuals in kind of encumbered in relationship, they're only who they are through other people.

SPEAKER_01 5:04

Absolutely. And that includes place as well as other persons. Place, where do you come from? I mean, I have a Welsh accent, for example, and here in the Northeast, after a sentence, after half a sentence, if I'm in a shop or somewhere, somebody says, Oh, where do you come from? Now that wouldn't be the same if I was in London because there are so many people from so many places, you just wouldn't get asked that question in the same way. But where you come from? The village, I did come from a village, and so on. So the that great complexity of what makes me up, what constitutes me. The reason that is significant for issues of death is because it provides a background to or a frame for grief. Now it happens that there are about three sort of boxes of theories of grief, basically. But what is really interesting is that each of those boxes sits upon a foundation of the individual. So if you change and we could talk about that, those theories, if you change that foundation from the individual to our dividual complex personhood, everything now changes. It's like looking through a kaleidoscope. And once you change it just a little bit, then everything else changes. All issues inside it change.

Grief Theory And Continuing Bonds

Kenny Primrose 6:43

So can you give an example of what that might look like?

SPEAKER_01 6:46

For example, for most of the 20th century, for nearly all of it, the idea of attachment and loss has been the main theory of grief. We are attached to each other, we have to be attached to each other because we are mammals and as babies we need other people. We cannot survive on our own. So Sigmund Freud comes along and he makes a big point about this, and then some subsequent people come along who really stress this attachment business. We're attached, we're attached, and that makes us. And then we lose the mother, we lose the father. Freud, of course, argues that this is why we want a heavenly father, because we'll never get detached from him. We'll never lose him. As it were, that's a whole world of its own, of course. But once you start thinking about the individual, that feeds into that. I'm an individual, my mother's an individual, I'm attached to her, she dies, I lose her, and off she goes, off I go. But this is untrue to the empirical basis of life. Not least, for example, to dreams. We are inhabited by our dead. But because in the West we don't talk about ancestors and ancestor relationships very much at all, even though ancestry is now the biggest hobby in the UK.

Kenny Primrose 8:27

Do you think the fact that people are into genealogy and ancestors, but not in a kind of spiritual ancestor way, is a kind of secular replacement?

SPEAKER_01 8:37

I don't, because I don't think it is something people feel separate from. That when you talk to people about their kin, their dead kin, fostering knowledge of those kin, developing their ancestry, their kinship, and so on, their genealogies, they feel a fondness, an attachment, an engagement with them. And it's only fashion, I think, this is my view at least, it's only the fashion that Western intellectuals have developed amongst themselves, so speaking about the individual, that led to Freud and others speaking about attachment and loss in that way. Now, something interesting happened in about 1994. In the middle of the 1990s, several people, independent of each other, actually, more or less came up with the idea, which is now caught in a phrase, just as the previous one was attachment and loss. Now the phrase comes out continuing bonds. So if you read any textbooks now, more recent textbooks on grief, grief theory, grief counseling, and so on. Well, grief counseling sometimes is a bit behind the times. They'll catch up at some point soon. But continuing bonds is now the fashion. It's now in vogue from about the mid-1990s, so 20, nearly 30 years now, or 20 odd years, continuing bonds. And the emphasis is on not grief work. Freud talked about grief work, was the way you took all the energy that bonded you to your kin. You now to break the bonds and locate your bonds in other people or in your job or in whatever, redistributing the energy of the self, as it were, of the bonding. Now they would say, no, keep the bonds. So that when you use, if you inherit property or goods or ideas, see them as fertile links, ongoing attachments with your dead, so that your dead are never really dead. Your dead live within you. And I think that many of those philosophers who might wish, let's just use the word philosopher for the kind of person who might use individualism as a means of discussing agency and identity.

unknown 11:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:22

Who I am and how I what I do, those two basic factors. When they go home to their families and life situations, they're all of a sudden back in the webs of relationships. They've probably got a photograph of their partner on their desk, or at least in their wallet, or at least on their smartphone. It won't take long before they whip one out. Or nowadays their dog or their pet. I've seen at least two within the last week when someone has whipped out their smartphone and hey, here we are. So the point I'm making is that the fashion for attachment and loss came, dominated, and is now going away. The idea of individual personhood, the complexity of who I am, what I am. And I think this does affect issues of grief. So for example, if you're a grief counsellor, now you would be more likely to talk about how you understand your relationship, your ongoing relationship with your dead kin. You would not be trying to separate you as a bereaved person from your family who've gone. Now, of course, you've got to be careful with this kind of thing. Because in one sense, grief is a weird, it's a very interesting word because it's a singular noun, grief. Whereas really there are so many kinds of griefs. It is such a spectrum, such a map in many ways. And there are those people who don't want to continue their bonding with their mother or father or whoever. They had a bad time with them. But that bad time probably lives on in their identity as much as good times live on for other people. So many people have very difficult lives, as we all know. And that is partly because of what other people not have just done to them, but continue to do within them.

