Categories
Cemeteries Death + the Economy Funeral Industry

Home is Where the Dead Body Is

Home Burials Offer an Intimate Alternative
Katie Zezima, New York Times (July 21, 2009)

Tuesday’s New York Times featured a front page article — FRONT PAGE — on people who choose home burials for a deceased love one. Economic concerns are given as a key reason for any upsurge in home burials, because they do tend to be less expensive than traditional funeral services. The contemporary practice of home burial (where the body is kept in a private home so that family and friends can see it before burial or cremation) is not new and it most certainly predates the current economic recession. A strong case can be made that ‘home burials’ are actually a return to a more common 19th and early 20th century funereal practice. That said, I want to focus on the current trend reported by the Times.

In August 2004, for example, Public Television’s POV documentary film series aired a really fantastic home burial documentary entitled A Family Undertaking. The POV documentary follows different groups of families (each with a dying relative) and shows how the home burial is prepared. All of the families involved demonstrate time and time again how the home burial choice is a labor of love.

The fundamentally important part of any home burial is to understand what the local state law says about dead bodies. I say the following with complete sincerity (and as the son of a Funeral Director): most people are capable of handling their own funerals. Here is the most important information to know: 1.) what kinds of permits are required to transport dead bodies, 2.) who signs which pieces of paperwork, and 3.) what the local state law says about the final disposition of the body.

Final disposition is a fancy way of saying burial or cremation or any other legally sanctioned form of dead body disposal. Some states give more time than others for final disposition, it depends. Here is the key: ALL American states put their laws online and it is fairly easy to key word search ‘dead body’ or ‘corpse’ to see what the local law states.

The Times article also suggests that the renewed interest in home burials is another sign of economic stress. I’m not so sure. I agree that home burials do cost less than a full-on funeral home funeral, but I’m not convinced that economics really drives it. Economic concerns might function as a catalyst but it seems to me that many people choose home burial because it feels more meaningful.

I think that a better gauge of economic duress is this: the increase in unclaimed bodies in county morgues. These are situations where the next of kin cannot afford to pay the various burial costs so they leave the body in the morgue and local officials take care of the corpse.

All of this is to say, that as individuals begin to choose more and more varied forms of final disposition we will see increasing funereal variation, such as home burials. On the one hand, I totally understand this practice and support it. On the other hand, I really enjoy the classic 19th century cemeteries found across America and I would never turn away a chance to be buried in one. Quick aside: the New York Times ran a wonderful article a few days ago on the land surveyor at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

The funniest part of the New York Times article is towards the end. It discusses how Maine carpenter Chuck Lakin makes handmade wooden coffins that can also double as bookshelves or display shelves… until death calls.

Chuck Lakin, coffin builder

Just by chance, a friend of mine sent me the following link this week on Coffin Shelves: Furniture for Life (and Death).

Coffin Shelves for Life

I am a total believer in multi-use coffins.

Categories
Cemeteries Death + Art / Architecture

Condo Columbaria? Mountain View Cemetery

On July 11, 2009, Mountain View Cemetery—Vancouver, British Columbia’s only graveyard—invited the public to an open house to showcase its new buildings and columbaria. On-the-spot grave look-ups, four different cemetery tours, Chinese joss paper demonstrations, a string quartet, harpist and free popcorn all made for a pleasant day for cemetery boosters, curious potential customers and taphophiles such as myself. I attended two of the tours and explored on my own the whopping 106 acres of the grounds.

John Atkin, tour guide

Opened in 1887, Mountain View contains 145,000 interments at 92,000 grave sites. By the mid-eighties the cemetery had no more plots to sell and, hemmed in by houses, had nowhere to expand. Even the designated cemetery pathways, recognized as prime real estate, have been filled in with graves. According to John Atkin, civic historian and tour guide extraordinaire, 86 percent of British Columbians prefer to be cremated. Inspired by this statistic, the city approved construction of columbaria, providing 2,200 urn spaces to tap this market.

Columbarium main pathColumbaria side pathColumbaria condos

Click the photo thumbnails to see larger images. Each compartment, or niche, can hold up to two interments of cremains. Customers (residents?) can choose to be in the main columbarium wall, which forms a courtyard around a portion of the Masonic section of the cemetery, or in smaller, tower-like columbaria that line a path toward a newly restored water fountain.

