How to visit a Virtual Grave
Alison Winward, The Guardian (November 10, 2010)

Armistice Day Marked Around the World – In Pictures
The Guardian (November 11, 2011)

The War Graves Photographic Project
Commonwealth War Graves Commission

A quick post for Armistice Day (in the UK), Veterans Day (in the US) and Remembrance Day (in Canada). A few years ago, volunteers began amassing online photos for The War Graves Photographic Project. People can search online for graves all over the world and see images of the gravestones. The Guardian article at the top discusses the project and how it got started.

As of right now, it looks like the graves are only for the UK and Commonwealth Nations. That said, it seems like something which will catch on in America.

Thanks Veterans, one and all.

– The Death Reference Desk.

This American Life
In this show, we return to people who’ve been on This American Life in the last ten years, whose lives were drastically altered by 9/11, including Hyder Akbar, an Afghan-American teen who moved to Afghanistan after his father was tapped to become governor of Kunar province there.

On the Media
Ten years after 9/11, a look at the state of American civil liberties, growing up after the attack, and the evolution of 9/11 humor.

The Death Reference Desk is a website about death, dying, the dead body, memorialization, funerals, and then some. As such, it would seem that Death Ref would have a lot to say about the events on September 11, 2011 to commemorate September 11, 2001.

But what more could possibly be said?

Even now, a week later, on September 18, 2011 I am pulling this post together only because I came across two different radio broadcasts which caught my attention.

It’s telling, I think, that a non-visual medium produced these stories. Both of the broadcasts, by WBEZ’s This American Life and WNYC’s On the Media captured images from the last ten years in a far more evocative manner than any of the television coverage.

In a nutshell, you have to see these radio programs in your head and that takes more work than anything by CNN, FOX, NBC, CBS, or ABC.

There is not much new to say about the events of September 11, 2001 that has not already been said during the last decade.

Check back with the Death Reference Desk in fifty years.

Holy Smoke: Celebrating Life
Planning a loved ones final arrangements can be a challenging responsibility, one you want to do with care and consideration. Allow Holy Smoke to help you create a tribute to your outdoorsman or woman like no other.

So yeah. I had heard about people loading ammunition with human cremated remains and then shooting the ammo but I did not know, until this week, that a company would do it for you.

And based on the reaction of my British friends (I live in England), many people still do not believe it is possible. And/or, the loading of live gun ammunition with human cremated remains is a distinctly American form of memorialization. Not unlike spelling memorialization with a ‘z’ instead of an ‘s’.

Take that Red Coats!

But I digress.

Here at the Death Reference Desk we believe in presenting the full monty when it comes to contemporary forms of postmortem memorials. So a company such as Holy Smoke is due some respect for combining two of America’s great past times: shooting bullets and capitalism. Not necessarily in that order.

But lo, what might you receive when purchasing Holy Smoke’s ammo? Well, their website explains it all:

Our Process

The process of having cremated ash placed in live ammunition begins when you contact us. You tell us what type of hunting or shooting that the decedent practiced and we can help you decide what will best suit your needs. Feel free to email us, call us at (251) 213-1211 or (251) 232-4414 or complete the proposal form on our Buy Holy Smoke page, and we will gladly discuss the options (caliber, gauge, etc.) available to you. We are here to serve you and want to simplify the ordering process as much as possible.

Once the caliber, gauge and other ammunition parameters have been selected, we will ask you (by way of your funeral service provider) to send approximately one pound of the decedents ash to us. Upon receiving the ashes our professional and reverent staff will place a measured portion of ash into each shotshell or cartridge.

Example: 1 Pound of ash is enough to produce 250 shotshells (one case).

Now, I’m not a gun person (even though I grew up in the great state of Wisconsin) so 250 shotgun shells sounds like a lot of ammo. I can’t imagine firing a gun 250 times to remember a person I loved.

Unless, of course, you’re using the Holy Smoke ammunition to defend the human race against the imminent Zombie Apocalypse!

Arlington Cemetery’s Mishandling of Remains Prompts FBI Criminal Probe
Jerry Markon and Christian Davenport, The Washington Post (June 29, 2011)
The Justice Department is investigating the mishandling of remains at Arlington National Cemetery in a broad criminal inquiry that is also seeking evidence of possible contracting fraud and falsification of records, people familiar with the investigation said Tuesday

I have no idea who is going to make the documentary film about the rise and fall of Arlington National Cemetery but it is going to be a long and complicated movie. Twists and turns will emerge from nowhere and then suddenly it will turn out that the FBI was investigating the whole situation.

