What does morbid mean?


Image sourced from https://letterpile.com/personal-essays/My-View-about-Death-Dying-and-Heaven

It struck me this week that we use the word morbid so much, but do we truly understand what it means?

So let's take a look at the Oxford dictionary definition of morbid below: 

'Having or expressing a strong interest in sad or unpleasant things, especially disease or death.'

So looking at the above definition, we see that they are already asserting that disease or death are viewed as sad or unpleasant. But when a doctor is treating a disease, do we claim that their interest in it is sad or unpleasant? Nope! It's actively encouraged, I mean how else would we have cures so many diseases, if not for interest in finding a cure! 

Therefore we can clearly see that disease is not in and of itself, morbid. 

So why is talking about death morbid? 

So looking at this pragmatically, I can see that someone who is interested in death in a way that is unhealthy and all consuming, can lead to depression and in extreme cases suicide. So I'm not saying it's all positive, however let's not throw the baby out with the bath water here. Some aspects of death can be cause for positive change upon reflection. We only have to look at the Death Cafe movement and how it took off, to see that death is of interest to a huge number of people. 


Death is a huge part of our lives and yet by failing to look at it, I feel, we are doing ourselves a huge injustice. There is so much wisdom to come from reflecting on death and our own mortality, that to blanket it as morbid is just not right, in the same way as saying all interest in disease is morbid, when clearly it isn't. 

We will all experience death in some form over the course of our lives. So turning away from it and never talking about it, in my view, isn't healthy. I'm not advocating talking about death all day, every day, but let's not make it the elephant in the room. Let's spend some time looking at and unpacking it. Who knows, what you unpack on this journey could end up helping others and if not, at least you are some way to accepting your own death when it comes. 


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