Need for Respect for the Dead

This last couple of weeks have been a sad time as I heard about deaths of people I know or of relatives of my friends. Most of the time when someone dies people say must not speak ill of the dead and everybody on social media got to blessing the departed soul with words like rest in peace. Social media can be a good place for your acquaintances and not so close family to comment and send condolences. But this week two actors passed away one was from the UK and very well known for her role as Alice in The Vicar of Dibely and the other a Bollywood icon with career spanning a few decades.

My thought process is about how the two were remembered by the media and the public. For the lady from UK there were many messages about what a wonderful actor she was and obituaries in different places by friends and fellow actors. While people are curious when someone young passes away the only comment made by family were ‘natural causes’ which seems to be pretty much respected and no further digging was done into the person’s history.

The furore over the Bollywood icon’s demise could not be any further different than this. The lady in question was at once mourned by many with messages of RIP and genuine sadness from the fans around the world. But this soon turned into a media circus with details of this lady’s personal, medical and mental health history being dragged across the media and speculated on with opinions of all and sundry. The initial cause of cardiac arrest got changed to heart attack and then to drowning in bath tub due to unconsciousness. Do we really need such detail? Does it make a death any less painful and sad? Then there was moralising about why so much cosmetic surgery and all the regimens of keeping slim and pretty from various news and entertainment websites. There is so much salacious gossip also about her life history not just about her acting career (which generally is acceptable to summarise) but also her personal relationships at all levels.

This is not only unnecessary but so very intrusive for the family as well as dare I say the dead. Can we not let a person die in peace? What is gained by dragging out every sordid or otherwise detail of a life that was mostly lived in the public glare? Privacy is at a premium for everyone in this day and age especially for people who have a celebrity status. People can sue if they are unhappy about breaches of their privacy. So does it mean that it is a free for all in breaching privacy as the person is dead? I have read the headlines and that had been enough to get me annoyed that why a person cannot be left alone after death? Does the public have a ‘right’ to tear apart someone’s life and scavenge on the details? Are human beings really so inconsiderate? Or is the media just creating a furore and putting out ‘news’ which they say the public wants? This feels so wrong and wonder if anyone actually gets taken to task for crossing the line? How does one stop this kind of dissection of a dead person’s life for just sensational gossip?