At this point, nothing which emerges from the ongoing and unstoppable Arlington cemetery train wreck surprises me. Nothing. The Washington Post has been singlehandedly leading the charge on this case and today’s story is a doozy:

The Justice Department is investigating the mishandling of remains at Arlington National Cemetery in a broad criminal inquiry that is also seeking evidence of possible contracting fraud and falsification of records, people familiar with the investigation said Tuesday.

A federal grand jury in Alexandria has been subpoenaing witnesses and records relating to the scandal at the nation’s most venerated military burial ground, sources said. The investigation, conducted by the FBI and the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command, has been underway for at least six months, according to sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The Justice Department’s investigation significantly escalates the level of scrutiny faced by the cemetery, and the probe joins several ongoing inquiries by Congress, which last year passed a law mandating that the cemetery verify that remains are properly accounted for at every one of its 330,000 graves. The law also requires the Government Accountability Office to look into the cemetery’s contract management procedures, and whether the Army run cemetery should be turned over to the Department of Veterans Affairs, which oversees 131 national cemeteries.

So now we have FBI Agents, a federal grand jury handing out subpoenas, and increasingly obvious cases of multi-million dollar fraud.

Here’s the rub: it’s only going to get worse. That’s my guess after following this case since day one.

You can read all the previous Arlington Cemetery posts here.

The Death Reference Desk will of course follow this case until the end.

Photo: St. Paul Pioneer Press

What’s the next best thing to placing flowers on your loved one’s grave marker? Teddy bears? Mylar balloons? Thanks to technology, those items are now passe. The latest way for you to pay your respects is via the QR code. The what??

A recent article in the St. Paul Pioneer Press discusses how Rochester (MN)-based Funeral Innovations is helping to spur the trend of this newly popular technology and hoping it will catch on with funeral directors and the general public.

For the uninitiated—or perhaps those without a smartphone—a QR code is a two-dimensional code readable by dedicated QR code readers and camera phones. In use in Japan since 1994, QR (or quick response) codes are now being used by various individuals, groups and businesses to promote all sorts of things. Advertising, music and business execs are using the codes to give people a value-added experience; scan the QR code and you are transported to a new layer of information about the product, artist or in the case of the funeral industry—the dearly departed.

So how does it work? Well, say Aunt Sally’s family puts one on her headstone. If your smartphone has a barcode reader app installed, you can point the camera on your phone towards the code. The camera then scans the code and relays information to your phone by taking you to a website where more information is available. Maybe it brings up Aunt Sally’s memorial service posted on YouTube or maybe it takes you to an online photo album or a page on the funeral home’s website that includes her obituary or tribute. Snazzy, huh?

QR codes have become the latest topic of discussion where I work. Ever since they made a big splash at SXSW this past year, there’s been a lot of chatter about how libraries can capitalize on this admittedly geeky but cool tech tool. At my library, we’re bandying about the idea of putting them near some of the art and architecture in our historic building. Click the code and voila—access to way more info than we can possibly squeeze onto a tiny plaque placed near the art or architectural feature. At the University of Bath for example (where Death Ref colleague John resides), they are experimenting with using the QR code to “to join up library services with the technology and equipment students use.”

While we must remain vigilant about not alienating those who cannot afford or who have no desire to own a smart phone or barcode scanner, I can see how a technology like this has the potential to be a game changer—a new way of conceiving and consuming information for the masses. But what do you think? Are QR codes the wave of the future or a gimmick best left in the digital dustbin? Let us know your thoughts.

Furever
Amy Finkel, Director

We humans love our pets. A lot. We love them so much that when they die the grieving process can become overwhelming. Over the last ten years the number of companies and funeral homes offering pet memorialization services, products, and bereavement literature have ballooned.

Meg came across the following in-development documentary on pet loss. The film, Furever, has got chops so we’re throwing its director, Amy Finkel, a Death Ref bone.

Ok. Enough with the bad metaphors and puns.

The Death Reference Desk has been running dead pet stories for a long time and we are more than happy to add this one to the list.

