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natural process...
    Gorer linked this change in attitudes to death with the decline in religious belief:
    But in England, at any rate, belief in the future life as taught in Christian doctrine is very uncommon today even in the minority who make church-going or prayer a consistent part of their lives; and without some such belief natural death and physical decomposition have become too horrible to contemplate or discuss.
    In 1961, Gorer’s brother Peter died of cancer, leaving a wife and children. He was only fifty-four and an eminent immunologist whose work eventually made human organ transplantation possible. Peter Gorer was a Fellow of the Royal Society and, had he survived, he would have almost certainly won the Nobel Prize for Medicine. A heavy smoker, he died quickly after he was diagnosed with lung cancer. Geoffrey Gorer took charge of the burial and looked after his sister-in-law, niece and nephew. He was struck by the rejection of traditional ways of behaving, and by the harmful effects of this rejection on the bereaved. The experience inspired him to write Death, Grief, and Mourning in Contemporary Britain (1965). The book was based on a survey of 1,628 people, undertaken in May 1963.
    Gorer described how his friends were offended by his decision to go into mourning after the death of his brother: ‘A couple of times I refused invitations to cocktail parties, explaining that I was in mourning; the people who invited me responded to this statement with shocked embarrassment, as if I had voiced some appalling obscenity.’ He speculated that the origins of this attitude date back to the Great War, when the numbers of casualties were so overwhelming that the only way of dealing with it was to grieve communally, but to remain stoical about one’s personal loss. Another commentator, Pat Jalland, referred to this as ‘the suppression of privatised grieving’. Gorer observed, too, that society tacitly demanded that the bereaved keep their grief to themselves. In Britain and the US, the trend was ‘to treat mourning as morbid self-indulgence, and to give social admiration to the bereaved who hide their grief so fully that no one would guess anything had happened’.
    Gorer concluded that, compared to their grandparents, ‘...the majority of British people are today without adequate guidance as to how to treat death and bereavement and without social help in living through and coming to terms with the grief and mourning which are the inevitable responses in human beings to the death of someone they have loved.’ ‘The Pornography of Death’ concluded with a plea: ‘...then we must give back to death – natural death – its parade and publicity, re-admit grief and mourning’.
ERNEST BECKER:
THE DENIAL OF DEATH
    The death taboo reached its zenith (or nadir) in the US in the late twentieth century. Perhaps America, which had conquered the world, subconsciously believed that it could conquer death too. Richard Nixon famously declared ‘War on Cancer’ in 1971. Three years later, Ernest Becker (1924–74), an obscure cultural anthropologist, won the Pulitzer Prize posthumously for his 1973 book The Denial of Death. It is difficult to believe that it was widely read, since the prose is in places impenetrable, his argument conveyed through the prism of classical psychoanalytical theory (‘the meaning of anality’) and heavily influenced by the work of Otto Rank, a disciple of Freud’s. In Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977), Allen’s character, the death-phobic, psychoanalysis-obsessed Alvy Singer, gives Annie (Diane Keaton) a copy of The Denial of Death .
    The book, however, has a certain potency because Becker was dying from cancer when he wrote it, and succumbed in 1974, aged forty-nine. If Freud taught that sex was the basic motivation for human behaviour, Becker argued instead that it is our fear of death:
    ...the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is the mainspring of