In the spring of last year, I attended a funeral in Pretoria, South Africa, over Skype. A formative friend, who was South African, had died of cancer, at thirty-one. That morning, I woke up at six, made coffee, and then sat on my bed in an old red hoodie; but also, via a laptop perched on the knees of a friend, I sat in the Greek Orthodox Church of Pretoria. Two other friends, one in England and one in Cyprus, were on the call, as well. As familiar as technological marvels have become, the whole thing still felt futuristic and miraculous, compounding the feeling of disbelief, of watching an implausible fiction, that accompanied the death. The Webcam didn’t work at first, but the sound came through, so my friends and I sat looking at one another and listening to the priest, who was chanting in Greek and swinging a clanging censer. Finally, the camera blinked on, and there it was: an ornate church and a honey-colored casket with white flowers on top. “That’s when it became real for me,” my friend in England said, later. “I didn’t believe it until I saw the coffin.”
One of the times that it became real for me—these things come in waves—was twenty-four hours before the funeral, when, after lying awake all night, I started throwing black clothes into a carry-on and trying, through tears, to navigate the South African Airways phone-menu options, until it became clear that the next flight I could make would still get me there too late. I could have gulped down the expense and bought a ticket days earlier, but I was stopped by something that I can only describe as embarrassment, as though it would be presumptuous to assume that my presence would be meaningful, to myself or to anyone else. Talking it through with friends, I’d mention that Skype might be an option, and they would say something like, “So you’ll be able to be there anyway.” Which made sense, right up until that moment when I realized that it was quickly becoming materially impossible for me to be there, on the ground that the remains of my friend would be lowered into. In those minutes, the brutishness of Earth’s matter coalesced, and the obstacles of time and space, which have been evaporated by the steam engine and the airplane and the Internet, became solid again. And the death became, for me, for the first time, what it was: not the silencing of a voice or the extinction of a mind, although it was those things, too, but a slackening of muscles, a stillness of blood. People are more than bodies, of course, and yet here we all are, as my friend, the one who died, who talked this way, would say, “enlimbed.”
Those mornings were on my mind as I read “Death’s Summer Coat: What the History of Death and Dying Teaches Us About Life and Living,” by Brandy Schillace, a medical-humanities historian. The book opens by surveying a wide swath of mourning customs from around the world, practices that Schillace holds up, usually to their advantage, against the customary funeral-home funeral of the modern West—by which she means, for the most part, the dominant cultures of the United States and the U.K. Schillace bemoans the homogeneity of mourning practices in this part of the world—she points out that even very religious Americans tend to have funerals in funeral homes rather than in churches, for instance—but she perhaps obscures what differences do exist, with her frequent use of “we.” We pump bodies full of chemicals to make them appear alive before sealing them in heavy casings; in Tibetan Buddhist sky burials, bodies are ritually dissected and left in the open air to be consumed by vultures. (“Death is hardly even seen as an irritation in Tibetan culture,” Schillace writes, citing the meditation master Trungpa Rinpoche, “even if it remains an event of sadness and loss for those who remain.”) We send our dead to professional undertakers for preparation and disposal, while, as late as the nineteen-sixties, the Wari tribe, of Brazil, dismembered, roasted, and ate family members who died. (“Eating the dead means taking part in the wheel of life intimately,” Schillace comments.) Western tradition is haunted by zombies, vampires, and other spectres of the dead walking among the living; the Torajans, of Indonesia, have a ritual called Ma’Nene, in which bodies are disinterred, dressed in new clothes, and carried in a parade around the village. (“No longer an alien or unfamiliar process, death and the corpse are reintegrated with life and the living body,” per Schillace’s analysis.)
The book is aligned with the so-called death-positive movement, which seeks, as Shillace puts it, to “reclaim ground that has been lost—particularly in the West—during a century and a half of sanitisation and silence.” The movement encompasses the territory of death salons and death cafés—events where people gather to share in contemplating mortality—and of natural or green burials, in which the unembalmed dead are laid to rest in biodegradable coffins, or with no coffin at all, in a gesture of environmental concern and as an avowal that the human body, like any other meat, is subject to rot. (The California-based funeral director Caitlin Doughty, whom Rebecca Mead wrote about recently for The New Yorker, has emerged as the cult-celebrity face of the alternative death scene. She offers home funerals and guides family and friends in washing and dressing the body themselves. “I think people need to get closer to it. It should be up in your face,” she told Mead.)
Schillace buttresses her somewhat familiar portrayal of the West’s repressions (readers may be reminded of the epiphanies of “Six Feet Under”) with an account of how the culture went wrong. She begins with the Black Death, a pandemic of such apocalyptic proportions that, she explains, it ruptured the continent’s mourning customs. There were not enough priests to perform the traditional rites (plenty died along with the laymen), and many refused to attend to plague victims anyway. Churchyards couldn’t accommodate all the corpses, so bodies were buried in unconsecrated ground, or just abandoned in ditches. “As our city sunk into this affliction and misery, the reverend authority of the law, both divine and human, sunk with it,” Boccaccio wrote, of Florence, in 1348. With the Reformation and then the Enlightenment, religious authority sank further, and then came the Victorians, with their elaborate, and commodified, grief culture. (Widows wore their weeds for years, graduating through various sheens of black and eventually to gray or purple as their loss receded into the past, and skeleton jewelry became a common luxury item.) Although grief was public, the emphasis of grieving moved from the passage of the departed to the pain of those left behind, a shift that continued into the twentieth century, by which time grief was considered personal, psychological, and even intensely private. (When the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross published “On Death and Dying,” in 1969, which introduced her now-pervasive theory of the five stages of grief, it came as a major breakthrough in talking openly about death again.) The Victorians also witnessed a flourishing of medical science, and suddenly people were surviving ailments that certainly would have killed them just decades before. The deathbed, once the province of the priest, became, more and more, the domain of the doctor. As death became medical, it became something to be fought or fixed, and in these parallel shifts—from the religious to the medical, and from the communal to the private—Schillace perceives the forces behind our misaligned contemporary attitudes about mortality.
