A New Name for Dying: How Language Shapes Our Perception of Mortality

I've written before about why our language around death is so strongly tethered to our perceptions of it, and why we need new language to describe it.   But I was to explore this topic further, as I believe it is very relevant (and hopefully helpful) to people across the globe right now who might be in need of comfort from some form of loss. 

There's loss everywhere. I could write endlessly about the Ukraine war and its casualties - I'm not even sure that any source consulted could give an accurate account.  I could write about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, because probably everyone reading this has heard of the atrocities inflicted by both sides in that conflict through some social media post or another. I could move away from war and instead talk about socio-economic injustices, like the UK poverty epidemic or the systemic racism in Turkey,   which are a global phenomenon and not limited to any particular geographic or ethnic group (though there are worsening pockets in certain places).  But the point here is that loss - both individual and cultural - is happening everywhere.  And since we are currently unable to make the necessary changes we need to make to contain it, this will likely continue or worsen.  

Loss of any kind can be devastating.   The loss of a job or a home, for example, can be just as harrowing as the death of a loved one. Changes in political climate (as we have seen in the United States) can have far-reaching and life-alterting effects, as well.   But any kind of loss - no matter what kind it is - should be recognized as a type of death; even if it is only the death of a lifestyle. 

So what does the word death mean? How did we come to use it to describe end-of-life or change-of-life situations or scenarios?  I'm going to use several different lexicons here to make a point, so bear with me if you're an English-only reader, or if you're a reader whose native language isn't germanic or indo-european in its roots. 

Our modern english word for death comes from the Old English word dēaþ, which itself stems from the much older Proto-Indo-Europoean word dheu-.  And this word literally refers to the process of dying itself.   Other similar roots are seen in words like dauthi, or tod, the Old Norse word for death and the German word for death, respectively.   Obviously, in the mists of our distant past, some root that was commonly assigned to this process of the cessation of biomechanical systems held sway, and stuck with us through various socio-linguistic changes and crossed certain geographic boundaries.  It comes to us today in the form of our modern word death, which we then take to mean the act of dying or of being dead. It's generally assumed that the word death was first used in the middle ages to describe this process, but we can see of course that its roots go back much deeper to an earlier time. It seems, then, that as humans we've been attempting to catalog this thing we call death for a very long time indeed. 

It's clear from looking at the history of the english word for death that we have come to view the process of biomechanical death as something weighty and significant; something worth our attention in a way that makes us uncomfortable perhaps.   But whether we like or understand it or not, it's presence in our history (and its guaranteed appearance in our futures) unsettles us at best, and sometimes even dismantles all we hold dear. 

The language we use to describe the process of biomechanical death directly affects
our perception of the end-of-life process itself. 

And yet. 

Yet. 

Our language is the key to understand these features of death's designs - because do we not call thing as we see them? What if a tree is not named a tree, but calls itself something else entirely?  What if an otter is not an otter, but some other powerful spirit that I cannot name? In Ancient Greece, for instance, Death was given a personification - Thanatos - and was viewed an entity/individual with thoughts, feelings, desires and dispositions just like you and I. In Latin, rthough, the word for death was mortis, from where we get our modern words like mortuary, morgue, mortician, mortality, etc. All words that describe events/scenarios/places/people related to the process of dying, with no personhood or personification attached.  

In all of these examples, though, there is imbedded within the root an emotive position of ending. Of something that once was but is no more.    Our language shapes our perception of our mortality more than any other experience, perhaps, and it is our other experiences with grief and bewilderment that stem from the programmed belief upon which we base the premise itself:  that death is an final stopping point, from beyond which there is no coming back.   

If our language so shapes our perception of mortality, our best hope for reimagining death is to reinvent the language that describes it, so that old paradigms of grief and sadness are slowly - over time - replaced with a new understanding of the significance of an end-of-biological-life process.