10 | Megan Rosenbloom on the Death Positive Movement

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll

Physics, Science

4.7 • 4.7K Ratings

🗓️ 20 August 2018

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We're all going to die. But while we are alive, it's up to us how we understand and deal with that fact. In the United States especially, there is a tendency to not face up to the reality of death, and to assume that our goal should be to struggle at all costs to squeeze every last minute out of life. The Death Positive movement aims to change that, helping people to both face up to death on a personal and cultural level, and to give themselves more control over the manner of their own deaths. One of the leaders in this movement is today's guest, Megan Rosenbloom, who works as a medical librarian by day. We talk about attitudes toward death around the world, the differences between dying at home and in a hospital, the importance of autonomy in old age, and how individuals and societies can cope with the ultimate inevitability that comes with being alive. [smart_track_player url="http://traffic.libsyn.com/seancarroll/megan-rosenbloom.mp3" social_gplus="false" social_linkedin="true" social_email="true" hashtag="mindscapepodcast" ] Megan Rosenbloom received a Masters from the University of Pittsburgh in 2008, and is currently Associate Director for Instruction Services at the Norris Medical Library of the University of Southern California. In 2016 she won a Mover & Shaker award from Library Journal. She is active in the Death Positive movement, serving as the co-founder and director of the Death Salon. She is currently working on a book about the history of books bound with human skin. Home page Norris Medical Library page Order of the Good Death Death Salon Anthropodermic Book Project Talk sponsored by USC's Office of Religious Life Twitter Download Episode

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll.
0:04.6	One of my favorite things to do in Paris is to visit the Catechons underneath the city itself.
0:11.0	These are an extraordinary collection of tunnels that are about 20 meters underground,
0:16.3	the height of a five-story building,
0:18.4	and there are stories of course of people sneaking in to sealed-off areas to throw massive parties and so forth.
0:24.1	But some of the Catechons are explicitly open to the public.
0:27.9	You walk down a rickety spiral staircase and you find yourself surrounded by bones.
0:34.2	This part of the Catechons are used as a storage place where the skeletal remains of literally millions of perisions from the 1700s.
0:44.6	Back then, the art of the cemetery was not quite as advanced as it is today,
0:49.4	and bones were just piling up.
0:51.6	There are stories of a heavy rainfall washing bodily remains down the streets of Paris itself.
0:58.1	So at some point, they gathered up literally millions of remains and put them underground in these Catechons.
1:05.6	It's a site that if you visit it, we'll leave a real impression, an impression of your mortality,
1:11.3	but also an impression of the different ways in which different cultures think about mortality.
1:16.9	To me as an American, going to the Catechons makes me realize that it's not necessary to have sort of the ponderous sombre attitude toward death that we have here in the US.
1:29.5	Deep in the Catechons, there are little snippets of poetry on the walls.
1:33.9	There are sometimes the skulls are arranged in little heart shapes and so forth.
1:39.2	It's slightly more accepting almost whimsical version of how we think about death.
1:44.6	And we know the different cultures think about death very differently.
1:47.3	In Mexico, there's the day of the dead, Dia de Muertos, which celebrates and honors the ends of our lives.
1:54.7	In the United States, we don't do this.
1:56.5	We don't celebrate, we don't honor death, we're certainly not whimsical about it.
	...

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