Jo's experience in the mortuary

The wrongs of disrespecting the dead - and the emotional labour of funeral work

Arnar Árnason offers an anthropologist's perspective on why disrespectful treatment of the bodies of people who have died can be considered wrong and why it might happen. He also reflects on what it can mean to treat the dead with respect.

In the case story, Jo calls two other funeral workers out on the disrespect they are showing the dead but is unsure how to justify doing so. The deceased, after all, cannot hear the disparaging words the two funeral workers direct towards them and they cannot feel the vicious poke of the gloved finger. If Jo had not been present, only the two funeral workers would have had any inkling of what was going on. One of the two suggests that there is no need to be respectful of the dead because the dead cannot hear or feel anything. He implies that if the funeral workers are doing no harm, they are doing no wrong. Both points are problematic. The assumption that 'There is no harming the dead' is considered in another commentary. Here I focus on why the funeral workers can be considered to be acting wrongly.

I consider the funeral workers who Jo encounters in the temporary mortuary facility to be acting wrongly for several reasons. They are acting without respect, without extending dignity to the deceased they have been charged with caring for. They are also acting carelessly. Only that is not quite strong enough a description: they are deliberately acting against care. Some of their actions are hostile and vicious (which is to say they are wrongly motivated) and they seem to express an arrogant sense of superiority as they reason that because the bodies of the dead do not feel, they can do with them as they please. I concentrate here on the wrong of disrespect.

Without denying the wrongfulness of the two funeral workers' behaviour, it is perhaps helpful to try to understand the disrespect they show. Here I think it is important to remember that it is part of the job of funeral workers to carry out interventions on the bodies of the deceased in their care.These interventions may include lifting the deceased into a body bag, shutting them into a cooler for storage, and putting name tags on their toes, wrists or other relatively accessible places on their body. These are interventions that are not usually visited upon living human beings. As the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic reminded us, funeral workers also need to handle dead bodies with caution because those bodies might be a potential source of infection.

When I try to imagine myself in the place of the funeral workers, I am confronted with this question: How can I retain appropriate respect for the deceased while being required to do things to their bodies that would likely not be considered respectful if they were alive? What do I have to do to ensure my own wellbeing if this is what my job demands? In other words, I might ask: How can funeral workers be mindful that a dead body they are working is at the same time human, and likely a much-loved member of a now grieving family who still care about them as a very particular person?
The notion of emotional labour is well known in social science. It came to prominence in research about air stewardesses (conducted at a time when that was entirely a female profession). Air stewardesses, the research suggested, had to affect a manner of relaxed, efficient cheerfulness irrespective of how they might have been feeling. In an aircraft full of people who were often anxious, often excited, sometimes drunk and in a context where safety concerns must always be kept in mind, this took effort. Although the details of their work demands are different, I think that funeral workers may need to carry out significant emotional labour in managing their work with the bodies of the dead. Perhaps symbolically transforming the status of who-what they are working with into body-objects is one way in which some funeral workers deal with the emotional challenges of what they do. And body-objects may not seem to demand the same respect that persons do.

Nothing of this is to justify the disrespect, carelessness and viciousness of the funeral workers in the case story, but sympathetic understanding can be an important part of ethical consideration. It is also an important basis for any efforts that might be made within the funeral industry to support more consistently respectful behaviour within the workforce.

The character of Jo illustrates that more respectful approaches are possible (we might also hope they are more usual) in behind-the-scenes funeral work. In striking contrast to the other two funeral workers, Jo features in the case story as someone who experiences the deceased as human beings, as persons. Jo extends respect to the dead, recognising and helping to ensure their dignity as they would do (it seems) if they encountered the dead alive.

Exactly what Jo does, and what it takes to care for the deceased with respect and dignity, is not fully evident in the case story. Perhaps it is easier to identify examples of disrespect than to say, positively, how funeral workers can and should show respect for the dead as they work with them. Respectful working will not be ensured simply by getting people to follow rules such as 'Don't joke' and 'Don't poke' while in the mortuary. Joking and poking are not always disrespectful, and in a coroner's mortuary, something like the poking of the body that Jo witnesses, might be a necessary part of a post-mortem examination carried out to establish the cause of death. In that context, it serves a positive purpose of help determine a cause of death and hence, perhaps amongst other things, provide grieving relatives with at least some answers about their loved one's death that may help them in accepting what has happened. Even there, though, the poking (and the rest of the examination, which might be much more invasive) might be done more or less respectfully. The degree of respect depends to a large extent on the attitudes that the person doing the poking or examining brings to their role, and particularly on the way they view the body they are working with (as person and/or as object).

Keeping the person in mind while necessarily working on their body seems important for respect. Some professionals who work with the dead speak with them (out loud or silently) in ways that perhaps both reflect and support a commitment not to forget their human dignity. This practice might be something that practitioners can try, and managers suggest, if they become concerned about levels of respect.

Where's the harm?

