Source: Magazine “Friends of HUMANISM” 15, Summer 2024, page 21 (click for .pdf)
Conversation with Mark Benecke, who is offering a workshop on the topic of death on World Humanist Day, June 21, 2024.
Dear Mark, given your experience and your immense wealth of knowledge as a forensic biologist, it seems you have a special relationship to death and ways of dying; one that is perhaps very close to secular humanism. What would you say about this?
You can perhaps judge better than I can. For me, death is a part of the cycle of life, or more precisely, the composition of substances. Sometimes, I am "com-posed" as a human being and sometimes the components are used elsewhere: in trees, flowers, stones, water, wind and insects. Even in the course of what we consider to be our lifetime, substances enter and leave us all the time: dynamic equilibrium as it's referred to in biology.
Do you think there is a good way to deal with death using humour?
Why not? As long as someone had a full life, fine! I don't find it humorous to laugh about serious actual misfortunes.
Last year, the Humboldt Forum in Berlin hosted an exhibition entitled "infinite. Living with Death" ("un_endlich. Leben mit dem Tod"). There death was presented exclusively from a religious or medical perspective. Your voice also accompanied the program from a scientific perspective. Were you surprised that no secular viewpoint was represented?
I actually found my view secular: in the tent where my voice was heard, I described the decomposition of corpses by insects. In addition, in the exhibition booths, the slow shutdown of the body as it dies naturally through ageing was described matter-of-factly. I wouldn't describe either of these as medical but as biological.
Whether in the context of our humanistic hospice work or in humanistic life skills lessons, our daily work always deals with questions of life and death in educational terms. We still see this as a taboo topic however, or at least as one that is somewhat repressed. In your opinion, how can we change society's view of death and dying and make it less painful?
Talk to dying people more often. There are so many people in retirement or nursing homes and often also in hospices who are happy to receive visitors. The rest will happen by itself.
Would you share with us a humanistic educational adage?
Live and let live ("Jeck loss Jeck", a phrase in Cologne, Germany)
Dear Mark, thank you for your time and for your input!
Thank you for making the world clearer and more reasonable.
Mark über Tod und Sterben
Deutsche Version
Dr Death
Sunday Telegraph Magazine (London) | 2003
Snuff
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