I study death for a living -- sort of, at least I study how people think about death -- but I'll be the first to admit that I haven't seen a lot of dead people firsthand. One of the fortunately few exceptions to this was during a recent vacation to Zakopane, Poland, where I saw a man die right before my eyes from a heart attack. (The picture of the Carpathian Mountains in the distance was snapped just before this happened, so this is what he probably saw as his consciousness fizzled out.)
For many different reasons, I find death to be intellectually challenging, more so than we're generally aware. For starters, and despite what we tend to say, I'm not convinced we fully appreciate the fact that we're no more special or entitled to life as were all those people decomposing under our feet at this very moment. In some difficult-to-articulate sense, it's almost as if the dead are another species. I found it fascinating that once the Zakopane man's lids were closed, for instance, the ambient social scene returned almost instantaneously to normal, with people munching happily on popcorn and lining up to buy tickets for the tram. "Well, that's him," people seemed to be saying. "But he's different from me."
Only one study that I'm aware of has directly targeted this issue. Another PT blogger, Timothy Pychyl, has already mentioned the work of terror management theory, so I'll skip its basic premises. But in one particular terror management study, participants were asked to rate their self-perceived degree of similarity with some target character. At first, many participants saw considerable overlap between their own identities and the traits of this character, but then something interesting happened. When informed that the character was sick and dying, participants felt they'd less in common with this person after all.
This finding reminds me of something I once read in the very sobering Holocaust-based memoir This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski. The author, a prisoner at Auschwitz himself, noted how hundreds of people at a time were corralled so easily by just two or three armed guards into the gas chambers, even when they likely knew the terrible purpose of these nondescript buildings. Sure, some people, perhaps many, would have been shot and killed if they'd revolted, but it was all but a certainty that they were about to die anyway. "[H]ope," writes Borowski, "makes people go without a murmur to the gas chambers, keeps them from risking a revolt, paralyses them into numb activity."
It's almost as if we each secretly believe that we're special, privileged, likely to be rescued from death no matter how grim things look. After all, death is what happens to those other people. Well, here are a few of these other people.
