Category: Cultural Expressions

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We Need to Talk about Mortuary Makeup

Societal beauty standards follow us to the grave.

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It’s impossible to aestheticize death, but we still try. Shortly before the pandemic reached lockdown level last year, my 101-year-old grandmother died. When my mom proposed that I help her dress the body for the viewing, I obliged despite the fact that I creep out with ease. My grandmother was such a central figure in my life and I wanted a more private opportunity to say goodbye.

The experience fulfilled that expectation, but it also taught me that the process of prepping a body for burial is a vivid reflection of our relationship with societal beauty standards—an interminable dance that continues even after we die.

When we arrived at the funeral home the day before the viewing, the staircase leading us to the room where her body was kept felt like it spanned miles. What if she suddenly reanimates? If I tugged on a limb too hard, would it detach from the rest of her body? Once we got started, my anxieties were assuaged but my curiosity piqued. I knew that mortuary makeup was a common practice, but I didn’t anticipate how thorough the grooming would be; her skin had to look supple, her cheekbones had to look lifted and her complexion had to appear even and, at minimum, rosy-adjacent, given the circumstances.

The most shocking sight, though, was seeing the funeral director stuff my grandmother’s bra. After eight children and 101 years, the jig on perky breasts had long been up. So, what was the reason?

“I don’t know how I feel about stuffing bras, but it’s definitely something that embalmers do,” says L.A.-based funeral director Amber Carvaly. “It’s very commonplace and the idea is that people will look different laying down. But they’ll obviously look different because they’re dead and they’re lying in a casket.”

In a 2018 episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Carvaly gave Kim Kardashian—who is, by many standards, an archetype of the eternal fascination with youth and beauty—a step-by-step on mortuary makeup. To elucidate the idea behind the practice to me, Carvaly compared it to the philosophy behind Kardashian’s controversial Balenciaga Met Gala look. Basically, we each have distinct signatures that we like to be known by while we’re alive and ideally, these become the attributes that we’re remembered by after we’re gone. Which means that it’s never ideal for a dead person to actually look dead.

“Kim’s image and who she is and what she looks like is so iconic that you don’t even have to see her face or an article of clothing. She can just be draped in black and you know exactly who she is. Like that’s her brand and her icon.”

In the funeral industry, this would be likened to a “memory picture”, a term Carvaly introduced me to during our chat. In essence, it refers to the lasting image of a decedent that’s ingrained in the minds of their loved ones. “It’s a memory of who they used to be,” she explains.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to liken our desire to make the dead look life-like to the ongoing obsession with looking younger, or to attribute the latter to a society-wide fear of dying. This is something that can’t be color-corrected, concealed, or glossed over.

“We are obsessed with image as society and as individuals,” Carvaly says. “But this idea is implanted while we’re alive. As women, we’re so obsessed with anti-aging and it sort of emerges from a fear of death.” Carvaly says that this even shows itself in how beauty trends evolve. “They change to keep us looking younger and if you wear a trend that’s from the past, it dates you,” she says.

We want the memory picture to capture our loved ones at their best, so the measures that we go to to bring corpses to a perceived standard are just symptoms of the widespread idea that younger is always better.

“We’re a death-denying society,” Carvaly adds. “We don’t like to talk about it, we don’t like to accept it, we don’t like to look at dead bodies because all of it just reminds us of our own mortality. We do so much of that while we’re alive, so of course it carries into death. We don’t even want to look at old ladies on screen—we only want to see people when they’re young and beautiful.”

But while this is a reflection of Western culture’s image-conscious underbelly, the process itself was therapeutic for me. My grandmother died overnight and I slept through my mom’s calls and texts to come to the hospital. Helping to dress her felt like an atonement for not being there, beckoning back to times when I would paint her nails, help to pick her church hats, or watch her apply baby powder with a glamorous, fluffy powder puff. It’s how I cared for her and how she cared for herself. “I think that from a standpoint of beauty as a ritual and beauty as a way to care for people, it’s something different. It’s grooming as a form of love instead of beautification to suit industry standards,” Carvaly tells me.