Two words: Freeze Drying.

Furever is a documentary exploration of pet preservation, or, the processes by which a deceased pet is professionally conserved. I have shot forty hours of footage of one technique, freeze-drying, which produces disarmingly lifelike results. This seemingly bizarre practice offers a unique perspective on mortality, grief, and mourning. The concepts investigated in Furever will disarm anyone who might want to dismiss the subjects as mere oddball caricatures. Furever contributes to the dialogue on death and grief, bewildering aspects of the human condition, begun by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, dovetailing with the growing trend toward pet anthropomorphism, and the anguish that befalls the owners of deceased pets. Many dismiss or judge pet preservationists for being “unbalanced,” yet the assorted rituals in place for deceased human loved ones, while precious to those who practice them, often seem odd or unusual to outsiders.

As China’s Income Gap Grows, Tombs Are a Target
Sharon LaFraniere, The New York Times (April 22, 2011)

From the bottom end of this article:

On paper, low-cost burials have been national policy since at least 1997, when State Decree 225 ordered cemetery land conserved and “thrifty funeral arrangements” promoted.

The Pine Tree of Longevity, Chengdu’s largest cemetery, apparently did not get that memo.

In the “artistic section,” overlooking hills of flowering peace trees, row after row of huge tombstones are decked out with rearing stone stallions, giant open books and granite tables and stools.

One recent morning, Zhou Dongmei, the head of sales, carefully steered two visitors away from that section toward lines of smaller, plainer markers that sell for a fraction of the cost. “This is the only kind of plot we sell now,” she said, adding, “it is a process for people to accept this.”

Indeed, most Chengdu mourners interviewed expressed skepticism about the tomb limits. At Temple of the Lighted Lamp cemetery, Kuang Lan, 42, said: “My personal opinion is if you have the money to make a bigger tomb, make a bigger one. If not, make a smaller one.”

But Yang Bin, 48, who earns roughly $150 a month chiseling tombstones at Zhenwu Shan cemetery, quietly criticized the excesses of “capitalists” who “are everywhere now.”

“This is how the Chinese are,” he said, after trudging down the cemetery’s steep hill in his thin, black cloth shoes. “If they have money, they want to show off their face. If you don’t have money, you have to work.”

And for everything that I could say, I have only one comment. It comes from the 1980s band Men Without Hats:

Just happened upon a well-researched article posted to Boing Boing. Titled Ghost Babies, by Mark Dery, the post delves into the re-sale of postmortem photographs for sale on eBay and elsewhere with a little history on postmortem photography in 19th century America thrown in for good measure.

As a librarian, I found the sources to be a nice cross-section to begin further investigation. Here are the works mentioned and a brief description. These are of course but a few monographs on the subject of memorial/postmortem photography. Check your local public or academic library or interlibrary loan resource to delve further.

Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America. Jay Ruby.

Secure the Shadow is an original contribution that lies at the intersection of cultural anthropology and visual analysis, a field that Jay Ruby’s previous writings have helped to define. It explores the photographic representation of death in the United States from 1840 to the present, focusing on the ways in which people have taken and used photographs of deceased loved ones and their funerals to mitigate the finality of death.

Sometimes thought to be a bizarre Victorian custom, photographing corpses has been and continues to be an important, if not recognized, occurrence in American life. It is a photographic activity, like the erotica produced in middle-class homes by married couples, that many privately practice but seldom circulate outside the trusted circle of close friends and relatives. Along with tombstones, funeral cards, and other images of death, these photographs represent one way in which Americans have attempted to secure their shadows.

Ruby employs newspaper accounts, advertisements, letters, photographers’ account books, interviews, and other material to determine why and how photography and death became intertwined in the nineteenth century. He traces this century’s struggle between America’s public denial of death and a deeply felt private need to use pictures of those we love to mourn their loss. Americans take and use photographs of dead relatives and friends in spite of and not because of society’s expectation about the propriety of these means. Ruby compares photographs and other pictorial media of death, founding his interpretations on the discovery of patterns in the appearance of the images and a reconstruction of the conditions of their production and utilization. (Syndetic Solutions, LLC)

Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America. Stanley Burns.

