Based Camp: People Don't Know How to Die Anymore

In this Talks at Home episode, Malcolm and Simone discuss mourning culture and the phenomenon of expected performative grief when a loved one dies. They analyze the reasons people mourn, including regret over the deceased's unfulfilled experiences, selfish sadness over losing them, and guilt about things left unsaid. Malcolm and Simone propose a cultural shift towards focusing on the deceased's legacy and life's work rather than indulging in non-constructive sadness. They also touch on relating constructively to children's lives versus elderly deaths and texting while driving risks learned from Malcolm's medical examiner work.

Malcolm: [00:00:00] They are using the amount of pain that person's death caused their children as like a judge of the quality of that relationship.

Malcolm: And so they want you to experience pain as a sign that relationship was a meaningful one. worse, when they expect this emotional reaction from you, and when you have this emotional reaction, you are affecting I'm affecting my entire family, my wife and my kids, most of all it's saying not just they want me sad, but they want my kids to feel this grief.

Malcolm: They want my grief. And

Simone: This is where it gets really scary, right? Because this is where you can turn something into a traumatic event as we've discussed in other episodes by making it contextualized as traumatic.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm: hello, Simone! This is going to be an interesting, if sad, episode, because we lost one of this show's first and most avid watchers, she watched every episode, a few days [00:01:00] ago, which was my mom she passed away suddenly and unexpectedly a few days ago.

Malcolm: Since she passed away, I have experienced a very interesting phenomenon. Do you want to talk about it, Simone?

Simone: Yes, you have experienced the phenomenon of what we might call mourning culture, M O U R N I N G, where, interestingly there's a very bifurcated reaction that we get from people when we tell them.

Simone: One is, wow, that's really heavy, hope you're doing alright, let me know how I can help. Other people are like, Whoa, hold on. Like, how are you even on the phone with me right now? Like, how could you be telling you, you need to be like, no, get off the phone right now this is an emergency.

Simone: I understand. Like, Don't, you know, don't handle process your pain. Um, And they kind of, there's very much this expectation and feeling that you get from these conversations. That you should be pulling out your hair, crying, rending your clothing gnashing your teeth, right? Like rolling around on the floor in [00:02:00] pain.

Simone: Yeah, I need to be doing

Malcolm: whatever North Koreans were supposed to do when Kim Jong il died, where you get, the moral police come after you if you are not mourning correctly and loudly enough. Yes. This brings me to a confluence of really interesting phenomenons, right?

Malcolm: Which is one, what's going on here? Like why specifically do they want me to be demonstrating emotional pain? What are the reasons why Hmm. and. If we are intentionally building our own culture, a culture by our value system, what would a person actually do when a person dies, when a parent dies? Yeah,

Simone: Yeah. And,

Malcolm: And how do we relate to that? And then in addition to those things, I want to cover the concept of what lessons I learned from my mom, because I think that's a really, a valuable thing to convey to the audience.

Simone: And I don't know, [00:03:00] man, that might be its whole, like a whole other episode. That might be a whole other episode. Now this woman was a force of nature. She is not someone who can be wrapped up in even one episode. So no let's save that for later. Let us talk about the culture of especially mourning in the context of losing.

Simone: A loved one or family member. Yeah.

Malcolm: Let's first focus on why. Like, why do people feel sad? When somebody died, and I think that there are only a few reasons and they can really be isolated to better understand if they're bringing you any utility or they are in any meaningful way honoring the person who died.

Malcolm: So the first is you are sad for anything that they did not get to experience, right?

Simone: So there's a feeling of regret over what they didn't complete because you know what they wanted and they didn't get that.

Malcolm: Yes, and so that can be things like seeing their grandchildren grow up or something like that, right?[00:04:00]

Malcolm: It's similar to that, and I think that this by far is the biggest reason that people mourn, is regret over things that they won't get to do with the person in the future. The reactions they won't get to have from the person, essentially missing the person.

Simone: People are mourning their own lifestyle changing to a great extent, right?

Simone: Yes.

Malcolm: Yeah. And the things that they're like, I think that this form of mourning is entirely selfish. And really not beneficial at all. The first form of mourning and we'll get to other forms. I don't know. I can understand why you would take some time to reflect on the regret of the things a person isn't going to get to experience, but it really has no utility by that.

Malcolm: What I mean is the person's already dead,

Simone: Going to be able to fix it by fretting over it.

Malcolm: yeah, and so what you're doing is you're allowing that person to, for something totally non efficacious, to negatively affect your mood, and worse, and this is something I [00:05:00] always say about sadness, Sadness hurts the people.

Malcolm: When I show sadness, when I publicly show grief, especially if it's an unaddressable grief, right? That disproportionately hurts the people who care about me most. Because they will begin to feel that grief. It will begin to affect their mood as well. It's

Simone: a communicable disease. So it's like knowing that you have a bad cold and then running up in French, kissing someone.

Malcolm: And there was that great study that you were looking at how families how emotions travel throughout the families or how stress travels throughout the families.

Simone: Saliva cortisol levels. Yeah. So I recently found a study that I found really interesting that measured throughout the course of a conflict.

Simone: So they, the researchers orchestrated a guess, like a conflict inducing. Activity for a family and then they throughout this activity, the duration of it at several points, they measured everyone's saliva level cortisol level. So I guess they made them spit like in the middle of this. And they found [00:06:00] that families do have.

Simone: high correlations and cortisol levels. In fact step parents had lower levels of correlation and cortisol levels with the rest of the family, like with the kids than biological parents. And they found also that mother's cortisol levels predicted father's cortisol levels predicted children's cortisol levels predicted mother's cortisol levels, which also suggested like mothers are The onus is on mothers to stop the cycle.

Simone: When people are getting stressed out because they are the. The driver of the feedback loop, essentially which is re