I can’t help but notice the parallel between the smaller columbaria architecture and Vancouver’s condo-saturated skyline. It seems Vancouverites can rest in peace as they live—stacked in tall, stately structures. Accordingly, niches are priced with costs increasing the higher one resides above ground: the bottom row (with the worst view?) is $2,600, the second from the bottom costs $3,100 and all others fetch $3,800.

Mother marker, laid flatThe Masonic section was chosen for the columbaria due to its traditional graveyard aesthetics. In the 1960s a city bylaw stated all headstones would be knocked flat unless the family requested otherwise. The purpose? To most efficiently mow the lawn. Well organized and fiercely traditional, the Masons busted out the phone tree and the requests poured in, rescuing the Masonic graves from certain obscurity.

As part of revitalization and restoration initiatives, repentant cemetery officials have been turning markers upright, but it is a slow process—not terribly expensive, but there are thousands upon thousands of laid flat headstones to contend with.

Other points of interest:

  • Mountain View has no regulations regarding body preparation for burials. Embalming is not required, nor are vault liners or even caskets. Due to lack of space, however, few burials are performed. To be interred in the ground there today, a family would need to have a plot purchased decades ago.
  • When markers were laid flat, the granite bases from military graves were used in the construction of the Stanley Park seawall.
  • More than 10,000 infants—stillborn babies or those who lived only a few days—are buried in three sections of unmarked graves at Mountain View. The largest area now has a dry streambed memorial of over 6,000 stones, with each stone representing an infant. Families can purchase larger stones to have the child’s name engraved on it.
  • Located on the edge of the cemetery, the Vancouver Crematorium is a privately owned operation, a revelation which shocked and wounded the Canadian audience. As an American, I found this interesting—in the United States no one would question or even notice such privatization.

Lorraine Irving, TaphophileThe other tour guide, Lorraine Irving of the BC Genealogical Society, focused on the lives and deaths of individuals in the cemetery, passing around copies of historical photos and reading from obituaries and contemporaneous news articles. I also noticed a few portable information stands placed by the graves of BC notables.

This got me thinking… wouldn’t it be great to have cemeteries geotagged so as you wander around the graves and tombs, photographs, time lines, family trees, obituaries and other related info about the deceased would pop up on your phone? You could write personal remembrances that others could read, as well as visit distant cemeteries virtually. It’d be best open source, perhaps set up like a giant wiki to which anyone could contribute. Genealogists would freak.

I *ahem* highly doubt I’m the first person to have this idea—nor will I be the last to have no means to pull it off. But a girl can dream…

Another markerSomber girl markerMasonic marker
Categories
Death + Technology Death + the Law Death Ethics

Re-thinking the Definition of Death in Canada

Ethicist Seeks Law to Say When Dead Is Truly Dead
Tom Blackwell, National Post (July 16, 2009)

How and when an individual is determined to be dead is a persistent bio-ethical, medical, and philosophical debate. I came across this article on the debate in Canada and I think that it highlights a common set of points for any modern nation which uses life support machines. First and foremost, the entire debate about the definition of death is a human-made problem. The use of life support machines in the 1970s suddenly meant that individuals who might have normally died from heart failure could suddenly be kept alive for long periods of time, although artificially. The person might not be conscious and could have brain damage from a prolonged absence of oxygen but that same person’s heart might still beat.

Before the advent of life support machines, the heart stopped beating and the person died. Once it became clear that the human heart could be kept artificially beating, bio-medical attention turned towards a definition of death using brain activity. If the brain is not fully functioning, then most of what we call the “person” is also dead. This then led to debates (which continue today) about whether Whole Brain or Partial Brain criteria should be used to determine death. Philosophically, this is an interesting point: where is the “person” located in the modern body, the heart or the brain?

Ventilator

I am skipping through decades of debate with this particular post but it is most certainly an issue that Death Ref will continue to present. Here, too, is an interesting aside on the topic. Right before President George W. Bush left office, the President’s Council on Bioethics (which President Bush created in November 2001 and President Obama has since disbanded) released this report: Controversies in the Determination of Death: A White Paper by the President’s Council on Bioethics.