Vikki Entwistle looks at how some ways of interacting with the bodies of people who have died can be considered harmful

The funeral worker who rebuffed Jo's appeal to him to be more respectful of the dead by pointing out that the dead “can't hear us or feel anything” was, in those words, stating something that many people think. When someone is dead, they have no more embodied experiences of sight, sound, touch, taste or smell. But many of us, like Jo, would disagree with what the aggressive funeral worker seemed to think follows from this. We don't conclude that that there is no need to respect the dead as, we might say, 'in' their bodies. Also like Jo, however, we might struggle to explain why we ought to treat dead human bodies with respect.

A previous commentary considers what is wrong with the attitudes expressed by the disrespectful funeral worker. With a view to further supporting the recognition and pursuit of good and respectful practice, this commentary considers how some ways of treating the bodies of the dead can be understood to cause harm.

Can the dead be harmed (1)?

Harms, in the broadest sense, are things that are bad for us. Some philosophers think of harms more particularly as setbacks to people's interests, including our interests in staying alive, in achieving particular goals and in projects in which we have a stake.

If we start with a thought that once someone has died they no longer exist, it may seem at first to follow that they cannot be harmed because they are no longer there for anything to be bad for them, or for them to have any interests. However, there are various ways in which someone and/or their interests can continue to exist, and to be harmed or set back after their death. It is also possible that what is done to one person (or their body) causes harm to others.

Most obviously, as in the situation presented in Jo's case story, a person's body continues to exist after their death, and is usually recognisable as a human body and 'there' (somewhere) such that living people can continue to interact with it, at least until it is buried or cremated. In many countries there are legal prohibitions against dissecting or taking organs from a dead human body without formal prior consent arrangements, and some religious groups strongly oppose these activities. Even when permitted, regulations communicate strong expectations that dissection, organ removal and other post-mortem interventions on the body should be conducted with respect and concern for the dignity of the deceased. We can plausibly think that it is bad for a deceased body to be abused or neglected, including, for example, by being stored before burial or cremation in an environment that falls below what is usually expected in the given community context.

The lack of embodied experiences does seem somehow ethically significant, as there are some things (including burial or cremation) that it can be considered appropriate to do to dead but not to living bodies. But there is also - at least, it seems to me - an ethically significant difference between deceased human bodies and other objects that lack embodied experiences. Wilful abuse of a body is not simply the same, for example, as vandalism of a car, and neither can careless neglect of a body be considered in quite the same way as failure to maintain a car. All can be considered somehow wrong and harmful, but for some different kinds of reasons and to varying (likely contested) extents, including dependent on the details of particular cases.

Matters are also complicated because it is not as easy as might be thought to say when a human being or person 'ends' or ceases to exist. Understandings of when death occurs and how we can recognise it have changed over time and to some extent differently in different places and cultures. Even with developments in science, technology and medicine, the determination of death is not completely settled or unanimously agreed. Religious beliefs about whether and when a soul or spirit leaves the body, and whether and how the soul or spirit can be aware of, or otherwise affected by, what is or is not done to the body, vary. Some beliefs entail that if the body is not appropriately prepared before burial or cremation (for example with ritual washes, prayers said in proximity, shrouding or dressing, anointing, positioning, or provision of accompanying objects), this may have seriously adverse implications for the person, their soul or their spirit. And, indeed, the question of which of burial or cremation is allowed or preferred is one that major religious groups answer differently, in part reflecting beliefs about what benefits or harms they entail, including for the person, soul or spirit, and in relation to any hoped-for bodily resurrection.

Abusing someone's dead body can harm those who mourn

It is perhaps somewhat easier to make a compelling case that disrespectful treatment of the body can harm the people who care about the person who died. In the time between someone's death and their burial or cremation, those close to them often continue to see the body very much as the person - even while they acknowledge that the person is dead. For this and other reasons, people who are grieving can be significantly pained if they learn that the body of someone they care(d) about was mistreated or if they were buried or cremated without the expected careful preparation.

More generally, many people are distressed to hear of situations in which dead bodies have been poorly stored, grossly neglected or sexually abused. A belief that the bodies of the dead are not sentient and would not feel pain in the way they would have done when alive does not preclude these feelings or experiences. Whether or not we think such treatments harm the person who died, and whether or not there are any close mourners to be particularly pained by the way the body of their family member had been treated, such situations arguably set back our collective interests in being able to access the kinds of post-death and bereavement care we consider appropriately respectful.

Can the dead be harmed? (2)

And we can perhaps argue from this point about setbacks to our collective interests to make a case that the poor treatment of dead bodies is also harmful to those who have died. This depends on accepting that it is possible to set back the interests of the dead (and so to harm them) even after their death. I am convinced of this possibility by examples such as people spreading malicious falsehoods to the effect that a dead author did not write the masterpiece that established their reputation as a writer of great talent. If we also accept that people can have interests in what happens to their descendants or to the communities they leave behind, any disrespectful treatment of their bodies that harms their descendants or members of their communities might also be said to set back their interests.

Acknowledgement and references

I found two philosophical papers very helpful when writing this commentary.

• Floris Tomasin's paper “Is post-mortem harm possible? Understanding death harm and grief” was published in Bioethics in 2009. You can access it here:
• Sean Aas's paper “What we argue about when we argue about death” will be published soon in the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy.