I grew up in a home in which my parents replaced my pet goldfish, Cleo, every time it died for five years. They explained  to me (many years later) that they allowed Cleo to really die only because I’d noticed him floating upside down. Had I not, who knows how long they would have kept up the rouse to shelter me from my first loss?

Many Canadian kids grow up with the privilege of avoiding exposure to real death, and garner much of their understanding about death and dying through a series of interpretations of things seen on TV, in books or on film. 

Learning about and experiencing death without real world context can be traumatizing and certainly impacts the way in which one begins accepting death as a reality of life . To prove my point, here's an example of kids reacting to the ending of the film The Odd Life of Timothy Green:

In the winter, our group sat sipping on lemon ginger teas at aspiring death midwife Emily Jull’s home and discussed the impact of how children learn about death.

“As far as our education process and how people could learn about death and dying, I personally would love to see it be part of the education system the same way sex education is. I would love to see [death] be recognized as something that is natural and something that belongs to each one of us. I would love to see children be able to engage with [death] naturally and at an appropriate stage,” Jull stated.

Jull explained that our children are growing up without having their natural curiosity around death fed, and in turn their curiousity about death is repressed and internalized as fear.

“We treat [sex and death] like these taboos that children can’t handle, like they’re unnatural and we need to repress them, and the fact is, I think we need to do the exact opposite. I think we need to engage and have healthy normal conversations about them and stop making them into these fetished, ridiculous things [sic].” 

Michelle Clarke, program co-ordinator for Humber College’s Funeral Studies, also explained to us that she believes that children should be taught about death by their parents.

Clarke explained that she’s alarmed by the amount of parents that would prefer to tell their children that a squashed bug or deceased grandparent is “sleeping” as opposed to “dead.”

“Conversations about death, and dying, and tragedy are commonplace in our home, and I don’t want to shield my kids from it because it could happen to us. So, we have always had a very healthy appreciation, and they have been brought up with this appreciation of death,” explained Clarke.

In an email to professor Charles Wells of Wilfrid Laurier University, who teaches a course about pop culture, we asked whether or not he could discuss the impacts of pop culture on Canadian’s understanding of death and dying. In the email, professor Wells brought up media’s fixation on “undeath.”

Hit television shows like The Walking Dead, Fear the Walking Dead, and Game of Thrones all market an apocalyptic reality in which the dead rise again and in turn imply that death is not a finite process.

Pop culture often reflects a society’s hidden paranoia and insecurities; perhaps the success of television franchises that depend on tropes like zombies reflects our society’s desire to avoid the finality of death?

There is a romantic side to the undead as well. The Twilight franchise casts an laughable lens on the romanticized concept of immortality through the portrayal of hypersexual, sparkly, forever-teenaged vampires. The films Fido, and Warm Bodies presents a reality in which humans find love in with undead zombies and establish romantic bonds that transcend the limitations of mortality. This kind of skirting around finality is dangerous, because unlike the fictions being knit together and oversold by pop media, death is inevitable and death is finite.

Beyond the scope of zombies and vampires, it is important to consider the way in which media portrays a more human kind of dead as well. With shows like Criminal Minds being marathoned by students across the nation, it’s important to understand the inaccuracy in the portrayal of corpses.

In an article for Buzzfeed, “This Is What Goes Into Being A Corpse On ‘NCIS,’” Ariane Lange writes, “NCIS executive producer Mark Horowitz, who casts the dead bodies, said whether he chooses a designated extra, a stuntperson, or an actor is dependent on whether the part requires the character “to appear alive.” If the character is dead for the whole episode, he’ll generally cast an extra. Whether the actor actually plays the corpse during shooting or whether they have to have a dummy made depends on 'how severe their injuries are.'"

Being overexposed to images of studio-manufactured death has skewed our understanding of what real dead bodies look like.

In the 2013 article, “Let’s Remember What Real Dead Bodies Look Like,” Caitlin Doughty writes, “Popular culture images of death fall on the extreme edges of the spectrum: either the prettied-up dead (that is to say, OBVIOUSLY living actors in TV crime shows) or the grotesque horror living-dead types.”

There is an oversaturation of marginalized people being killed or dying in pop culture as well.

In the article “‘Anyone Can Die?’ TV’s Recent Death Toll Says Otherwise,” Maureen Ryan explains that women, people of colour and LGBTQ characters are killed off of popular TV franchises at an extremely disproportionate rate than that of their white male counterparts.

“Those of us who continually promote the inclusion of a wider, more diverse array of TV creators bang that drum for a lot of reasons. One of them is the avoidance of preventable events, like this spring’s Festival of Tired Tropes, which managed to invoke standbys like Bury Your Gays, Women in Refrigerators and the Black Guy Always Dies.”

It’s not just TV. A blog from 1999 called Women in Refrigerators tracked the violent deaths of female comic book heroines. The title of the blog mocks a trope in comic books in which dead female characters are often stuffed into fridges. The comprehensive list can be found here: http://lby3.com/wir/women.html

By systemically normalizing the violent and meaningless deaths of marginalized people in pop culture, we’ve skewed our understanding of death and dying as a society.

“I think too, and I don’t know, I would love to see formal research on the link between children being quote on quote protected from death and their obsessive fascination with videogames that cause death,” said Clarke.

“Like, my little guy, my oldest is just now getting into videogames, but he’s only six, so he’s not obviously into a whole lot of stuff, but there are some videogames that he plays with my husband where you kill the other guy and there was one that wasn’t graphic, but it bothered him, and he’s like ‘I don’t want to play that.’ He understands it, right, and it’s not on a level that we understand, but he gets it, that this isn’t okay. Like he gets upset when other kids kill bugs because he understands that that shouldn’t happen. And so, it makes me think, has our society gone so far into a death denying existence that it’s alright to kill something and it’s okay to be cruel to something and let it suffer because we just don’t understand what that really means and what the implications are of it.”