AUTHOR S AFTERTHOUGHTS

AUTHOR'S AFTERTHOUGHTS

Today's global marketplace is not the one that existed five years ago. Emotions are more on the surface. When Lady Diana Spencer died in a vehicular accident in France in the late 1990's, England presented the world with a new way to exhibit the public demonstration of grief . Prior to this tragedy and its subsequent collective global mourning and expressions of grief, loss, and of pain, it was typical that expressions of death were more private. Now if there is a death of a public figure, people use the Lady Diana model to express their sorrows. Mourners take flowers and teddy bears, write letters , and light candles at any site that has anything to do with the lost public figure. Driving past an extremely rural race car track in central Oregon a week after the death of racing fame, Dale Earnhardt, I saw a single inexpensive flower bouquet with an attached teddy bear duct-taped to the race track gate

I was invited to present a seminar at a State Conference of Medical Examiners and Coroners. They had become aware that their industry had changed after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001. What they reflected to me was that death had always been their private domain but that directly after the World Trade Center event, although they were waiting to be called, the fact that there were initially no corpses, found them astonished to be out of the response loop. They watched a new set of people become central in the management of the dead. They waited for bodies and none came. The deaths and the dead became public, symbolic, and overt, no longer the hidden aversion. Death was, perhaps for the first time in history, public domain. Television was showing it. What followed for the coroners and medical examiners were the arduous months and months of identification and DNA sampling of micro body parts for tedious scientific determinations. Managers in the death industry began readjusting their thinking because their employees were very upset. The Coroners wanted to explore their covert emotional bases and asked for some new tools to teach their teams and new recruits how to manage in the new environment.

What once was hidden is now overt. What used to be overt is now hidden. Emotional responses are externalized in movies and stuffed into the deep reaches of our humanity as we try to absorb all the changes.