Back to Home > Wednesday, Mar 15, 2006 Opinion email this print this '); '); } ``The word... We seem to mourn death less than t

``The word death is not pronounced in New York, in Paris, in London, because it burns the lips,'' declared Octavio Paz in 1961, in ``The Labyrinth of Solitude,'' adding that by contrast, the Mexican ``is familiar with death.'' Was Paz right? Is he still right?

Our cultural ambivalence about death and grief gets played out on the political scene and on the literary scene. On the one hand, we need and yearn to mourn; on the other hand, we're ``uncomfortable'' -- to put it mildly -- with dying and mourning. We're simultaneously a death-denying society and a society enthralled not just by morbid comedies (``Pulp Fiction'' and ``Six Feet Under,'' for example) but by true stories of mortality.

Predicated either on the tenets of grief therapy or more radical alternatives, peculiarly cheerful do-it-yourself memorial services focus on ``celebrations of the life'' of the ``departed'' rather than the pain that his departure caused, while ``New Age'' activities, from channeling to past-life therapy, retool Victorian spiritualism with 21st-century technology.

To make matters more bewildering, for much of the past century, film and video have let us see the dead in movies, on TV and even, more recently, on computer screens, iPods and cell phones, as if long-gone celebrities -- and our lost loved ones -- are alive and well.

Although some may believe the details of pain that such books disclose ought to stay private, most of the selections offered by my Bereavement Book Club find receptive, even passionate audiences. Why are so many readers engrossed in books that feature such apparently uncongenial subject matter? As Gorer suggested 50 years ago, what sex was to the prudish Victorians, death has become to us squeamish moderns.

Yet just as the great novelists and poets of the 20th century refused to repress the realities of the erotic, so contemporary writers insist on testifying to the truths of loss. Especially in a society in which death often seems so unspeakable that grief is deemed equally unspeakable or at least embarrassing, the sometimes painful candor of the Bereavement Book Club teaches us much that we need to know about dying while giving us permission to mourn. And after all, to be mortal is by definition to have to learn to mourn.

This is cache, read story here