Postmortem photography, photographing a deceased person, was a common practice in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These photographs were often the only ones ever taken of their subjects and much pride and artistry went into them. It is astounding that although postmortem photographs make up the largest group of nineteenth-century American genre photographs, they are largely unseen, and unknown. Today we struggle to avoid the topic of death; as a result we have closed the door on these images, which reflect an American culture in which death and mourning played a visible and active part.

These photographs were a common aspect of American culture, a part of the mourning and memorialization process. Surviving families were proud of these images and hung them in their homes, sent copies to friends and relatives, wore them as lockets, or carried them as pocket mirrors. Nineteenth-century Americans knew how to respond to these images. Today there is no culturally normative response to postmortem photographs.

Discussions of death in books are prolific, and we are accustomed to images of death as part of our daily news; but actual death, as a part of private lives, has become a shameful and unspoken subject.

This volume presents a chronological arrangement of postmortem photography 1840-1930; no other collection of this material has been made available despite recent interest in the American way of death. What emerges is a vivid visual history of the changes in American customs. (Excerpt from the preface of Sleeping Beauty I)

The Victorian Celebration of Death. James Stevens Curl.

In this beautifully illustrated and well-researched book, Professor Curl has rescued much fascinating material from undeserved oblivion, and his work fills a genuine gap. From humble working-class exequies to the massive outpouring of grief at the State funerals of Wellington and Queen Victoria herself, The Victorian Celebration of Death covers an immense canvas. It describes the change in sensibility that led to a new tenderness towards the dead; the history of the urban cemeteries with their architecture and landscapes; the ephemera of death and dying; State funerals as national spectacles; and the utilitarian reactions towards the end of the nineteenth century. Combining wit with compassion, Curl wears his learning lightly, and his taste for the eerie is delicately balanced by this literary personality. He has resurrected many valuable and extremely interesting aspects of nineteenth-century attitudes to death and the disposal of the dead; Curl’s achievement is as well-ordered as any sumptuous funeral, and is lucid as well as entertaining, with many surprises and associated delights. (Amazon product description)

Wisconsin Death Trip. Michael Lesy.

As the title suggests, this is a truly strange book. Published in 1973, it is essentially a collection of photos taken in Black River Falls, WI, by Charles Van Schaik between 1890 and 1910. The subject matter ranges from children in coffins, to farm animals, to family portraits of some of the grimmest-looking people imaginable; the photos are accompanied by snippets from newspapers. The whole package seems to confirm that the good old days were actually awful. (Library Journal)

A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in 19th-Century America. Michael Sappol.

In this groundbreaking new book, Sappol, a historian and curator at the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, explores how professors and body snatchers, patients and physicians, and politicians and the public confronted the anatomical dilemma and forged a new consensus about the body and its place in 19th-century American culture. Body snatching has, of course, had its historians. Stories about the 1788 Doctors’ Mob in New York City (the angry mob of 5000 New Yorkers searching for medical students, physicians, and cadavers dispersed only after the governor called out the armed militia), the 1824 riot against the Yale medical department (spurred by the discovery of the partially dissected body of the recently deceased daughter of a West Haven farmer in the anatomy rooms), and the 1878 Harrison scandal in Cincinnati (when the body of John Scott Harrison, the recently deceased son of former president William Henry Harrison and father of president-to-be Benjamin Harrison, turned up in the dissecting room of the Medical College of Ohio) have long been a staple of American medical history and medical school anatomy courses. One of Sappol’s great accomplishments in this dazzling book is his creation of a new lens to view these well-known — and some lesser-known — episodes. It is as though we see them, and more important, understand them for the first time. The anatomical perspective, Sappol suggests, urges a serious reconsideration of the boundaries of professional medicine and popular culture in the 19th century. More than that, he seeks to explain how 19th-century anatomical view of the body led to the view of the body we know today. Crucial to Sappol’s argument is a redefining of what counted as anatomy in 19th-century medicine. With considerable verve and penetration, he explores orthodox anatomy in American medical education, advancing the claim that dissection and membership in the male fraternity of dissectors was critical to the formation of professional identity and legitimacy. (Partial excerpt, New England Journal of Medicine)

Warner to Introduce Bill to Revoke Reserved Plots at Arlington
Christian Davenport, The Washington Post (March 30, 2011)

A quick update on Arlington National Cemetery and its ongoing problems. The lead didn’t necessarily get buried in this most recent article from the Washington Post but the entire Arlington debacle just got a lot more interesting.

