Texas Prisoner Burials Are a Gentle Touch in a Punitive System
Manny Fernandez, New York Times (January 05, 2012)
At a cemetery in Texas, murderers and other convicts whose bodies are unclaimed can be interred and, for a few moments, remembered.

A really interesting article on the cemetery used by Texas prison officials for unclaimed bodies. These are the unclaimed dead bodies of convicted prisoners.

I found this section towards the end of the article most compelling.

The state’s prison agency, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, has been the steward of the cemetery since the first inmates were buried there in the mid-1800s, maintaining and operating it in recent decades as carefully and respectfully as any religious institution might.

An inmate crew from the nearby Walls Unit prison cleans the grounds, mows the grass and trims trees four days per week. The inmates dig the graves with a backhoe and shovels, serve as pallbearers and chisel the names on the headstones by hand using metal stencils and black paint. The cemetery was named for an assistant warden at the Walls Unit who helped clean and restore the graveyard in the 1960s, and even today, the warden or one of his deputies attends every burial.

“It’s important, because they’re people still,” said the warden, James Jones. “Of course they committed a crime and they have to do their time, and unfortunately they end up dying while they’re in prison, but they’re still human beings.”

In a state known for being tough on criminals, where officials recently eliminated last-meal requests on death row, the Byrd cemetery has been a little-known counterpoint to the mythology of the Texas penal system. One mile from the Walls Unit, which houses the state’s execution chamber, about 100 inmates are buried each year in ceremonies for which the state spends considerable time and money. Each burial costs Texas about $2,000. Often, as in Mr. Davis’s case, none of the deceased’s relatives attend, and the only people present are prison officials and the inmate workers.

Though all of those buried here were unclaimed by relatives, many family members fail to claim the bodies because they cannot afford burial expenses and want the prison agency to pay the costs instead. The same relatives who declined to claim the body will then travel to Huntsville to attend the state-paid services at the cemetery.

Time and time again, the Death Reference Desk has come across the cost issue. You can see all of those posts in the Death + the Economy section.

The Texas prisoner cemetery also reminds me of the post on Hart Island, where New York’s unclaimed dead bodies are buried.

I’d like to create an entire map of all unclaimed dead body cemeteries/repositories around the world. Welcome to 2012′s big project.

Green Burial Project Developing Corpse-Eating Mushrooms
Paul Ridden, gizmag.com (July 29, 2011)

The Infinity Burial Project
Jae Rhim Lee

Every once in a while I come across a new-dead-body-disposal-concept which I really like. Indeed, I really wish that I had tons of excess cash so that I could start my own dead body technology R&D company which would then develop innovative and exciting new ways to handle human corpses. We would be the Venture Capital worlds Death Angels. Or, if YOU happen to be a Venture Capital investor reading the Death Reference Desk (it could happen…) then drop me a line because I’ve got lots of great final disposition ideas!

Until that happens, I’ll confine myself to ye olde Death Ref.

Back in July, I came across this short Gizmag post on artist Jae Rhim Lee and her cultivation of flesh eating mushrooms. Actually she’s working with run-of-the-mill shiitake and oyster mushrooms and isn’t bioengineering some new kind of flesh eating fungus. Too bad, really.

Anyway, Jae Rihm Lee’s project taps into the burgeoning world of green burial technologies, a topic which Meg, Kim, and I have covered in depth on the Death Reference Desk. You can read all the green burial posts and/or I strongly suggest reading Kim’s excellent Green Burial: A Review post.

Here is how Gizmag’s Paul Ridden explains Jae Rihm Lee’s mushroom idea:

The Infinity Burial Suit prototype is made of organic cotton and covered with an embroidered net of thread which resembles the growth pattern of mushroom mycelium, and that has been infused with mushroom spores. A special cocktail of minerals and spores will also be introduced into the corpse itself, that will encourage mushroom growth from the inside. Special make-up based on the spore slurry is also being considered that will quickly break down and assist the decomposition process.

The project is aiming towards the development of a natural burial system which will facilitate decomposition of the body, remediate accumulated body toxins, and deliver nutrients to plants in the surrounding area. Lee also hopes that the Infinity Burial Project will help raise awareness of the concept of death acceptance, rather than continuing to try and detach ourselves from our inevitable end.

