The bright white light

A spate of 'forensic detective' TV programmes reflects the popularity of death as entertainment. Yet this trend distances us from the reality of grief, writes Kathryn Holmquist.

In his fourth and most successful book so far, The White Road, thriller writer John Connolly continues the literary shock tactic that has earned him a fortune: a precoccupation with violent death. In a particularly graphic passage, he describes the last moments of a "nigger" martyred for breaking a window in South Carolina.

Connolly's grim "descent into the abyss" (as the book jacket boasts) delivers what it promises. Yet what is most shocking is that this is entertainment. Death has become an entertainment industry that distances us and makes us feel safe.

We double-lock our doors and clutch comforting cups of tea as forensic detectives on Discovery Channel's Crime Night scrutinise stray hairs, patterns of splattered blood, the human bones found in forests and the DNA abandoned on the bodies of the victims. Finger-nail scrapings, semen, carpet fibres and last meals create a grotesque fugue of evidence.

We feel an eerie distance, forgetting that the cases under scrutiny were once real, living human beings who were entrapped, tortured and killed. Their hideous ends have become our mundane past-times. Programmes such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation on RTÉ 1 are like the gargoyles on medieval churches, intended both to warn and amuse.

Shock is a part of entertainment, and in an age where even the most bizarre sexual practices are banal, the pornography of death can still raise the blood pressure. A German artist currently exhibiting in London, Gunther von Hagens, plastinates corpses, even those of his friends, and turns them into "edutainment".

By skinning corpses and replacing their body fluids with plastics, von Hagens can produce grotesque, de-personalised and strangely soulless anatomical studies, such as a female body containing a foetus.

Psychological voyeurism can be healthy. People who watch horror films are less likely to experience nightmares, writes psychotherapist Alex Lukeman, in Nightmares: How to Make Sense of Your Darkest Dreams (Newleaf). Seeing our inner demons objectified on the cinema screen seems to pacify our subconscious fears.

Narcissism plays a role, too. Voyeuristic engagement with death lets us rudely flaunt our vitality and gloat over our next breath. It's an unattractive, although all too human trait.

While we may laugh at death, we cannot delay it forever. Sooner or later we have to acknowledge that in an environmentally conscious era, we're the most recyclable product of all, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Everyone experiences that moment eventually: the unyielding, undeniable, unfathomable knowledge that I too will die. It usually comes with the death of a family member, especially a parent, spouse or child. "Young" deaths are becoming so rare that many of us are insulated from such knowledge well into our 40s.

Death entertainment does nothing to prepare us for the challenges of real grieving.

Psychologists talk of teenagers who, after attempting suicide, come around to admit that they actually believed that they would be able to observe their own funerals. Death was unreal to them.

Death cannot be closer, yet it has never been farther away. The more successful we become at living, the less time we give ourselves to mourn. I was trapped behind a walking cortège the other day. It was disorienting to have to creep slowly and respectfully in the car behind a stranger's coffin, which was followed by mourners on foot. It was as though time stopped for us rushing strangers who happened upon the event. We could grumble about being delayed for our next appointment, or we could take a moment to stop and say - hold on, being late is OK. How much does any of this racing about matter anyway?

For an arrogant few, especially the young, being near death is an exhilarating high. Increasing numbers of successful young professionals with perfect lives are seeking enlightenment through highly dangerous sports such as free-solo rock climbing, where there are no ropes, anchors or belays to save you should you fall.

Such thrill-seekers strip away the protective boundaries between themselves and something larger. Climbers risk mountain sickness, frostbite and hypothermia to scale Everest and other challenging peaks. Snowboarders dice with the threat of avalanche when they travel to, for instance, the vast, unregulated, snow-covered expanses of the Pacific Northwest in the US.

PETER Stark, author of Last Breath, who describes a dozen ways of dying through death sports, sees them as a spiritual quest. Learning how fragile your hold on life is can put everything into perspective. "The ego, the vanity, the insignificance, and - often - the pettiness of so much that passes for human endeavour and striving become abundantly clear. This is what the great religions and the shamans and the Sufi are trying to tell you - to step beyond the self that blinds you."

But the macho striving for the near-death, and possibly the actual death, experience lacks the essential ingredient of grace. Like Connolly's martyred Errol Rich most of us will not choose the manner of our going. We will be cornered by the inevitable and we will die quickly, or slowly - either way we will find grace through acceptance if we're lucky and if we have the time.

Legendary US journalist Studs Terkel asked paramedics, nurses and doctors about their observations of death and dying for his new book, Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith (New Press). One paramedic told him of the peace he found when he entered the homes of elderly people who had died peacefully and alone, surrounded by pictures of children and grandchildren.

Another paramedic told Terkel of how a bullet-ridden body of a child or teenage boy became more than a body only when the family arrived to claim it. A teenage boy, looking into the eyes of a paramedic for comfort as he bled to death, would fade away peacefully. It was his family, arriving at the hospital, who brought the sense of death, anger and mourning. The boy had died too savagely and quickly even to know he was dying.

People who have nearly died describe how life expands around the moment of death so that seconds seem to last hours. I got an inkling of this 20 years ago in a serious car accident. As the lorry came bearing down on me to collide head-on, I felt an eternity of time and, bizarrely, a sense of fearless peace and even humour. I remember thinking: "So this is how it ends, if only I'd known I wouldn't have allowed myself to suffer so much." I blacked out, then regained consciousness on an A&E trolley with a handsome intern staring intently into my eyes. "Am I dead?" I asked him.

"If you think this is heaven, baby, you've got a lot to learn," he answered.

So maybe this is hell. Sometimes it seems like it. Yet the only way to cope with the death that shadows us all is to relish those brief moments of ecstasy and laughter we share with friends, children and lovers. Being near death seems to have given Terkel's subjects a grace that most of us lack.

It's a calm you see in the faces of surviving New York firefighters, in the proud stances of climbers who've reached the pinnacle of Everest and in the caring bedside manner of those who care for the dying.

"Dying is usually a very slow process," one doctor confided to me. It's certainly not as dramatic as death entertainment makes it out to be.

What is it like when you're close to reaching the other side? I have a friend who nearly died in childbirth and found herself moving towards a white light which gave her an overwhelming and irresistible sense of peace. Living was no longer of any concern. She pulled herself away from the light in response to the distant voice of a nurse calling that her baby needed her.

TERKEL met a nurse who suffered "brain death" and spent one year in a coma. She was in public care and had no family, so there was no one to sign the official papers required to switch off life support. Left to "vegetate", she miraculously regained consciousness, with no ill effects. She told Terkel how she had spent her comatose year travelling through time, living many lifetimes, amassing wisdom. Afterwards, she visited a Tibetan monastery where monks interpreted her coma experience as an enviable and rarely experienced spiritual state.

You may accept her story, or you may believe that the woman's unconscious mind remained active as her body rested. One thing is sure: we are all on life support. Our beating hearts keep us in one dimension, but as the Christian religion and many others teach, physical death is a portal. To some this is a deeply held belief, to others a reassuring tale. The only way to learn the truth, is to live well until death and then hang on for the adventure.