When Carvaly’s friend Maria passed away, applying makeup to her corpse was a way of honoring how she liked to be seen; while she was alive she was seldom seen without a red lip. “If someone had been like, ‘Don’t put lipstick on her!’ or, ‘She’s dead. Don’t glam her up,’ she would have haunted us,” Carvaly recalls.

Both my experience and the concept itself are multifaceted: I was comforted by the ritual, but alarmed at the extent to which it was practiced. We beautify the dead mostly with the living in mind: to filter the intensity of seeing a corpse, to create a comforting pre-funeral ritual, and to pacify the most pressing reminders of our own mortality. But our discomfort with aging and death is tampering with how we live, and that’s something that no amount of makeup can mask.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Perspectives on providing end-of-life care for the nation’s incarcerated

A view of the Prince Georges County Correctional Facility in Upper Marlboro MD

According to the Maryland Center for Economic Policy, the state of Maryland spends about $1 billion per year incarcerating roughly 20,000 people convicted of crimes. A third of them come from the city of Baltimore. In 2015, our state spent $17 million locking up people from one neighborhood alone: Sandtown-Winchester in West Baltimore.

For many of those who are given long sentences, their lives end while they are behind bars. An essay in the Baltimore Sun a couple of months ago about palliative care for prisoners when they are diagnosed with terminal illnesses caught our attention, and today, we’d like to explore the issue of death with dignity for those who are imprisoned.

Tom’s first guest is Dr. Raya Elfadel Kheirbek. She is the author of the essay mentioned above, and the Chief of the Division of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at the University of MD.

Dr. Kheirbek joins us on Zoom.

Then, Tom is joined by three activists working with an organization called the Humane Prison Hospice Project:

LadyBird Morgan is a registered nurse and the co-founder, and program director of the Project. She joins us on Zoom…

Marvin Mutch is a Senior Advisor and policy advocate for the Project. He also joins us on Zoom…

And Edgar Barens joins us as well via Zoom. He serves as an advisor to the Humane Prison Hospice Project. He’s a filmmaker whose 2014 documentary called Prison Terminal was nominated for an Academy Award.

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(from left) Humane Prison Hospice Project co-founder and program director Ladybird Morgan, RN, MSW; Marvin Mutch, former inmate and special advisor; filmmaker Edgar Barens, producer of the 2014 documentary “Prison Terminal.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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How different cultures cope with grief

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Many cultures cope with grief differently than we do.

I’ve been interested this topic ever since I met my beloved husband Baheej. Both his parents died in Nazareth, the Holy Land, where he was raised, and died after he was already here in the U.S.

So he was worried and was fascinated about how we handle grief here. It was a time when scholars were just starting to study death and dying and the whole issue of grief and how we handle grief here in the U.S.

So Baheej wrote his doctoral dissertation on “The Sociology of the Mortuary,” which turned out to be about how funeral directors here must take over many of the roles that are performed by family and community in most traditional cultures. He joined the Rotary Club in La Crosse, Wisconsin, where he was already teaching in the university, so he could meet funeral directors who were part of the local business community. And he interviewed them and surveyed their network of other funeral directors.

He learned that families turn to the funeral directors when there is a death, and the funeral directors take over most of the arrangements and logistics. They are the ones who know what to do — not just the casket and cremation or burial but most everything: death certificates, transportation, after-funeral dinner logistics, what to do, where and when to go, coordination with the clergy as needed, and giving consolation and emotional support to the family. They take over many traditional family roles because there is no one else to do it, or has the experience and knowledge.

It’s true, we often don’t know what to do, and are sometimes far away from family, and we partially rely on clergy if religious. But we rely heavily on those professional funeral directors who are essential parts of that first week. In my case they not only arranged many things here, but also arranged the whole transfer for burial in the family plot out of state, which involved coordination with a second funeral director there.

Here we just don’t have much social support or social protection. This was extreme in Baheej’s case because no one around him (except me) even knew his parents had died.

