Interpreting Death
Thanks for your patience with this one. I’ve been thinking on many of the conversations from last month’s “Interpreting Death” panel at the National Association for Interpretation’s National Conference, and I wanted to properly summarize the different points brought up by everyone involved.
Death is complicated.
After listening to perspectives from historical interpreters, park rangers, zookeepers, wildlife rehabilitators, researchers, and more, that’s the one thread that really pulls through. Some people are fascinated by death, while others are repulsed. People associate death with the macabre, with grief, with taboo and with love. It’s impossible to cater towards everyone when the topic of death comes up.
So for anyone attempting to cover something related to death in a creative or educational sphere, here’s a few brief guidelines that I work with in my writings.
1) Respect over all else. This means respecting the dead whose story you are telling, the people you are telling it to, and those who have tried to tell the story positively before you. Talking about death means you’re likely to push on uncomfortable issues for many folks, but keeping respect and empathy for others front and center will ease many mistakes. Don’t shy away from important details or images, but do allow for people to choose whether or not they see them. Admit unknowns and points of contention, but tell what you can in a meaningful way.
2) Allow the audience to mourn. Thinking on death can bring up feelings of grief for many, and allowing those feelings their place at the table brings depth to your work and RESPECT to your audience. I write about birds that have long since died, but I still try to include posts on the implications of these deaths, the good and the bad. Sometimes, people are upset. They are sad and angry, and those feelings often start from a place of love for animals. Acknowledging these feelings in others, and myself, re-humanizes museums, researchers, the audience, and myself, pulls us together in our mutual mourning for these birds, and allows us to continue learning together.
3) Share, even when it’s uncomfortable. Much of Western culture doesn’t like to focus on death. These leads to death becoming an almost fantastical concept, one that becomes more and more disconcerting to talk about, and one that many folks don’t honestly learn much about. I have plenty of children and adults in my classes who are so uncomfortable with the concept, they ask if we can find an alternative food source for nonreleaseable predators instead of dead animals. This is not to say they are unintelligent people, but they’re so horrified by the idea of death, they cannot look more closely at how one animal’s death keeps another alive. This often coincides with a disassociation from where the meat they may eat comes from, and what the meat actually is. These are complex moral issues, but they can’t be appreciated without deeper understanding. The best way to build that understanding in others and yourself is to share with each other. Share about your fears about death, your concerns for others, your ideas concerns deaths of people and other animals. More importantly, listen as others share with you. It’s often awkward, and not every interaction is perfect, but its important to have open discussions on the things that we can never perfectly understand.
If you have other guidelines for talking about death, I’d love to hear them. I’m going to be on a break for the next few weeks, but I hope to have some good conversations about how to talk dead stuff in between posts here. Until then, thank you for reading this very long post!