Author Archives: Rachael Kathleen Cogbill

Dead Man Walking

I was reading the New York Times this morning when I came across this article, which is directly related to the topic of my term paper: continued associations of HIV/AIDS with death. The article reveals the presence of institutionalized stigmatization of individuals living with HIV in the prison system in Alabama and South Carolina. Despite the fact that airborne methods of transmission were debunked in the early days of the disease– back in the ’80s, when so little else about HIV/AIDS was understood– HIV positive inmates are prevented from working with food and segregated from the rest of the general prison population, including at mealtimes. Prisoners with HIV are prevented from transferring to prisons closer to their families, and, until recently, were barred from prison church services. Perhaps most disturbingly (and most relevant to my paper, as well as to the topic of this blog), one HIV positive inmate reported that guards would call out “dead man walking” when he passed through the halls. This is despite the fact that, with current treatments for HIV (while there is no cure and no vaccine, there are effective treatments), a person can live a relatively normal, healthy life, and is more likely to die with HIV than from HIV. With proper treatment, the amount of virus in a person’s system can be reduced to nearly undetectable levels (meaning that it is difficult to spread the virus to another person), and the progression of the disease to AIDS can be all but halted. In other words, modern medicine has made it entirely unnecessary (and entirely unethical as well) to treat people with HIV any differently than people without the virus, even in a prison setting.

And yet, misconceptions about the disease persist. People (yes, even outside of the Alabama and South Carolina prison systems, though I wish I could say otherwise) still think of HIV as though it was the plague. This is not to downplay the seriousness of this disease– it is a very serious issue, especially in Africa, where treatments are not  generally available, and where the death toll is absolutely devastating. But in the United States, the rate of people dying from HIV has fallen sharply since the early days of the epidemic, and continues to fall, even as perceptions of HIV remain very much the same.  These unchanging perceptions, exemplified by the policies of the prison systems in the article, provide a fascinating insight into how we associate things with death, and the rigidity of those associations, even as other cultural circumstances change.

Rachael Cogbill

“Plan 9 From Outer Space” and the Living Dead

“You know, it’s an interesting thing when you consider… the Earth people, who can think, are so frightened by those who cannot: the dead.” So says the alien “Space Commander” in what is, hands down, one of the worst movies ever made: Ed Wood’s “Plan 9 From Outer Space.” Some of the movie’s more… memorable features include its flinchingly bad dialogue (“A flying saucer? You mean the kind from up there?” “Yeah, either that or its counterpart.”), the terrible casting (which was made worse by the fact that the star, Bela Lugosi, died before “Plan 9” was finished… and then was replaced by his chiropractor for the remainder of the film), the “string-powered” flying saucers, and the plot in general (aliens attempting to destroy Earth using an army of zombies). Even the back of the DVD case calls the movie “a hymn to all those who have ever tried to create something intelligent and meaningful and failed miserably every step of the way.”

Scene from "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

Scene from "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

 

But, despite the fact that Ed Wood’s lofty intentions for his film were so horribly crushed by its sheer terribleness, there is still something about “Plan 9” that is striking. There is a lot of truth in the idea that people are horrified by the dead, and especially by the not-quite-dead. Our fascination with zombies, in shows like “The Walking Dead,”  in the ever-growing list of zombie movies, which has become a horror genre in itself, or even in classic horror tales like “The Monkey’s Paw,” reveals our fear of the “living dead.” Even in cases where zombies are portrayed as ridiculous (as in “Zombieland,” or this episode of “South Park”), there is still a sense of horror associated with the idea of mindless eating machines that were once human, but are no longer alive, nor quite dead.

Zombies

Zombies

 

What is it about zombies that is so threatening (other than the fact that they are virtually unstoppable and want to eat us, of course)? Maybe it is the fact that they defy order, and negate our rituals for the acceptance of death. If we have accepted the death of a loved one, and conducted the proper rituals to come to terms with our loss, it would be a severe blow to our society, as well as our individual emotions, for that person to return to “life.” In the case of zombies, this is made even worse due to the fact that the person who was dead does not come back as he or she was, but as a distorted version of a human being who can do nothing but eat and destroy all in its path. Perhaps what we fear is a loss of our own intellect, of becoming, like zombies, unthinking, violent distortions of ourselves. Whatever the underlying cause of our fear of the undead, what remains is the fact that we do fear them, despite the fact that we can think and they cannot. “It’s an interesting thing, when you consider…”

Rachael Cogbill

The Mysteries of Mourning

Death is a mystery, and for all of our braininess, most of us can understand death only through the emotions we associate with it, through our feelings of grief and loss. Our ability to comprehend death in even this small way, and to experience all of the complex emotions that the loss of a fellow human creates in us, is part of what makes us human. It belongs to our species alone, a marker of our deep intellectual and emotional ability, as uniquely human as our large brains or complex cultures. Or does it? Is it possible that we humans are not the only creatures capable of grasping the concept of death, and of feelings the emotions associated with the loss of a loved one?

Mourners at a funeral

A recent study, done by researchers at U.C. Davis, is yet another link in a growing chain of evidence that non-human members of the animal kingdom do, in fact, mourn their dead. This study showed that scrub jays (a type of bird) show distress at the presence of a dead jay, which includes ceasing all food-gathering and making loud calls of alarm. In my opinion, this study does point less to an emotional response to death and more to a self-preservation response, but it shows that animals can perceive death and its consequences. And who are we to say that the response isn’t, at least in part, emotional? The question of whether animals experience emotions of grief after the death of a relative or another member of their community is an important one, and there is far more evidence than just this study suggesting that they can. Giraffes, elephants and chimpanzees, all of which are far more social animals than jays, have been observed reacting to the deaths of others in ways that are, well, human.

If animals can feel grief upon losing a member of their community, some very difficult and disturbing dilemmas arise. I’m not referring to the rights of animals in zoos or being used for testing (which are important, of course, but not really the point that I want to make) but to what this could mean for our definition of humanity. If animals react to death in much the same way that we do, what does that mean for us? Do animals have culture, or is this response to death innate? How much of our own response to death is built in, and how much is a product of society? None of this changes the nature or the complexity of human reactions to death, but it does raise questions about what really separates us from the rest of the natural world, and about what it really means to be human.

Rachael Cogbill