Kenny Primrose 13:38

There's a helpful practice in psychotherapy of having a kind of empty chair and speaking to, say, a dead relative or someone. It's a way of kind of continuing on that conversation.

SPEAKER_01 13:50

And it has an enormous rooting in religion. What is prayer about? In let's just talk about the Christian spectrum of stuff. Well, prayer is talking to God or talking to Jesus or the Spirit talking to you. There's a whole host of communication going on. So that in a weird kind of way, when Christians talk about God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or put it in other terms, three persons who are three but they are one. This is the most interesting form of complex personhood that you can imagine.

Kenny Primrose 14:33

What it kind of means is that God is in essence relationship.

SPEAKER_01 14:37

Is in essence relationship. And that attachment is one way of talking about it. But attachment can itself be a strange word, not least because it's often in the death world at least, tied up in the phrase attachment and loss. And so the the issue when you think about it, it is very interesting. Attachment, loss, continuing bonds. You're talking a different language when you're talking each of those phrases. And so this is why I think it's important

Funerals As Ritual And Repair

SPEAKER_01 15:16

for grief. How do you then approach funerals, for example?

Kenny Primrose 15:19

Well, I was gonna ask that, you know, in a culture that's been defined by the individual, and we've lost a lot of the mourning rituals and rites of passage that we once had, what are the consequences? Does it do us injury as a people, as people who are who are kind of mourning at times but don't have an avenue for it?

SPEAKER_01 15:37

I think that it can do us injury if it presses the point that works against our instinct. If we are pressed to abandon, to dispatch, to give them a good send-off, and mean we are sending them off, then what's left? Well, interesting things are left. When the memorial of the death, of a birthday, of Christmas comes around, they're still sort of there. So that there's a sense in which the language of individualism isn't true to a breadth of human experience.

Kenny Primrose 16:26

We don't have the rituals that cohere with our emotional life, with our inner life.

SPEAKER_01 16:31

Exactly. Which is why the great the the most significant trend in funerals in Britain just now, there are two really. One is the celebration of life. So instead of funerals sending off, we celebrate the life of the dead person. A vast number of funerals are now celebrations of life. So you have a photograph of the person in the crematorium or the church, if that's where you're doing it, in front of the coffin. You are very likely now to show video clips or indeed longer films of the life of that person. You're talking about the life of that person, the favorite song of that person, you're going to play it in the service, you're going to sing it as a song or whatever. So you're acknowledging their presence in your life through a familiarity with what they liked and what they did and what they'd want. Now, if that celebrating life is one major factor in contemporary funerals, the other, and it's only been running since about two years before the COVID. And that is what is has different names, but basically it's called direct cremation or pure cremation. These are advertised on the television every day during the hours when older people are sitting watching detective things. And what they basically mean is that the dead body will be taken by the company concerned, or it could even be by the local funeral director, and will be cremated at your local crematorium probably early in the morning before the public services have started. And the cremated remains will be just taken back to the family, and there is no necessity and usually no actuality of a funeral service.

Kenny Primrose 18:31

I've got a friend that this happened to his father died, and he hasn't really managed to mourn to cry. And he feels like, you know, that's in him, that the those emotions are there, but there's no uh space for it, no avenue for that. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 18:45

And this is the point that a funeral is an avenue, it is a social gathering. It's we we get together to do things. And what I think is interesting, though there's very little by way of social survey statistics on this at the moment, but I talk to lots of people in the funeral world, and it looks as though this direct cremation business is a more middle class than a working class thing in England. That's interesting in itself, really, in terms of well, all sorts of factors. But these are parts of the ways in which thinking in terms of complex personhood over individualism come out. I mean, for example, it's not uncommon now for coffins to be decorated and perhaps get the children in the family to paint things on, to do things with. And they are real expressions, I think, of complex personhood. This is not about individualism. This is showing what that person meant to me, how I saw that person, the role that person plays in my life. So you see this is quite healthy. I see this as very healthy. Yeah, absolutely. Because it's it's opening up those avenues of communication.