In a nutshell, what Jae Rhim Lee is proposing would work. I’m not sure that it is any more cost-effective than just leaving a dead body to decompose in a forest but that’s a tricky legal situation. Besides, if a dead body, um, dies in a forest and is then devoured by mushrooms and no one sees it, then what fun is that? Besides torturing an already over used metaphor.

So I absolutely support the Infinity Burial Suit project, mostly because I can now embed the trailer for the BEST 1970s dystopian future film of all time: Soylent Green!

Project 12:31
Croix Gagnon and Frank Schott

via Today and Tomorrow, “12:31″

All DeathRef bloggers will one day answer for their sins of gratuitous and gauche headline puns. But, wow, you gotta check this out. Using cross-sectional cadaver slides from the Visible Human Project as source material, Croix Gagnon and Frank Schott piece together haunting “light paintings” of the corpse of an executed murderer floating through nocturnal scenes.

See all the images and read the story at their website, or just feast your eyes on this creepy animation of all the slides, crown to sole:

Wow.

At the Hour of Our Death
Sarah Sudhoff

Our worldly possessions speak to how we live, while their particular aesthetics — the whorl of this cushion, the filigree of that doily — hint at personality. In her series, At the Hour of Our Death, artist Sarah Sudhoff explores how our stuff reveals how we die, and reminds that we do die, and so do the ones we love from whose deaths we are detached. Sudhoff photographs the stains left behind from suicides, murders and other messy deaths.

Filmmakers Mark and Angela Walley produced a short documentary about Sudhoff and her work:

[Video not working because Vimeo is evil? Click here.]

Sudhoff’s intention with this work is to draw attention to the often invisible process and remnants of death. Normalized efforts to erase or conceal — or incinerate, as is the case of the fabric swatches she photographs — the evidence that death leaves behind, including the body itself immediately swept from view until the funeral, isolate us from our loss and make grief impersonal and arguably more difficult than it already is.

I say “arguably” because seeing the blood splatters of a loved one’s suicide would probably freak out and traumatize most people more than it would aid their mourning. Nevertheless, this sanitizing of death is a denial of reality and dislocates our understanding and acceptance of death. Sudhoff’s work recognizes and acknowledges the marks death leaves behind, on pillow shams and drapes but also on us.

A bit morbid, sure, but this is the Death Reference Desk. And if I may, while granting Sudhoff legitimacy in her artist statement, and at the risk of being creepy or insensitive, I am personally less interested in the death tie-in than I am in the pure aesthetics of the work.

Ignore for a moment that these images are saturated with the gore of the dead. Why? Because otherwise is too easy — too emotional, too blatantly taboo and therefore transgressive, and while Sudhoff does not seem to aim for shock, the context sends interpretation down a single, obvious, kinda gross but we-should-feel-good-about-ourselves-for-thinking-about-death-and-the-consequences-of-its-social-sublimation path.

And you know what? These photographs are really rather pretty on their own and function as effective works of art without all that weight.

In the serendipitous way propriety and rules and stuff impose boundaries on Art, Sudhoff was unable to photograph actual crime scenes. Instead she is allowed to shoot their remnants pulled from the biohazard boxes of a death scene cleanup company. Fabric swatches are tacked to a wall, flooded with lights and photographed. While perhaps she would have done this anyway, this arrangement forces intense close-ups on the fabrics, as opposed to wider angle, let’s-see-the-whole-room, imagine-the-moment shots that would put us closer to the dead.

Instead, we have only a moment, and that moment is abstract and evocative. The textiles themselves are both art and commodity. Even a foam carpet pad, with its texture and color, has a weird, familiar but rarely recognized beauty.

The stains that seep can be seen as corruption or defacement — defects in these products. And yet there is balance and harmony, a rightness in the randomness. Nonetheless, even if you didn’t know it was blood, the creeping distortions signal that something is dreadfully wrong, complicating that beauty (or, ironically, enlivening and enriching a mundane pattern).

Combined with context — knowledge of what these stains don’t represent but actually are — Sudhoff’s work achieves a subtle power easy to overlook when we’re so quick to look away.

If you’re into this stuff (heh), check out Sudhoff’s other photo series linked on the left side of her website, including medical waste and sacks of unclaimed cremains.

Artist’s Study of Island Brings the Dead to Life
Adam Geller, Associated Press (October 30, 2010)

Hart Island Project
Melinda Hunt

This is a really compelling article about a New York burial ground for unclaimed bodies. Adam Geller, from the Associated Press, wrote a lengthy piece about both Hart Island (the cemetery) and the woman who turned Hart Island into a fascinating artistic project. That artist, Melinda Hunt, features prominently in this tale. Here is the lead:

When the dead are delivered, four mornings a week, the ferry Michael Cosgrove is waiting.

A refrigerated truck from the city morgue follows Fordham Street to its stump, between a used boat dealership and a lot thick with weeds, and a high chain-link fence warning “Prison-Keep Off.” For New Yorkers who die without the money, family or identity required to get a proper funeral, the dock just beyond is the boarding point for a seven-minute journey to oblivion.

The destination is Hart Island, 101 acres of wind-swept sand and trees crooked in the waters a half-mile off the Bronx, like a beckoning finger.

If the more than 800,000 people laid to rest on the island over the last 141 years were alive, it would be the state’s second largest city. Dead and buried, they populate what is almost certainly the country’s largest public cemetery. But there are no headstones, no eulogies and no regular visiting hours.

In fact, most New Yorkers have never heard of Hart Island. In a city of 8.5 million lives, such a place may be a necessity. But it is one long deemed off-limits, home to stories better left untold.

AP Photo/The Hart Island Project, Melinda Hunt

At least that was the case until Melinda Hunt discovered it.

“This guy was a heroin addict and his girlfriend went looking for him … this is a Vietnam veteran who developed schizophrenia and he committed suicide,” Hunt says, flipping through sketches of Hart Island dead. “These people sort of speak to me.”

Hunt is an artist, but the portrait of Hart Island she has created over the past 19 years blurs the boundaries of that job description. The divorced mother of two college-age daughters has turned herself into Hart Island’s detective and de facto archivist, its lead witness and chief scribe.

Add it all up and it might not fit some people’s definition of art. But in this last refuge of the forgotten, Hunt says her Yale degree in sculpture and deftness with a charcoal pencil are only the starting point.

The end, as she sees it, is to unearth lost souls.

The article goes on from there and is a really good read. You will find similar kinds of articles in the Death + The Economy section of Death Ref. There is no shortage of unclaimed dead bodies these days.

Here, too, is a short section from a documentary entitled Hart Island: An American Cemetery.

Vertical Cemetery is a Greenery Clad Final Resting Place for Mumbai
Yuka Yoneda, Inhabit.com (September 28, 2010)

We’ve posted before about vertical burial — that is, placing corpses in upright containers for burial in the ground standing up. The proposed Moksha Tower in Mumbai takes this concept to a whole new level by providing burial space in a skyscraper, giving “burial” and memorial options in a physical space while conserving precious horizontal green space that might otherwise be used for parks — or housing for the living.

While this design is clearly not in any spiritual tradition, the Moksha Tower attempts to appeal to the four major religious groups in Mumbai. According to an article from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, the tower “acts as a symbolic link between heaven and earth”:

For Muslims, it provides areas for funerals and space for garden burial; for Christians, areas for funerals and burial; for Hindus, facilities for cremation and a river to deposit a portion; for Parsis, a tower of silence is located on the roof of the tower.

Check out more architectural renderings!

Săpânţa: The Happy Cemetery
Dumneazu (July 23, 2010)

While grave markers can be creative and downright wacky, most reflect the solemnity of death — just the facts, m’am, perhaps with an accurate but general epitaph, like “Loving wife and mother.” Aren’t they all? And would you really say otherwise if not?

The Happy Cemetery in Săpânţa, Romania, would. From Dumneazu’s post:

The poem accompanying this gravestone said something along the lines, “And now my children are in the hands of God / Which is probably better than being in my hands.”

Ouch. Reflecting local folk art, carved and painted wooden grave markers in the Happy Cemetery memorialize a person’s life and death through often humorous poetry and depictions of community and personal life (i.e., drinking, being a heart-breaker and/or floozy) and the scenes that led to his or her demise (i.e., vehicular homicide, beheading).

Check out Dumneazu’s post for a number of photos with accompanying commentary. Great stuff!

Morbid Ink: Memorial Tattoos
Samantha Stark, WNYC radio (July 21, 2010)

WNYC radio in New York put together a short piece on Memorial Tattoos, which coincided with my talk on the same subject for Observatory and the Morbid Anatomy Library.

Samantha Stark, the WNYC reporter who put the story together, did a really good job of tracking down individuals and tattoo artists with memorial tattoos. I found those interviews far more compelling than anything I said.