We basically dress in black or muted colors for the funeral but usually not the next day. Friends or neighbors may bring a hot dish or a cake. As we know, we are expected to get a grip and “get better” after a few weeks or a couple months. We do the best we can, mostly on our own. We don’t have many “after funeral” traditions or other social protections. We are expected to go back to work and act normal.

We do have some music about death and grief, but that’s only if you listen to a lot of music. One nice old song I like goes this way: “There are holes in the floor of every room, and she’s watching over you and me.” The raindrops “are her tears falling down.’ It’s a father consoling his son over the death of his wife and mother of his little boy.

There are many songs about loss and death. Some are about a lost love because of a breakup or divorce, many are about grief over death of a loved spouse, parent, child, friend.

But if we look abroad, there are many cultural tradition of consolation — such as mourning poetry, mourning jewelry, mourning dress, and ways of discussing and acknowledging the death.

One famous mourning poem in Nazareth is “Oh God, how could you take the center jewel from the necklace,” written by a father on the death of his daughter. My beloved Baheej read it to me because he sent it to a friend years ago who had lost his young daughter in a car accident.

The mourning jewelry idea was widespread in Victorian England after Prince Albert died and Queen Victoria went into mourning for the rest of her life.

Black clothing for a long mourning period happens in many cultures. Also men wearing black arm bands signals grieving. Not just the day of the funeral but for a period of time. Baheej’s beloved grandmother, Leah, wore only black the rest of her life after her eldest son drowned in Brazil after he emigrated there in the early 1900s.

In some cultures there are lots of other rituals and vocabulary to support grieving people, such as photos by grave stones, which I’ve seen in Mexico and Italy.

The point is: Many cultures have a range of social protections after a death, so all the community knows what happened and can extend themselves and be supportive.

By social protections I mean some outward signs, but also neighborhood and community awareness, and the ability and motivation to get personally involved and talk about the death with the bereaved. Of course, we don’t live in Nazareth or some other traditional culture with centuries of such customs, so we will have to do the best we can. But awareness may help.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Dia de los Muertos (Day Of The Dead) 2021

More than 500 years ago, when the Spanish Conquistadors landed in what is now Mexico, they encountered natives practicing a ritual that seemed to mock death.

It was a ritual the indigenous people had been practicing at least 3,000 years. A ritual the Spaniards would try unsuccessfully to eradicate.

A ritual known today as Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead.

The ritual is celebrated in Mexico and certain parts of the United States. Although the ritual has since been merged with Catholic theology, it still maintains the basic principles of the Aztec ritual, such as the use of skulls.

Today, people don wooden skull masks called calacas and dance in honor of their deceased relatives. The wooden skulls are also placed on altars that are dedicated to the dead. Sugar skulls, made with the names of the dead person on the forehead, are eaten by a relative or friend, according to Mary J. Adrade, who has written three books on the ritual.

The Aztecs and other Meso-American civilizations kept skulls as trophies and displayed them during the ritual. The skulls were used to symbolize death and rebirth.

The skulls were used to honor the dead, whom the Aztecs and other Meso-American civilizations believed came back to visit during the monthlong ritual.

Unlike the Spaniards, who viewed death as the end of life, the natives viewed it as the continuation of life. Instead of fearing death, they embraced it. To them, life was a dream and only in death did they become truly awake.

“The pre-Hispanic people honored duality as being dynamic,” said Christina Gonzalez, senior lecturer on Hispanic issues at Arizona State University. “They didn’t separate death from pain, wealth from poverty like they did in Western cultures.”

However, the Spaniards considered the ritual to be sacrilegious. They perceived the indigenous people to be barbaric and pagan.

In their attempts to convert them to Catholicism, the Spaniards tried to kill the ritual.

But like the old Aztec spirits, the ritual refused to die.

To make the ritual more Christian, the Spaniards moved it so it coincided with All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day (Nov. 1 and 2), which is when it is celebrated today.

Previously it fell on the ninth month of the Aztec Solar Calendar, approximately the beginning of August, and was celebrated for the entire month. Festivities were presided over by the goddess Mictecacihuatl. The goddess, known as “Lady of the Dead,” was believed to have died at birth, Andrade said.

Today, Day of the Dead is celebrated in Mexico and in certain parts of the United States and Central America.

“It’s celebrated different depending on where you go,” Gonzalez said.

In rural Mexico, people visit the cemetery where their loved ones are buried. They decorate gravesites with marigold flowers and candles. They bring toys for dead children and bottles of tequila to adults. They sit on picnic blankets next to gravesites and eat the favorite food of their loved ones.

In Guadalupe, the ritual is celebrated much like it is in rural Mexico.

“Here the people spend the day in the cemetery,” said Esther Cota, the parish secretary at the Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. “The graves are decorated real pretty by the people.”

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Death positivity advocate discusses Día de los Muertos, burial rituals

Both contemporary and historical celebrations of the festival are rooted in resistance

Chavez also discussed Spanish oppression of Mexican cultural rituals, calling their colonial practices a “targeted attack” on the complex rituals of Dia de los Muertos. She says that pop culture references to the celebration overlook the complex history of death culture in Mexico.

By Rya Vallabhaneni

Co-founder of the Death Positive movement Sarah Chavez visited Brown virtually Monday evening, kicking off a three-part event series the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology is holding in honor of Día de los Muertos, which is celebrated Nov. 1 and 2. Her talk, “Día de Muertos: A History of Resistance,” focused on the tradition, culture and opposition surrounding contemporary and pre-colonial celebrations of the dead.

“It is such a rich and also kind of complicated, nuanced history,” Chavez said in the presentation. 

Along with her work as a museum curator and writer, Chavez is a founder of The Collective for Radical Death Studies and a host of the podcast Death in the Afternoon. She is also a founder of the Death Positive movement, which encourages people to speak openly about death and dying instead of treating them as taboo subjects. “Everyone’s own practice and belief is a very individual thing,” she said.

Chavez began the talk by describing the culture of Mexico’s Indigenous peoples before Spanish colonization. To these diverse groups, “the dead remained vital members of the community,” Chavez said. In contrast with European treatment of the dead as a source of contamination to remove, Indigenous Mexican cultures connected the dead with life, burying them under homes and in communal areas. As Chavez said, their treks to final destinations in the afterlife were “every bit as real as the world we inhabit now.”

Next, Chavez discussed colonization and Spain’s attempts to eradicate Indigenous Mexican cultures. It seemed as if colonizers launched a “targeted attack” on the customs of Día de los Muertos, Chavez said, creating mandatory burials, forbidding mourning practices and capping funeral expenditures. Yet Chavez was quick to acknowledge the determination of Indigenous peoples to preserve their cultures. Given what these communities endured, she said, “it’s really incredible that we have some version of their practices today.”

Although contemporary Día de los Muertos practices in Mexico are strained by what Chavez called a “grief over loss of language, culture and spiritual life,” their success in bringing families, communities and the dead together persists.  Many Mexicans still parade candles through the streets and bake pan de muerto, a traditional holiday treat, Chavez said. The scent of the cempasuchil flower, a type of marigold, features in Día de los Muertos celebrations, and cemeteries, as Chavez said, are still “bustling with activity” and “full of life.”

On the first day of the celebration, children who have passed are believed to visit their living families.  On the second day, the adults are believed to visit. Families place ofrendas, which are gifts such as food and flowers for the dead, on altars, “sacred and powerful” spaces, according to Chavez.  “You’re creating a portal between the living and the dead,” she said.

When outlining Día de los Muertos practices in the United States, Chavez had a very different story to tell. Widespread celebration did not begin until the early 1970s with the emerging Chicana movement, a response to the Vietnam War in which Mexican-Americans advocated for social and political empowerment through honoring their cultural heritage. Even today, Chavez said, “Día de los Muertos practices in the U.S. continue to be rooted in activism and social issues.”

Adeline Allen ’25, an attendee of Monday’s talk, found Chavez’s discussion of the Chicana movement to be one of the most surprising parts of the event.  “It’s interesting how identity and identity politics play into cultural celebrations and how we view them,” she said. 

Chavez ended the event by reiterating that the current “colorful characterization” of Día de los Muertos in popular culture fails to consider the history of death culture in Mexico.  She also added that those who frown upon Mexican death culture, including many people living in the U.S., “have not been afforded the privilege of denying or hiding from death.”

The Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, which partnered with The Collective for Radical Death Studies to organize Monday’s talk, will hold the second event of its three-part series on Saturday, Oct. 30.  Members of the Brown and RISD community are invited to create tissue-paper cempasuchil flowers at Manning Hall. By beginning the series with a virtual event, the museum was able to increase accessibility for some attendees, as well as Chavez herself, who actually tuned in from California, according to HMA Manager of Museum Education and Programs Leah Burgin MA’17. “We’ve had people enjoy our programs globally in a way that hasn’t really happened before,” Burgin said. The third and final event consists of the official Día de los Muertos celebration, which will take place on Tuesday, Nov. 2 at North Burial Ground and is open to the public.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Coming to terms with grief

— The psychological perks of Day of the Dead

Women in Catrina makeup and Yucatán huipiles for Day of the Dead in Yucatán.

The annual festival is dedicated to remembering lost loved ones — and mocking something we fear

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The animated film Coco has probably done more than anything else to take the “ew” factor out of Day of the Dead for those of us who grew up with nothing like it.

This is great because there are good psychological reasons for celebrating it.

Grief is universal, but how we cope is largely determined by culture. European cultures have mostly lost their equivalent to Day of the Dead, with only All Souls’ Day and Halloween as distant reminders that we, too, used to actively honor our ancestors. Instead, a belief took hold to see anything associated with death as evil, something to be shunned, ignored and fought against at all costs.

Mexico is not completely immune to this, says National Autonomous University of Mexico professor and researcher Beatriz Glowinski, an expert on death and grieving. But that Day of the Dead has survived gives Mexicans a special outlet for their emotions.

Simply put, Day of the Dead is an annual festival dedicated to remembering lost loved ones and, yes, to mock something we fear. The underlying belief is that the dead can come back at this time to the land of the living, but it is no coincidence that it occurs at the end of the harvest, when fields die to sustain the living.

Large public Day of the Dead altar in Durango
Large public Day of the Dead altar in Durango sponsored, perhaps appropriately, by the Hernández Funeral Home in that city.

It is a syncretism of Mesoamerican and Catholic beliefs or, more accurately, the survival of Mesoamerican beliefs about death with a Catholic veneer. It survives in two forms.

The older and more “intimate” Day of the Dead is a gathering of friends and family to remember those important to them. The dead are not lamented but welcomed back as part of a family reunion.

The other Day of the Dead can be found in the large festivals and parades that have grown in popularity in both Mexico and the United States. In Mexico, they began to become more important as local and national efforts to counter the influence of Halloween began in the 1990s.

Many communities today have one or more open public events on this day, and Day of the Dead celebrations are popular in schools from kindergarten to college.

All cultures recognize the psychological need to grieve, but they also put limits on how long and how publicly a person may be in mourning.

“It is very complicated and very difficult … there isn’t a period of time … it does not exist,” Glowinski says. “It can take years, depending on the person.”

People decorating graves in Mixquic, Mexico City. This is one of the most traditional and colorful observances of Day of the Dead in the capital.

And if grief is not addressed adequately, “a person can become stuck in their lives personally and professionally,” she says.

Even after the proscribed mourning period, grief lingers and returns, and Day of the Dead addresses this. Simply visiting graves, as is done in other cultures, can have the same purpose, but it is often a solitary activity, whereas Day of the Dead by its very nature is social.

On and around November 2, Mexicans have permission and even the expectation to acknowledge their losses in a supportive environment. The ritual of shopping for supplies, preparing an altar and sharing time with loved ones is therapeutic. Areas we do not casually visit, such as cemeteries, become a place of social gathering, both for those attending to family graves and those of us looking on.

There is nothing morbid or even remotely Halloweenish about this.

It is easy to see how lighting candles on graves fulfills this purpose, but what about the superficially corny skull and skeleton decorations? These decorations, parties and parades are about showing the relationship between life and death and take the morbidity out of thinking about death.