It’s a long report but worth reading. The President’s Council on Bioethics upheld the use of brain death criteria and suggests that the determination of death in America remain neurologically based. Given the intense social, legal, and political battle over Terri Schiavo during the beginning of President Bush’s second term, this is a most intriguing finding.

Categories
Death + the Law Death Ethics Suicide

British Couple Choose Assisted Dying at Dignitas Clinic

With Help, Conductor and Wife Ended Lives
John F. Burns, New York Times (July 14, 2009)

For several years now, the UK press has reported on individuals and couples who travel to the Dignitas Clinic in Switzerland to end their lives. The most recent articles focus on Sir Edward Downes and his wife Joan. Joan Downes had terminal cancer and based upon statements by family members, Edward Downes (who did not suffer from any terminal disease) accompanied his wife in order to die with her. The Downes’ case, while tragic, is but one of many over the last year. Indeed, a similar situation occurred for another couple, Peter and Penelope Duff, in March 2009. The Duff’s were a well-to-do couple who lived in Bath, England (where I am faculty member in the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath). They were both suffering from terminal diseases and chose to end their lives at Dignitas.

What emerges from all of these cases is an often overlooked point and an issue that I think deserves more attention. The services offered at Dignitas are not free and each assisted death costs roughly $6,750 US dollars (approx. 4,100 British Pounds or 4,800 Euros). I mention the cost, which will most certainly strike many readers as crass, precisely because choosing to die in a less-than-violent manner is increasingly becoming an option only for the affluent. The debate in the UK over assisted suicide absolutely taps into the ongoing debates about social class and it is apparent that individuals with access to the necessary funds will make their way to Dignitas.

The Guardian maintains an extremely valuable news archive on Assisted Suicide and I would suggest that all Death Reference Desk readers spend some time looking through the articles.

Interestingly enough, as debates about changing the UK’s laws on assisted suicide go on and on, two American states are often used as models. Both Oregon and Washington State have Death with Dignity Act laws and the Oregon law is often cited (and used) as a leading example of a rigorously reviewed, fair law. The Oregon Death with Dignity Act has even withstood judicial review by the United States Supreme Court (Gonzales v. Oregon 2006)

The UK’s assisted dying debate will most certainly continue as will the numbers of people choosing to die at Dignitas. This is a topic that I will also bring to the Death Reference Desk on a regular basis.

Categories
Death + the Law Grief + Mourning Monuments + Memorials

Roadside Memorials Face Roadblocks

Should Roadside Memorials Be Banned?
New York Times (July 12, 2009)

As part of their “Room for Debate” series, the New York Times provides five varying perspectives (along with well over a hundred reader comments so far) on the issue of roadside and neighborhood memorials. These shrines of grief—including crosses, photos, flowers, stuffed animals and other mementos—spring up seemingly spontaneously at the sites of accidental death and murder.

With most of them displayed on public property along highways and city sidewalks, however, opinions vary on their appropriateness and legality. Are such memorials safety hazards for decelerating, distracted motorists and, for the ones including religious symbols, violations of church and state? Or are they “outlaw” expressions of the people that will not and cannot (and perhaps should not) be suppressed?

One contributor is Melissa Villanueva, director and producer of Resting Places, a documentary about roadside memorials that explores the controversy in depth. The film is presently seeking distribution—here’s a trailer.

Categories
Cemeteries Death + Crime

Emmett Till: Forgetting to Remember

As an English major undergrad, I plowed through reams upon reams of literature and literary critique, cultural studies tomes and other articles and books. Nearly a decade later, one of the readings that struck me and stuck with me the most is John Edgar Wideman’s “The Killing of Black Boys.” Originally published in Essence in 1997, the essay describes the nightmare within Wideman’s nightmares: the battered, ruined face of Emmett Till, the black youth murdered in Mississippi in 1955.

Emmett TillTill’s crime? Being from Chicago and aged fourteen, removed from his city-slick, less racially tense environment, Till was tragically ignorant of other people’s ignorance, prejudice and devastating cruelty. This baby-faced, dapper teen, showing off for a clutch of country boys, made a pass at a white woman. For that, he was abducted, mutilated and murdered.