Kenny Primrose 20:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:08

In terms of music, in terms of what people say, in terms of what they might uh think. I give you another good example of

Green Burial And Relational Place

SPEAKER_01 20:17

this. It's one of the things we studied extensively. I'm director of the Center for Death and Life Studies here at Durham and did something similar at Nottingham University before that. And one of the one of the research projects we did, one of the first really in the country, though there were other colleagues at Sheffield doing something similar, was to study what's often called woodland burial, green burial, natural burial. All different words for different aspects of the same thing. Namely, taking a body, burying it in a biodegradable container in, and this is where natural woodland green come to bear, putting it in the soil somewhere. Sometimes these exist on the edges of pre-established cemeteries. Sometimes they're quite new, set up by a farmer or by private companies. And we did a study of this, we made even a little film of it. Why they had chosen that, or why they have chosen that way of going, was conversation that turned around ideas of not in the sense going back to nature in a neutral emotional sense, but going back to nature, if we can use that word, in a kind of sharing, participating way. Just as you might have in your everyday life, and many do in Britain, have your compost heap. So you are composting yourself, and that you're going to be where life is, where the birds are, where the plants are, as opposed to as one of the people persons put it, going into a dry as dust cemetery with those kind of connotations of life participation as opposed to death and neutral solidity. So this is where the human imagination playing with death comes into it. And it seems to me that by and large, it's not going to be true for everybody, of course it's not. But by and large, when the imagination plays with death, imagines itself dead, what it wants to do with itself when it's dead, it's participative. So that for example, now in Britain at the moment, about 880% of us will be cremated. It's a lot of people from about the middle of the 1970s, people in Britain started taking ashes, cremated remains, away from the crematorium and doing things with them. I've done a great deal of research with colleagues on the on the rest of the continent and their eyebrows would shoot across their heads when they learned that the Brits could just take ashes away and do whatever they wanted with them. Because regulations the British are lawless when it comes to cremated remains. Lawless really but what were they doing with them? Various colleagues have researched this by and large you put them in places of personal significance. But where personal is not individualist significance it's relational significance. It's where we fell in love it's where we used to go on holidays it's where he used to go and fish or whatever it happens to be. So the disposal of cremated remains the placing of cremated remains seems to me to be one of the databases underlying the notion of complex personhood. I mean many football clubs in the country have places where the remains for their fans dead fans can be can be located and what a strong thing fandom fandom is not about individualism. Fandom is classic complex personhood as we've been seeing over the last few days when great clubs are being put down by little football clubs is wonderful to see really so they're the kind of thing factual database areas of human life that I would point to in trying to make this point which I hope I've made now about the difference between individual individualism or dividual complex personhood and so the way that we do funerals or end of life or whatever as you say highlights the fact that we are dividuals.

Dying Alone Shame And COVID

Kenny Primrose 24:50

We're encumbered we're in relationship and so what does that teach you about life in a practical way? Because I guess in lots of ways we do live atomized individualized lives and the funeral like death like strips things back and shows you who we really are you know dividuals rather than individuals.