Many public festivals also have allusions to the cultural and historical past, making Day of the Dead also about connecting to heritage.

Day of the Dead in Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, one of the most popular destinations for Day of the Dead tourism.

Many might have trouble with the belief that the dead come back, but counselor and psychotherapist Merrie Haskins says that such a belief can be beneficial. “[It] means that you have the chance to say anything that was left unsaid before they died.”

Taking the stigma out of talking about death also leads us to express what we want when it is our time to die and to communicate that to family. This is important because said family will be able to find closure when the time comes, knowing that they respected those wishes.

In the U.S., Day of the Dead was originally something celebrated privately only by Mexican-heritage families, but it’s growing in popularity. In the 1970s, public observances began with the aim of asserting Mexican American identity. Only recently has there been interest from the culture at large in the holiday, introduced in schools and with decorations now available in Walmart and Target.

If Day of the Dead becomes a larger part of the U.S. culture in some way, it is because it provides something that our native mourning rituals lack: social recognition and support for the idea that those who have gone are still important to us.

It’s not necessary to literally believe that the dead come back, nor be Catholic, to benefit from the observation, Glowinski says, but the communal aspect is essential. The annual observance is “ … a phenomenal way to deal with the emotions that remembering our loved ones bring,” she says, adding, “They externalize such emotions, and this is very liberating and healing.”

On a personal level, I find Day of the Dead particularly meaningful as I live so far away and rarely go back “home.” In particular, I cannot visit my mother’s grave as much as I “should,” and the yearly ritual of setting up the gringo side of my bicultural home’s altar is a more-than-acceptable substitute.

It even makes me smile as I place my favorite picture of my mother, in a 1970s plaid skirt and cat glasses, with the ever-present mug of tea in her hand.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Why Americans Die So Much

U.S. life spans, which have fallen behind those in Europe, are telling us something important about American society.

By Derek Thompson

America has a death problem.

No, I’m not just talking about the past year and a half, during which COVID-19 deaths per capita in the United States outpaced those in similarly rich countries, such as Canada, Japan, and France. And I’m not just talking about the past decade, during which drug overdoses skyrocketed in the U.S., creating a social epidemic of what are often called “deaths of despair.”

I’m talking about the past 30 years. Before the 1990s, average life expectancy in the U.S. was not much different than it was in Germany, the United Kingdom, or France. But since the 1990s, American life spans started falling significantly behind those in similarly wealthy European countries.

According to a new working paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Americans now die earlier than their European counterparts, no matter what age you’re looking at. Compared with Europeans, American babies are more likely to die before they turn 5, American teens are more likely to die before they turn 20, and American adults are more likely to die before they turn 65. At every age, living in the United States carries a higher risk of mortality. This is America’s unsung death penalty, and it adds up. Average life expectancy surged above 80 years old in just about every Western European country in the 2010s, including Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, the U.K., Denmark, and Switzerland. In the U.S., by contrast, the average life span has never exceeded 79—and now it’s just taken a historic tumble.

Why is the U.S. so much worse than other developed countries at performing the most basic function of civilization: keeping people alive?

“Europe has better life outcomes than the United States across the board, for white and Black people, in high-poverty areas and low-poverty areas,” Hannes Schwandt, a Northwestern University professor who co-wrote the paper, told me. “It’s important that we collect this data, so that people can ask the right questions, but the data alone does not tell us what the cause of this longevity gap is.”

Finding a straightforward explanation is hard, because there are so many differences between life in the U.S. and Europe. Americans are more likely to kill one another with guns, in large part because Americans have more guns than residents of other countries do. Americans die more from car accidents, not because our fatality rate per mile driven is unusually high but because we simply drive so much more than people in other countries. Americans also have higher rates of death from infectious disease and pregnancy complications. But what has that got to do with guns, or commuting?

By collecting data on American life spans by ethnicity and by income at the county level—and by comparing them with those of European countries, locality by locality—Schwandt and the other researchers made three important findings.

First, Europe’s mortality rates are shockingly similar between rich and poor communities. Residents of the poorest parts of France live about as long as people in the rich areas around Paris do. “Health improvements among infants, children, and youth have been disseminated within European countries in a way that includes even the poorest areas,” the paper’s authors write.

