The title of the brief is a quote from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The ‘undiscovered country’ is a metaphorical reference to death. In his famous oration Hamlet questions our fear of death and how that fear ‘...does make cowards of us all’. 

It has been said that contemporary Western society has become intellectually and emotionally divorced from death. We are unsure how to deal with it. Issues surrounding ‘end-of-life matters’ have come to the fore in recent years, partly due to the fact that people are living longer, thereby causing significant problems in respect of end-of-life care. 

Our ‘divorcement’ from the subject, however, also relates to the fact that we – unlike generations before us – do not live with death on a day-to-day basis. Catastrophic wars and pandemic outbreaks of diseases such as bubonic plague, tuberculosis, cholera, influenza no longer threaten us on a daily basis. In contrast to this, in Victorian England by the mid 1800s the life expectancy in cities averaged between 25 and 30 years. 

I got into the idea of death being celebrated instead of avoided. It isn’t always sad or sorrowful. Death can a lot of other things: Humorous, happy, peaceful. I found another holiday with a more cultural sense of place, the Mexican holiday, ‘Day of the Dead’. This holiday has a sense of true culture and is all about rejoicing death as a way of life. It’s festive and a party for both young and old.