Death is Not a Taboo, but Grief Is
I’m often asked what I think about America and its taboo around death. It’s my opinion that Americans don’t have a taboo around death at all. The taboo is actually around grief.
If America had a taboo around death, it wouldn’t be plastered everywhere.
In America, death is part of our cultural centerpiece. Death saturates American TV shows, movies, books and podcasts. Our news media couldn’t survive without it. The True Crime genre in particular is telling. True Crime is a media genre that combines real-life trauma with a format that makes it both entertaining and easy to consume. True Crime converts victims into entertainers, often without their consent. One in three Americans say they consume true crime content at least once a week. If the taboo around grief didn’t exist, I think we’d have less of this kind of content. If the grief was discussed in as much detail as the death (or in the case of true crime…the murder) I would bet that the true crime genre might look a little different.
But, we don’t talk about the grief because the grief is what makes us uncomfortable.
So, we instead focus on the death.
Death holds our attention until the grief shows up, and that’s when we look away.
“Half of Americans Enjoy True Crime, and More Agree It Helps Solve Cold Cases | YouGov.” Accessed March 3, 2023. https://today.yougov.com/topics/entertainment/articles-reports/2022/09/14/half-of-americans-enjoy-true-crime-yougov-poll.