But in the U.S., which has the highest poverty and inequality of just about any country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, where you live is much more likely to determine when you’ll die. Infants in the U.S. are considerably more likely to die in the poorest counties than in the richest counties, and this is true for both Black and white babies. Black teenagers in the poorest U.S. areas are roughly twice as likely to die before they turn 20, compared with those in the richest U.S. counties. In Europe, by contrast, the mortality rate for teenagers in the richest and poorest areas is exactly the same—12 deaths per 100,000. In America, the problem is not just that poverty is higher; it’s that the effect of poverty on longevity is greater too.

Second, even rich Europeans are outliving rich Americans. “There is an American view that egalitarian societies have more equality, but it’s all one big mediocre middle, whereas the best outcomes in the U.S. are the best outcomes in the world,” Schwandt said. But this just doesn’t seem to be the case for longevity. White Americans living in the richest 5 percent of counties still die earlier than Europeans in similarly low-poverty areas; life spans for Black Americans were shorter still. (The study did not examine other American racial groups.) “It says something negative about the overall health system of the United States that even after we grouped counties by poverty and looked at the richest 10th percentile, and even the richest fifth percentile, we still saw this longevity gap between Americans and Europeans,” he added. In fact, Europeans in extremely impoverished areas seem to live longer than Black or white Americans in the richest 10 percent of counties.

Third, Americans have a lot to learn about a surprising success story in U.S. longevity. In the three decades before COVID-19, average life spans for Black Americans surged, in rich and poor areas and across all ages. As a result, the Black-white life-expectancy gap decreased by almost half, from seven years to 3.6 years. “This is a really important story that we ought to move to the forefront of public debate,” Schwandt said. “What happened here? And how do we continue this improvement and learn from it?”

One explanation begins with science and technology. Researchers found that nothing played bigger roles in reducing mortality than improvements in treating cardiovascular disease and cancer. New drugs and therapies for high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and various treatable cancers are adding years or decades to the lives of millions of Americans of all ethnicities.

Policy also plays a starring role. Schwandt credits the Medicaid expansion in the 1990s, which covered pregnant women and children and likely improved Black Americans’ access to medical treatments. He cites the expansion of the earned-income tax credit and other financial assistance, which have gradually reduced poverty. He also points to reductions in air pollution. “Black Americans have been more likely than white Americans to live in more-polluted areas,” he said. But air pollution has declined more than 70 percent since the 1970s, according to the EPA, and most of that decline happened during the 30-year period of this mortality research.

Other factors that have reduced the Black-white life-expectancy gap include the increase in deaths of despair, which disproportionately kill white Americans, and—up until 2018—a decline in homicides, which disproportionately kill Black Americans. (The recent rise in homicides, along with the disproportionate number of nonwhite Americans who have died of COVID-19, will likely reduce Black life spans.)

Even then, Black infants in high-poverty U.S. counties are three times more likely to die before the age of 5 than white infants in low-poverty counties. But Schwandt insists that highlighting our progress is important in helping us solve the larger American death problem. “We are wired to care more about bad news than about good news,” he said. “When life expectancy rises slightly, nobody cares. But when life expectancy declines, suddenly we’re up in arms. I think that’s a tragedy, because to improve the health and well-being of our populations, and especially of our disadvantaged populations, we have to give attention to positive achievements so that we can learn from them.”

We’re a long way from a complete understanding of the American mortality penalty. But these three facts—the superior outcomes of European countries with lower poverty and universal insurance, the equality of European life spans between rich and poor areas, and the decline of the Black-white longevity gap in America coinciding with greater insurance protection and anti-poverty spending—all point to the same conclusion: Our lives and our life spans are more interconnected than you might think.

For decades, U.S. politicians on the right have resisted calls for income redistribution and universal insurance under the theory that inequality was a fair price to pay for freedom. But now we know that the price of inequality is paid in early death—for Americans of all races, ages, and income levels. With or without a pandemic, when it comes to keeping Americans alive, we really are all in this together.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!