SPEAKER_01 25:10

Social change is a great fact of life part of social change in our site kind of society in Britain it varies within social classes really too I think one of the elements there is a trend towards individual isolation which is why when it comes to death the notion of dying alone is a kind of a shame shame as a human experience is fascinating because shame shows you where problems in relationships lie where conflicts where the dynamics of relationships are problematic. So that for example there's a small number of research papers on dying alone and where someone's body is found a week a month six months a year later and people feel this is awful this is shaming and for example where you have cremations of people who have died alone again there are no statistics on this but I've spoken to enough people to have the sense of it when the crematorium staff will provide a mini congregation with a funeral director so that when that person who died alone comes to his or her disposal they're not disposed alone and this is almost a kind of society almost a kind of a a first aid to society to culture that it would be a shame just to stick him in the oven and press the button. No we'll we'll stand there for a moment and we'll say a few words and w in other words culture emerges culture the interaction of people will emerge around that situation. Of course it doesn't get away from the fact that large numbers of people now live alone choose to live alone and it's inevitable that some are going to die alone. It seems to me that one interesting aspect of this emerged with COVID 19 we did a study here funded by the Cremation Society of Great Britain actually we did a s we did a social survey questionnaire and interviews with staff of British crematoria and this was really really interesting how they coped during this crisis period when they were almost forgotten. Well the government didn't even regard crematorium staff as frontline workers when the COVID thing started. Funeral directors were but not crematorium staff that was corrected but it's an interesting little index of things of how those people during COVID coped with this difficult issue of isolation of individuals of families. I'll give you a very interesting case one of the crematorium staff in one of the crematorium Britain was, as many were much concerned about the death of people and not least when children died because children died over that period mostly old people but we'll come back to them in a minute but children as well and this one lady on Friday nights went I I'm I would alm I might weep as I tell you this story because it is so affecting she went and read stories, children's stories where the little graves of the dead were children dead that's amazing. W what does that say about individualism? Not very much what does it say about corporate sense of community everything. But to come back to the old it seems to me this is my take on the COVID 19 situation and maybe it's a social class thing but let me not press that point too much here but I simply allude to it I think that for a period of time pre-COVID there were families putting their old people into old people's homes. It would be too strong to say they were getting rid of them but they weren't sent a stage in family life they were in the wings in the wings and they would be visited whenever the family wanted to visit them. And then they started dying in disproportionate numbers and it was as though the country became guilt ridden certainly it was an issue major issue and it strikes me that that might be one of those contexts in which the the battle between individualism and dividual complex personhood when the battle was beginning to be seen maybe by some kinds of families more than others I don't want to press that point too much. But all of a sudden they were important and I think people were guilty I think society if we're going to talk about social guilt. I think that was one of the elements of COVID 19 the guilt of the dying of the old yeah there was a real sense of shame wasn't there and the kind of lack of dignity lack of support I suppose I think the word dignity is an important one here because it's much in evidence now in discussions surrounding death stuff the dignity respect for the dead for bodies because I think what is interesting about the word respect and dignity is that they are to go back to our earlier conversation they're intrinsically relational it's not my respect but it's our respect in relation to what we've done with the dead which was why that phrase give them a good send off was important because of course this was important from the middle 19th century when we changed laws about the dying in the 1830s the British did something awful it decided that doctors could take corpses from the poor house and dissect them.

Kenny Primrose 32:09

I remember reading about this in a book on utilitarianism and kind of medical ethics it was a place called Angel Meadow in Manchester and they would take the bodies of the poor and replace them in their coffins with bricks. So you know still had the weight and something happened they just you know the people the families discovered that these bodies had been taken and replaced with bricks and they were used it turns out for the greater good for medical students you know to learn anatomy and dissection and so on and it highlighted really how repulsive it was to treat a body without dignity as a kind of transactional thing.

SPEAKER_01 32:44

And this was why it was important as that century went on for working class people notably because it would have been them notably working class people were interested in insurance in money so that somebody could be given a good send-off because they weren't they weren't being a nobody they were being made into a somebody and I think that that is almost an index of society when does somebody become a nobody we're seeing it now across the world in in situations of politics and warfare and revolt and riot and so on when you become a nobody and get stuck in a plastic bag really so they're big issues. So in a very interesting sense these rather abstract concepts of personhood individual whatever are very interesting interpretations of culture interpretations of life and they allow you to see things differently.

Digital Death And Online Memory

Kenny Primrose 33:48

So a lot of the things you study reveal that what we do around the dying isn't about the deceased it's about the people who remain I wonder what you think of the growing trend and I'm sure it will grow of kind of digital continuity. Like I could upload I think about this sometimes I lost my uh my mother about 20 years ago and you know I I could in this day and age input loads of information about her and simulate a conversation with her and there'd be some kind of continuity I wonder I wonder what you make of this is this a healthy practice having some you know digital continuing on of that relationship.

SPEAKER_01 34:27

This is interesting we have recently finished a three year project on digital death we learned a great deal out of it all I think we learned the obvious fact the descriptive fact that vast numbers of people were doing very many things on lots of platforms memorials online funerals all sorts of stuff what we have discovered however because our task in Durham was to create an archive of online platforms but what we found is that some are sustained but many are created last a little bit and then vanish so digital online worldwide web stuff need not be lasting in fact yeah I think it erodes much quicker than hard copy it does yeah absolutely which is why we still need paper and headstones and all sorts of things really so the the there's that digital side of things. Now another aspect of it takes me right back to individual my own view of it is that human bodies human minds human beings are full of emotion whatever we are doing there's no escaping emotion. So it would be totally wrong to say if you're sitting there with your monitor and you're engaged in online platforms of memorials for your dead friends or whatever that these are not emotional. They are emotional of their own kind and to a minimum degree you can share your feelings with others who might be part of your chat group around that event but in my opinion that's not very adequate that funerals events with others memorials events with others these are more valuable to the human higher primate to the mammal to the social animal I don't think we have as yet and I'm not sure we ever will but I'm not sure about that ever adapt ourselves to to the online reality compared with the offline reality. In fact one of the one of the facts that emerged from one of our colleagues part of his project was that people were benefiting much more people who were engaged in both online and offline forms of memorial in relation to their own yeah yeah that they were benefiting much more they were benefiting to a degree from online stuff but they were benefiting much more from their offline activity from their real world engagement. And I think that that is partly because at this stage maybe computer folk would disagree with this but the nuanced complexity of emotion needs person-to-person contact to emerge let us say you can manage to do 10% communicative emotion sharing online but I think you probably do 90% of it when you're alongside others. It's nonverbal visual tactile so even if you get a tactile robot sitting next to you but that's all that's all for the future but that is a big issue there is one other kind of factor just now that I've been very much I'm very much involved in and that is a new process of dealing with corpses and just

New Body Disposition And The Future

SPEAKER_01 38:10

now in the UK we have the idea of dissolving dead bodies rather than cremating them. For environmental reasons well it's there are that there there's a cluster of reasons environmental factors are one personal preference and choice I think will be another and it's because the the process of hydrolysis alkaline hydrolysis you put the body in a disbiodegradable container into the machine which is like a big tube with a door the door is very important because you put the body in you close the door and you fill it with solution about 5% alkaline usually with water you heat it up and then you put it under pressure. So it's a kind of a pressure process and after a number of hours the the the person has all the flesh is gone all the organic stuff's gone and when you you pull the person out they're there on the container in in the kind of skeletal form that you're used to seeing when you see medical films.

Kenny Primrose 39:29

So I wonder you've studied this as an academic and someone involved in policy but also as a human how does it make you think about your own demise those that you love and the fact that you're a dividual not individual does it have any kind of concrete ramifications for the way you do life and ultimately want to want to move on from this life?

SPEAKER_01 39:50

Yes I think definitely I think the whole of life I'll talk about death in a minute I think the whole of life is about understanding your your place amidst other people so the relationality of one's being is foundational that's the basis of ethics I mean from a Christian standpoint to love your neighbor as yourself is a very interesting phrase when you stop to think about it. Because you're not setting the neighbor as the other and there's a great deal of talk in modern society about othering dividual personhood is about corporate selfing not othering. Yeah. You're bringing things into yourself you're seeing yourself as part of other things. So where this some of us in our life and in our careers and professions have more of an opportunity perhaps for doing that than others do. But that's a question of its own. When it comes to death I think this then becomes a a very interesting issue. It's a very interesting issue for me because I have studied intensively both burial and reusing old graves woodland burial cremation and now this issue of of hydrolysis so the options open up there they are my decision at the moment is that my remains whether it'll be my corpse my cremated remains or my or the powder that was me will go back into the cemetery in Wales. I've got my plot already with an aunt bought for me many years ago and all my family are there. They're all buried there and my remains in whatever form they are will be part of that family place if you like and I I like that idea I like the idea of knowing where plot number 13 Drakewood cemetery place and people rootedness rootedness and the place yeah very important even though I've not lived in that particular village for 60 60 years but I still have lots of family in that part of the world so yeah they are the sort of facts that go through one's mind.

Kenny Primrose 42:14

So if I can kind of draw this together a bit and do correct me if I if I stray what you've been saying is that uh we are we're not individuals this is a myth this is a lie that's been pressed on us by our culture. We don't live atomized lives and death kind of shines a light on the fact that we are who we are because of the relationships we're in with others. And practically speaking this should inform the way we think about ourselves and the way we think about uh how we live as dividuals rather than individuals.