An all-white jury found his accused killers not guilty; the two men later admitted to the slaying and described it in detail for a magazine article. Outrage over Till’s death and the swift, sham acquittal helped galvanize the civil rights movement. Buried in Burr Oak Cemetery in suburban Chicago, Till was briefly exhumed in 2005 in hopes of finding more clues to his murder; he was then reinterred in a different coffin.

Chicago, the nation and world have been shocked to learn of the recent and possibly years-long scandal at Oak Burr. Four workers are accused of digging up and dismembering bodies then dumping the remains in shallow, mass graves. Freshly vacant plots were then resold with the families of the deceased new and old equally unsuspecting.

While the perpetrators of this scheme thought better than to disturb Till’s grave, they did leave his original coffin to rust amidst rubble in a shack, despite collecting donations to create a lasting memorial. Considering the flocks of tearful families searching for loved ones’ graves, it hardly takes the addition of Emmett Till to make this transgression more disturbing, maddening and deeply sad. After all, for those with the depravity to disinter and tear apart bodies for profit, shoving the dilapidated coffin of some old civil rights’ icon in a shed would barely seem like a crime at all.

But it is, and it hurts. It abuses American history, as twisted and painful it already is. It hurts that for many, Emmett Till is a hazy memory if not a total unknown. And it hurts that he had to be further forgotten—conned and disgraced—to be remembered again, and for some, learned of for the first time.

Whether or not you’re familiar with Emmett Till’s story, I encourage you to read Wideman’s “The Killing of Black Boys” (this linked copy is clearly transcribed; forgive the handful of typos). It is more a personal narrative than a rendering of history; off the scholarly track, perhaps, though the history we remember, how it affects us and how we choose to tell it is just as powerful and revealing. The essay can also be found in the book, The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative, edited by Christopher Metress (find in your local library). For more general resources, the Emmett Till Wikipedia article has a number of readings and external links.

Categories
cremation Death + Art / Architecture Monuments + Memorials

Mixing Death: Cremated Remains in the Ink of Memorial Tattoos

Olympia Resident Has Ink, Cremated Ashes Under His Skin
Christian Hill, The Olympian (July 10, 2009)

Memorial Tattoo with Cremated Remains This is a wonderful article on Memorial Tattooing, or a tattoo that an individual chooses after a person or pet dies. The article also explains an old tattooing practice, namely the putting of cremated remains in the ink used for the tattoo. After my parents die I plan on having their cremated remains mixed into ink for new memorial tattoos.

Categories
Burial Eco-Death

Promession: Lose Your Life, Leave a Tree

Kim posted a couple weeks ago about promession, the process by which a body is embrittled in a bath of liquid nitrogen, crumpled using vibrations then sterilized by freeze drying, rendering a corpse into compost. Promession avoids the harsh chemicals and environmental pollutants of traditional burial and cremation, making it a green alternative while providing the requisite sanitization of death and emotional distance from simply dumping fresh bodies into the earth (the original “organic compost” method).

Today I discovered an animation depicting the process. I fear the multiple angle re-enactments of a tree growing out of a corpse’s pulverized chest may shift the intended “gee whiz!” effect closer to “oh dear god,” but it’s still an interesting infoplug, provided you’re not eating a delicious, ruby apple, or plan to, ever.

Categories
Death + Popular Culture Death + Technology Grief + Mourning

Pocket Cemetery, the Breakfast Bar of Grief

Bereaving the latest celebrity death, or perhaps your dog? Need an on-the-go cemetery for your on-the-go life? Want to pay $2.99 to type “RIP” and click send into an unread utter void, also known as the Prayer function? There’s an app for that.

Pocket Cemetery for the iPhone allows you to inscribe virtual tombstones for dead celebrities (including Michael Jackson!), and even people you actually knew, or pets you had one time. Creator Wayne Perry calls it the “little virtual heaven in the palm of your hand.” I call it crap.

