The Language of Fear

Ben Wildsmith

Does anywhere in the world have as dysfunctional relationship with mortality as we do in the UK?

Following the assumed murder of Ann Widdecombe over the past couple of days, it’s tempting to frame the polarised, unkind reactions online as just more evidence that politics has reached its nadir.

Some were quick to celebrate her death, insisting that her views on a range of social topics disqualifies the late politician from commemoration, or even respectful silence.

Ranged against them were those who seem to be hoping desperately that a political motivation will emerge for her death, confirming the absolute moral superiority of their side over the other.

That narrative gained traction after the police confirmed that they were looking for a white, British national. In the racialised hellscape of social media politics, that information was inconvenient for some, leading them to hope for a culprit from ‘the left’ as consolation.

We’ve been here before; notably after the death of Margaret Thatcher in 2013. So, exempting politicians from the usual etiquette of public mourning isn’t new. Then, renditions of ‘Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead’ competed with bargain bin deification to define the national response to the death of an elderly woman from natural causes.

When Jo Cox was murdered, it didn’t take long for her husband to be vilified as insincere in his grief, as if it were a performance to judged publicly.

So, behaviour online about Ann Widdecombe’s death can’t solely be ascribed to the decline in our political discourse, although the ferocity and volume of antagonistic comments likely reflect a downward trend.

Underneath the expression of an unhappy zeitgeist, there are permanent elements of our cultures in the UK that poke through reliably at times of heightened emotion.

That the three politicians I’ve mentioned were women is not a coincidence. The persistence of misogyny in our society is evidenced by the change in pitch that accompanies any disagreement over a prominent woman.

Gendered language, a focus on physical appearance, and references to the subject’s sex life, or lack of one, feature in addition to substantive arguments.

If these obsessions can endure even beyond death, to the point where they are on people’s minds even in the immediate aftermath, it tells an ugly story about where we remain on what was once assumed to be a journey towards equality.

More broadly, ill-tempered bickering in the aftermath of a death – whether it be over politics or the contents of a will – exemplifies the cluelessness that many of us as to how to behave in the face of mortality.

In some ways our society has made progress in promoting openness about emotional subjects. Mental health and sexuality are discussed more widely, with less acceptance of cheap, distracting jokes about these fundamentally important topics.

Death and grief, however, the two experiences common to us all, often seem out of our linguistic scope.

To discuss them is to be ‘morbid’, as if the contemplation of an unwelcome certainty somehow brings it out of the abstract and into our lived experience.

Such rituals as we maintain around death are often cursory, atrophied nods to the enormity of the event for those affected by it. How often do we shuffle into municipal crematoriums, staring at our feet as a celebrant or priest cobbles together a few general platitudes about someone they never met?

Beyond the obligatory first enquiry, do we ask how a bereaved colleague is coping when they return to work after their few days off? I’m shocking at it, and, having been on both sides, I know I’m not alone.

We fund hospice care in this country through charities, as if the inevitable were an unlucky contingency that can safely be left to chance.

Preparing a space where death and grief can happen in a structured way seems to be a level of adulthood that we, collectively, do not want to achieve.

So, as much as the unpleasant arguments about Ann Widdecombe reflect the dire state of our politics, they fit a more established pattern of dysfunctional evasion. Anything, even abhorrent disrespect, is easier to cope with than mortality itself.

Behind that, gallows humour, conspiracy theories and everything else that swirls around the death of a prominent person, lies the unprocessed terror that many of us have of mortality.

If we talked about it more; learned to sit with each other through grief, perhaps that fear might recede a little.