Not Speaking Ill of the Dead

There is a rule so widely obeyed that we mostly forget it is a rule, and enforce it on each other without noticing we are doing it: do not speak ill of the dead. You feel it operate the moment someone dies. A person who was, in life, difficult — unkind, or a bully, or a disappointment, or worse — dies, and almost at once the language around them changes. The sharp edges go soft. Well, he had his moments. She wasn’t easy, but. He did his best. The failings get folded into gentleness, the harm gets passed over, and anyone who says the plain true thing — he was cruel, and I am not sorry he’s gone — is felt to have committed a genuine offense, a breach of something, even by people who agree with the assessment. The dead are, by a nearly universal reflex, granted an amnesty the moment they stop being alive to have earned it.

It is one of the oldest taboos we have, and the Latin tag for it — de mortuis nil nisi bonum, of the dead, nothing but good — is itself ancient, which tells you the rule was old before Rome wrote it down. And the first thing worth noticing is how strong it is, how it overrides even justice, even truth, even the real grievances of real victims. A person can spend a lifetime being wronged by someone, and at that someone’s funeral will feel the pressure to hold their tongue, to let the softening language stand, to not be the one who speaks the truth over the coffin. The taboo does not care whether the ill spoken would be accurate. It forbids the speaking regardless. And a prohibition that strong, that indifferent to fairness, is almost always sitting on top of a fear.

The fear underneath

The fear underneath is old and specific, and though almost no one consciously holds it anymore, it still drives the reflex: the fear that the dead can hear you, and can act. For most of human history the dead were not gone — they were nearby, newly and dangerously present, lingering at the edge of the living world, and above all listening. To speak ill of them in that interval was to risk their attention, their anger, their return. The dead were understood to be at their most volatile right after death, unsettled, not yet safely departed, and the living took great care not to provoke them — not to insult them, not to withhold the proper words, not to give the restless newly-dead a grievance to come back for. Nothing but good was not originally politeness. It was protection. You spoke well of the dead the way you would speak carefully of anyone powerful and easily offended who was standing just behind you in the dark.

And even now, stripped of the literal belief, the fear survives as a feeling — the small cold sense that speaking ill of the dead is dangerous, that it might call something, that the dead might somehow know. Watch a wholly rational person lower their voice to say something critical of someone recently gone, or glance around, or add a quick superstitious God rest him to take the curse off it. The old fear is still in the body, still governing the tongue, long after the mind has stopped believing the dead are listening. We obey a rule whose reason we have forgotten, because the reason left a residue in us that reason cannot reach.

What the rule protects now

But I do not think the taboo persists only as a fossil fear, because it also does something useful and even kind, and this is the part worth holding onto. The rule against speaking ill of the dead protects the living — not the dead, who are past protecting, but the ones left behind. Because the recently bereaved are raw, and their grief does not neatly separate the good and the bad of the person they lost; they are mourning the whole of it, the difficult person entire, and to speak the plain harsh truth in that first raw stretch is to wound people who are already down. The softening language is a mercy extended sideways, to the survivors — a collective agreement to let the family grieve the person without having to defend them, to give the loss a quiet dignity in the interval when the wound is open. The amnesty is really for them.

And there is a deeper thing the rule protects, which is our own restraint, our own better nature. Because it would be easy, when someone difficult dies, to finally say the things we couldn’t say while they lived — to settle the account over the coffin, safely, when they can no longer answer. The taboo forbids that not because the dead deserve the mercy but because taking the free shot would coarsen us, would make us the kind of people who kick what can no longer kick back. To decline to speak ill of the dead, even when the ill is true, is a small discipline of grace — a refusal of the cheap and cowardly victory of insulting someone who has lost the power to reply.

So I keep the rule, mostly, though not absolutely, and I want to be honest about the limit. I do not think the taboo should be used to erase real harm, or to silence real victims, or to launder a genuinely cruel life into a fond memory it doesn’t deserve — the truth about the dead matters, especially to those they hurt, and there is a time for it to be told plainly. But the reflex to soften, to wait, to grant the newly dead a quiet passage and their mourners an undefended grief — that I have come to respect, fear and mercy and discipline all braided together in it. We speak well of the dead partly because some old part of us still believes they are listening. And partly, I think, because we hope that when it is our turn, and our own difficult edges are laid out for comment, someone will extend us the same small grace, and say of us, over the coffin, well — he had his moments, and let the rest go quiet.