La solitudine del morto. La civilizzazione del lutto nella borghesia secolare.

This article argues that in contemporary Western secular bourgeois culture death is increasingly interpreted through the grammar of illness. Old age itself tends to be treated as a pathological condition, not as the final phase of a finite life cycle but as a progressive loss of function to be clinically managed. As a result, death no longer appears as an intrinsic limit of life, but as the ultimate failure of a technical system that was supposed to keep the body running. Within the modern biomedical imagination, illness is figured as an external disturbance, something that attacks, damages, and must be defeated or repaired. What disappears from view is finitude itself, the fact that living beings are transient and destined to decay. Drawing on Gregory Bateson, the author suggests that this view reflects a radical secularization of the epistemology of life. Once life is reduced to mere matter, stripped of relational meaning and treated as if it were indefinitely maintainable, death becomes thinkable only as breakdown, accident, or pathology. In parallel, care itself is transformed. Instead of accompanying vulnerability through proximity, patience, and domestic presence, care is recoded as technical intervention aimed at restoring functionality. Here Hannah Arendt’s distinction between labour and work becomes crucial: caring for the sick and dying belongs to the cyclical, repetitive maintenance of life, whereas modern culture increasingly treats it as a technical project of repair and performance. This transformation is tied to a broader inversion between home and public space. In advanced modernity, recognition and self-realization are located above all in paid work, productivity, and public achievement, while domestic labor such as cooking, cleaning, caring for children, and tending the frail is devalued as repetitive drudgery. Following Arlie Hochschild and Mary Harrington, the essay argues that care is progressively externalized and commodified. Tasks once embedded in kinship and intimacy are delegated to paid professionals, from babysitters and caregivers to therapists and delivery workers. The result is a "profanation" of care: it ceases to be a relational duty and becomes a consumer service. Illness, because it imposes slowness, dependence, bodily exposure, and unproductive time, resists this logic and is therefore increasingly displaced into professional institutions. The hospital becomes the privileged site of this displacement. It is not only a disciplinary institution, but also a morally legitimized space where vulnerability can be outsourced. What would appear at home as disorder, burden, and dependence is transformed there into procedure, protocol, and entitlement. In this setting, technical restoration is culturally coded as masculine, while everyday tending remains feminized and subordinated. The sick person may even come to desire hospitalization because it is the only socially authorized space where fragility can be expressed without disrupting the productive order of the family. Using Norbert Elias, the author then interprets the isolation of the dying as part of the long civilizing process. As shame, embarrassment, and disgust increasingly regulate public life, everything that exposes the body, dependence, pain, and loss of control is pushed backstage. Death follows the same trajectory. In modern societies, people can grow up without ever seeing a corpse or developing a shared language for dying. At the same time, the professionalization of death moves dying into specialized settings governed by efficiency, while both relatives and patients internalize emotional restraint and distance. The "loneliness of the dying" is thus a structural outcome of modern sociogenesis and psychogenesis. The second half of the essay turns autobiographical. The author reflects on his father’s final illness and death, contrasting two moral worlds. His father, shaped by a rural Veneto background, expected to be cared for at home by relatives, especially women, as had happened in previous generations. When he became seriously ill, the family spontaneously resisted hospitalization and chose home care, trying to preserve closeness and familiarity. Even after a brief hospital stay, they brought him back home so that he could die there, surrounded by children, in a domestic environment that still retained symbolic order and affection. Yet once he died, the family’s resistance faltered. Although the author had imagined a wake at home, relatives rejected the idea as unhygienic or improper, eventually choosing a funeral home near the family house. This "Casa Funeraria" is described as a substitute for the home: intimate, discreet, technically controlled, and emotionally neutral. It offers surveillance, preservation, aesthetic preparation of the corpse, climate control, neutral ritual spaces, and comfort for visitors. Read through Elias, the funeral home extends the civilizing process beyond life itself. Not only the dying, but even the dead body is removed from the domestic sphere and placed in a regulated, sanitized, deterritorialized environment. The essay closes on a bitter conclusion. Although the family had done everything possible to spare the father the loneliness of dying, they could not prevent the loneliness of his dead body. Carefully prepared and displayed in a neutral funeral space, he was seen by very few people. In this sense, the article suggests that secular bourgeois modernity has not only medicalized death and outsourced care, but has also completed the civilization of mourning by removing the dead from the house, from ordinary intimacy, and from the thick emotional texture of family life.