Pets Suicide And The Meaning Of Love

SPEAKER_01 42:49

Absolutely two final postscripts might make this point even firmer one concerning our pets and the other concerning suicide these are very interesting aspects of of modern life more people own dogs in Britain now I'm told than have ever owned dogs I I rather jestingly said to a my death rich and relief lecture class at the end of last term and I'm not sure it was much appreciated I said next time you're walking about Durham and you see a couple it's usually a couple with a dog on the end of a lead I want you to think of them pulling along a little dog shaped coffin there was a look that emerged. The point I was trying to make was all those pets are going to die.

Kenny Primrose 43:42

I remember when jazz our family dog died and I thought in a kind of slightly Buddhist way what's the point of ever getting close to a dog again? They're only going to devastate you by you know dying on your watch and I've henceforth I suppose been wary of getting pets Of loving something so much that I know I'm probably going to lose and be devastated again.

SPEAKER_01 44:05

See, and that's interesting because love is intrinsic to this whole discussion because love in the context of attachment and loss means one thing. Love in the context of individual complex personhood means something else. So that even interpreting, even the hermeneutics of love, as it were, depends upon the base theory of personhood. But there's that kind of issue of pets, pet burials, pet I've got a wonderful slide to show to my students this afternoon, actually, of a pet cemetery in Newcastle. Then go along and have a look at it. It's been there for quite a long time, with beautiful headstones to particular pets in in a park in Newcastle. So that's an important issue. And pet crematoria, that's now become an issue. But you see, suicide too, what is suicide? Suicide is most complex and most problematic because for those people who've experienced suicide in one shape or form, the question that emerges is sort of why did he do it? What could I have done? In other words, suicide is almost like a pathology of personhood. It's about individualism. Re I'm pushing this a bit for a fact actually, but it's about individualism taking being taken quite a long way away. Someone's moving away from us. I saw him only this morning, I saw him only last week. And now he's why so that the big why question becomes really problematic. And people would want to know what they could have done to help. So the moment we raise that question with ourselves, we are talking about love and we are talking about individual, complex, interactive relationality. Really. And that's the reason I like this kind of debate about personhood, because it provides us with an intellectual tool to take to a really large number of real life situations, ethical situations, and above all to in the question of why is life significant at all and whatever answer the great traditions give, and which in a way maybe some of the secular ones would really want to give as well, is to say love, a most complex word, a most culturally difficult word, historically difficult, but the whole of life is dealing with difficult words. Because none of us knows what the other thinks by the very use of the word spoon. We don't know. But it ultimately comes back to that kind of the meaning of meaning is relationality and the quality of relationality, which is love, and sadly in our world it's it's common neighbour of hate.

Kenny Primrose 47:24

It brings to mind the famous Harvard longitudinal study, which studied a core of young men who grew up in Boston across their lives, and what they found was that way beyond kind of cholesterol levels or alcoholism or tobacco use or whatever, their health and life expectancy was to a massive degree determined by the quality of their relationships. And as we've you know become more atomized and individualized in our culture, it's no coincidence that depression and suicide has gone up as a consequence.

Final Takeaways And Listener Support

Kenny Primrose 47:55

Douglas Davis, it's been such a pleasure exploring this with you. I know we've kind of touched the hem of a number of big issues, but really my big takeaway is the way that death points to who we really are. We are you know relational beings. We are who we are because of the relationships we're in. And um, yeah, the end of life really presses that home in a way that we often forget when we're you know thinking of ourselves as individuals.

SPEAKER_01 48:24

Absolutely. Thank you so much. A pleasure. I enjoyed that.

Kenny Primrose 48:30

Thank you for listening to this episode. I hope you enjoyed listening to Douglas Davis's voice as much as I did. My main takeaway, as I said during the conversation, is just how profoundly relational we are as creatures. Death has a way of bringing that into sharper focus. Relationships are in many ways the essence of life. They give a life meaning, shape, texture. They are what endure in the memories of those who knew us. This is the final episode in the series on death and grief. For now, the more I've explored the subject, the more I've become aware of how much there is still to discuss. So I suspect I'll return to it in future conversations. Before then, I'll be recording a summary episode in the coming months to draw together some of the themes and insights that have emerged across the conversations, and in the meantime, I have a couple of upcoming episodes that return to the broader questions at the heart of the exemplary. If you've enjoyed the episode, please do consider sharing it with someone else. Word of mouth remains the main way the podcast reaches new listeners. And if you haven't already done so, then leaving a review is hugely helpful and very much appreciated. Until next time, thank you for listening.