That misalignment, in her view, is largely due to a core tension in contemporary Western culture: we are “bent on living forever, but committed to the disposable nature of absolutely everything else,” which has left us ill at ease with the realities of physical existence and without the rituals that used to lead us through loss. “The modern westerner has lost loss,” she writes. And examining the customs of others, she thinks, might help us to see our own traditions with new eyes, and to fix what has gone wrong with them. She draws a rather awkward parallel to Cambodia after Pol Pot’s rule, when the vastness of the carnage had made the old ways of mourning impracticable, leading the society to develop new ones. “May this serve,” Schillace writes, “not only as a lesson about death, but a lesson about hope. Collectively, a society may consciously decide to change the way it responds to even such a major event as death.” The remedies that she gravitates toward—death salons; natural burials; personalized funerary options, such as bespoke grave clothes and a service that incorporates corpses into coral reefs—are, in essence, efforts to tether the idea of death to the particularities of the corpse, and to tether the reality of the corpse to the experience of living in a body.
If we’ve become alienated from our bodies in death, it’s perhaps because we’ve stepped so far outside our bodies in life. You could start with the invention of writing, moving our memories outside our brains, and then multiply that by the printing press and the pacemaker and all the countless inventions that have allowed us to outsource our previously bodily tasks. Cyborgs, all of us. Doubtless this perpetuates the weird ways we cope with the handling of lifeless bodies. How odd to put blush on a carcass and try to forestall its decomposition because it might seem slightly less dead that way. How sad that so many people die in the antiseptic surroundings of hospitals because the hopes offered by medicine can shade into denial about the approaching end. What a lack it is not to have some communal mark of mourning to give our grief some space in the world outside ourselves.
Still, it seems too easy to say, as Schillace does, that “our ancestors, who did not have the luxury—or burden—of being able to deny death, instead lived with the acceptance of it.” Or, “Once we meet death and keep it near, it ceases to threaten us, ceases to be alien.” History is full of rich and meaningful mourning customs, arguably richer and more meaningful than our own; but it is also strewn with signs of death not sitting flush in the human psyche. Orpheus travels to the underworld to undo his lover’s death. The Taj Mahal, an extravagant palace of grief, doesn’t seem to signal a loss simply accepted. Schillace writes about the Ilongot tribe, from the Philippines, traditionally a headhunting culture, in which the men used to channel the “rage of bereavement” by killing a member of a rival tribe and discarding his head. She approaches this custom with an anthropologist’s equanimity, focussing on it as a sign of a culture embracing and expressing its visceral feelings. But it’s easy to read it, too, as a manifestation of a grief with many ragged ends. In the cannibalistic Wari tribe, Schillace writes, “the elders of the village explain that only the cutting of the body is emotionally difficult—to eat the remains, on the other hand, is good and right.” Do we know what sort of wrenching difficulty that might be?
Death is the single event that our species has had the most practice with, and yet we haven’t managed to settle on anything near a set of best practices. The abundance of customs developed in response to death, then, might best be viewed not as a test in which some cultures do better than others but as a sign that, ritual commemoration or artisanal attention notwithstanding, mortality is never going to be a good fit, that death reduces us all to hurt animals, like Lear on the heath: “Howl, howl, howl, howl!”
I write this, of course, with a certain loss in mind. The medieval ages had skull-and-bones memento mori as reminders that death might come at any moment; the Victorians preserved locks of hair and took family photos with the dead to keep their loved ones with them a little longer; I have e-mails from my friend that pop up when I’m searching for something else, bringing, in the same moment, the brief illusion that he’s still alive and the cold-water shock of his loss. Death may be, for many of us, less physically in-your-face now than it once was, but it also manifests in ways that it never did before. Mourning as I’ve experienced it in the past months has been almost entirely virtual: the funeral on Skype, WhatsApp groups with friends overseas, shared folders of old photos on the cloud, visits to old tweets and e-mails. Everything has been both instant and distant, and none of it would have been possible for most of history. It has not been particularly intimate or ceremonious or therapeutic—it’s been nothing like washing a body—but these are the hooks I have to hang my sorrow on, which is maybe what people have to make do with in any culture.
People talk about the messiness of grief, but it’s hard to anticipate what that means—how feverish tears, incoherent guilt, and numb indifference can trip over one another in quick and random succession. At first, I couldn’t believe that my friend was gone; lately, I find it hard to believe that he was ever here. There are still moments, needle-sharp but increasingly infrequent, when “the full grief will hit me and my heart will toss like a horse’s head,” as Derek Walcott, a poet my friend loved, once wrote. But otherwise it’s as though death has settled on him like a sheet, the contours of his personality smoothed over by the fact that he died. I don’t know if this is what people mean when they talk about accepting grief; I hope it goes away.
Before the funeral, the friend in Cyprus warned the one in Pretoria that, in some Greek Orthodox burials, the mourners at the graveside throw dirt onto the body in the still-open casket, before it is closed and buried. I didn’t say so (and the burial, it turned out, didn’t include that particular ceremony) but the idea of carrying out such a ritual was deeply appealing, on a gut level, precisely because it was also horrifying. The act of pressing close to the death, looking at it straight on, sounded like it would be cathartic and scarring and honest—like it would be important. But, thinking about it now, I can’t see that it would have made much difference.