But I’m not surprised.

Memorial Tattoos almost always contain a narrative which overpowers any historical/conceptual argument.

These tattoos are a story about how one person died and another individual continues to live with his or her memory.

And that will never change.

Morbid Ink: Field Notes on the Human Memorial Tattoo
An Illustrated Lecture with Dr. John Troyer, Deputy Director, Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath
Date: Tuesday July 20th, 2010
Time: 8:00pm
Admission: $5

On Tuesday, July 20 I am giving a talk in Brooklyn on memorial tattoos. The talk, Morbid Ink: Field Notes on the Human Memorial Tattoo, focuses on research that I have been doing for a number of years. Many thanks to Joanna Ebenstein who runs the Morbid Anatomy Library for inviting me to speak.

The academic side of this research has really only taken place during the last year. But the tattoo side of my work started in 1994 when I got my first memorial tattoo for my maternal grandfather. Since 1994, I have gotten a tattoo for each of my grandparents, in the order of their deaths, down my spine. I went to the same tattoo artist for each of the tattoos, Awen Briem, and you can see her work at her studio Art With A point. In 2008, I got tattoos for both my parents (who are still alive) as a way of honoring them before they die. Each of these tattoos is a 1/4 long sleeve down both my left and right arms. Awen did an amazing job with these tattoos too.

All of this is to say that I have spent hours and hours (and more hours…) thinking and talking with Awen about why people get tattoos. It became apparent, based purely on Awen’s anecdotes, that memorial tattoos were becoming more and more common. In case you are looking for a definition, the Memorial Tattoo is most easily described as a tattoo which a person gets after someone they know dies. The deceased can be a good friend, a spouse, sibling, lover, etc. Now, the memorial tattoo can also be for a dead pet and I see this kind of tattoo more and more. Indeed, Awen ran some numbers and roughly 50% of her memorial tattoos are for pets. This all makes sense to me since pets became a companion species for humans long ago.

The talk on July 20th will discuss a variety of issues which I think memorial tattoos produce. Some of these issues include how meaning is assigned to a memorial tattoo, what marking a living body with representations of death entails, and current innovations in memorial tattooing.

I will also talk about the strange and peculiar avenues this particular research interest has taken me down. My favorite example is that the Death Reference Desk has itself become part of my research.

Last July, I posted an article on Death Ref about a gentleman who got cremated human remains mixed into the ink used for a memorial tattoo. As a result of that post, the Death Reference Desk has started receiving questions about the ins and outs of mixing cremated remains into tattoo ink.

And since Death Ref has always functioned as a reference desk, Meg, Kim and myself have responded to all the queries. Meg, in particular, has gone to great lengths to answer these questions and those responses are still available here: Using Cremains in Memorial Tattoos. You can also find more on memorial tattoos here.

It turns out that quite a few people have thought about/are thinking about mixing a pinch of human ash (almost always from the deceased) into the ink being used for a specific memorial tattoo.

I’m not surprised in the least. Within the logic of why people get memorial tattoos, it makes complete sense.

If you are in the Brooklyn area Tuesday and/or know someone who is, then send them to the Morbid Anatomy Library at 543 Union Street, Brooklyn, New York 11215 for the talk.

Dreamland: The Way out of Juarez
On The Media (June 4, 2010)

Earlier this week I wrote about the drug-cartel murders in Juarez, Mexico, and mentioned Charles Bowden, a journalist who has been covering the situation for over a decade. He recently spoke with On The Media about a new book, Dreamland: The Way Out of Juarez, a mix of journalism and evocative, literary expression with haunting illustrations by Alice Leora Briggs.

They also discuss corruption in both the Mexican and U.S. governments for allowing the cartel to continue, along with criticism of the American press for poor coverage on the topic. Do check out the interview — with his gravelly voice and poetic language, Bowden is a trip. A few quotes from the podcast:

“The city is dying. Violence isn’t an incident anymore, it’s the actual fabric of life, it’s part of basic transactions there.”

“Mexico is collapsing. This is an exodus of human beings. This is a far more significant event for the future of the United States than the war in Iraq.”

“I’ve been trying to leave the border for years, because it’s damaging to me. Because I’m tired of dead people. But I haven’t been able to make it. I actually am by some standards a normal person. I feed birds. I garden. I like to cook. I don’t need corpses. … The way I was raised, you can’t know this kind of slaughter is going on… and pretend it’s not happening.”