Here is the new wrinkle in this ongoing saga:

The list is 84 names long — mostly generals and colonels. There’s a sergeant major of the Army, a former assistant Army secretary, a Navy vice admiral, a former congressman.

They are VIPs with one of the most prestigious tickets in Washington: a reserved plot at Arlington National Cemetery, the nation’s premier military burial ground.

On Thursday, Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) is to introduce legislation that would revoke those reservations — made under an unofficial system that continued for decades in violation of Army policy — and force the cemetery to determine how many plots have been set aside.

In an interview Monday, Warner said he wanted to make sure that Arlington does not play favorites with its graves and that it does not honor any reservations made after 1962, when officials decided the cemetery’s coveted plots should be offered without regard to rank or status.

“It’s a disgrace that backroom deals were being made and some general might trump the rights of a fallen soldier from Iraq and Afghanistan,” Warner said.

He said he suspects the unofficial reservation system, in which generals and other top officials were promised choice spots by cemetery leaders, explains why the cemetery continued to rely on an antiquated and easily manipulated paper recordkeeping system.

Starting in 2002, the cemetery spent years and millions of dollars on the project to update the system but had nothing to show for it. Today, the cemetery still relies on a paper recordkeeping system, which shows, for example, that many choice gravesites are not available when they are. A House subcommittee has scheduled a hearing to investigate mismanagement at the cemetery.

In a nutshell, one of the key contributors to Arlington’s problems may have been this unofficial reservation system, which also explains how the computerized records system never got implemented.

I know that there has already been a Congressional investigation but I won’t be surprised if we see another.

Arlington Cemetery Struggles with Old Reservations
Christian Davenport, The Washington Post (March 21, 2011)
Officials at Arlington National Cemetery — still unable to fully account for who is buried where at the nation’s premier military resting place — are struggling to determine who has reserved plots and whether some of those grave sites are already in use.

Oh poor, sad black-hole-of-problems Arlington National Cemetery. One day, a book about running modern cemeteries will be written and in said book will be a chapter entitled Arlington National Cemetery: A Case Study in Totally Preventable Burial Disasters.

Last week, I posted another Washington Post article on the mass burial of ‘unknown’ urns.

And I now have a prediction: We have not yet reached the bottom of this continuing fall from postmortem grace. It boggles the imagination to imagine what will happen next, but I know that some new terrible development is on the way.

In all fairness, Arlington Cemetery’s new executive director, Kathryn Condon, is doing an impressive job of dealing with the multiple problems she inherited from the previous overseers. You can read about all of the problems confronting Arlington Cemetery here.

Here is the newest problem confronting Arlington, as taken from the Post article:

Officials at Arlington National Cemetery — still unable to fully account for who is buried where at the nation’s premier military resting place — are struggling to determine who has reserved plots and whether some of those grave sites are already in use.

Years of sloppy recordkeeping have left officials with no reliable data on how many reservations have been made for plots in the 624-acre cemetery. The problem — along with the discovery that an unofficial reservation system for VIPs continued for decades in violation of Army regulations — is yet another challenge for the cemetery’s new leaders.

Last year, Army investigators found that graves were mismarked and unmarked, that burial urns had been unearthed and dumped in a dirt pile, and that millions of dollars had been wasted on failed attempts to digitize the cemetery’s paper record system. As a result, the Army ousted the cemetery’s top two leaders, Superintendent John C. Metzler Jr. and his deputy, Thurman Higginbotham.

Since then, more problems have emerged, including the discovery of people buried in the wrong plots and a mass grave that held eight sets of cremated remains.

There isn’t much more to say, other than this newest problem will be added to all the other problems confronting Arlington Cemetery. At some point, it would be good to compile an entire list of everything that has gone wrong at Arlington…I’ll plan on this for the future.

Coincidentally, Meg posted information yesterday on some proposed legislation working its way through the United States Congress. The Bereaved Consumer’s Bill of Rights Act of 2011 was written to deal with the kinds of problems afflicting Arlington Cemetery. Sadly, this Bill would not encompass Veterans Affairs cemeteries, such as Arlington, so it’s up to the Federal Government to make the fixes.

This story will continue.