#idk my wife's favorite pair of slippers died this morning

[unforth]

The last couple hundred years have seen society, especially wealthy, western societies, increasingly distancing themselves from the visceral, immediate experience of death. Death is to be hidden and shunned, grief to be pushed aside and made brief. This has been made possibly by improvements in health care, but also by the ever-growing emphasis on the nuclear family and the greater space between people and the sources of their food.

On a smaller scale, as we've had more space to store belongings - as homes have grown and the number of people living within them have decreased - it has been easier for people to acquire and retain belongings over long periods of time. This has led to phenomenon where people buy things they absolutely adore...and then do not use them, as they have the space to store them and they've grown afraid of the damage that will be done to their things if they use them.

Though the second is of course on a smaller scale, the lose of a beloved object still involves a grieving process, and therefore is a less severe analogy for the loss of a loved one.

I posit that the two phenomena are in fact that same phenomenon: that a fear of loss of all kinds, the limiting of space for experiencing loss in our lives, and a dissipation of the skills that enable one to grieve loss in a healthy way, have resulted in our current culture where it is safer to ignore death, and safer to preserve our favorite objects unused, than it is to risk loss.

In this essay, I will...