Okay, okay… it’s easy to rip on this — tear it up, that is, not let it rest. But the immediate ridiculousness aside, I am curious about the nature of the demand for the product (Perry boasts over a 1000 pixel tomb hungry customers since his YouTube MJ pitch above). If placing real flowers on a real grave is a symbolic expression of mourning, missing and honoring the dead, what does it mean to enact this symbol… symbolically, sending nothing to nowhere? Is it a matter of convenience, as so many cell and web apps tout? Perry himself cites not being able to visit his grandmother’s grave — and most people will never get to visit their favorite celebrities’ final places of rest. Or is it reluctance to do the real thing for real, and the need to have a familiar technological, commercial wrought-and-bought interface by which to mediate grief?

If you need a phone app to remind and assist you in feeling sad, you’re doing it wrong. Yet, we’re not just comfortable with such simulacra, we rely on them to provide simultaneous detachment and engagement — distance from things unsettling while providing the feeling we’re doing something meaningful. Unlike other web and communication tools, however, with virtual memorializing, the parties with whom we are obliquely interacting happen to be dead. It’s hard to say how much that complicates the matter, though it does seem to underscore the long understood: mourning and grief is all about us.

I can also see shock-factor irony taking part in its popularity. If I were hip enough for an iPhone, I might throw down for a Pocket Cemetery to celebrate its bad taste, just as I’d love to have a Snuggie to parade around parties in the wee hours of lesser sanity. The PC has already attracted some unintended use, such as people creating graveyards filled with people they wished were dead. “I didn’t design it for that,” laments Perry as IPhonePocketCemetery on YouTube.

Fair enough — but I hope he’s not surprised he’s hard to take seriously, especially after his follow-up pitch with Billy Mays, whom he credits his own talent, and Farrah Fawcett: “I have a lot of memories of her. I was a 15-year-old boy with that sexy poster hanging on my wall.”

Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think eulogic sincerity — or pitchman integrity — exactly comes through with the fond reminiscences of being a horny teenager.

Categories
Death + Popular Culture

Body (We Are the) Worlds: Michael Jackson to Be Plastinated

Michael Jackson Set to Be Embalmed at the O2 Centre after Missing the Deadline for Cryogenic Freezing
Mail on Sunday (June 26, 2009)

It looks like Michael Jackson might get his world tour after all — or at least a perpetual stream of curious fans trotting past his moonwalking corpse. The day following the singer’s sudden death, Gunther von Hagens, the macabre but brilliant mind behind the controversial Body Worlds, announced a months-ago made agreement with the Jackson family to plastinate MJ’s body.

We can’t say we’re surprised — yet we can’t yet put a finger on what it all means, still surrounding by the thundering pulse of celebrity death tributes and tears. Is this a fitting, never-ending end for a bizarre life and (as of yet) mysterious death? An ensured, eternal spotlight for the consummate showman? A monster, as some would have him, made all the more horrific? The last and lasting exploitation of a fragile man full of ghosts? The list goes on, and oh, how the masses shall writhe with shock and delight…

Stay tuned.

Categories
Death + Crime Death + Humor

Cannabis Corpse

The AP reported that on Monday, police discovered 70 marijuana plants in the attic of the Helena Funeral Chapel. I didn’t intend to post this because eh, it’s Montana — who’s surprised, and who cares? Lo and behold, a couple of days later in Dallas, 100 pounds of pot were discovered in a casket during a traffic stop.

I know death is chronic, but seriously folks.

(To my surprise but-not-really, Cannabis Corpse is in fact the name of a band, not be confused, of course, with Cannibal Corpse.)

Categories
Cemeteries

Cairo’s City of the Dead (…and Living) Face Eviction

Razing the City of the Dead to Breathe New Life into Cairo
Matt Bradley, The National, Abu Dhabi (June 18, 2009)

“Living around the Dead Helps Me See How We Will End Up. It Makes Me Feel Closer to God”
Matt Bradley, The National, Abu Dhabi (June 18, 2009)

Imagine you and all your neighbors being evicted from your neighborhood, except your neighborhood is a cemetery. And you’re not dead.

An astonishing estimated 100,000 to 120,000 Cairenes live among the centuries-old tombs and on graves in the four-mile City of the Dead, locally known simply as el’arafa (“the cemetery”). As part of city revitalization initiatives, the Egyptian government plans to turn out the residents—living and dead alike—to convert the cemetery into a park to increase Cairo’s public green space.

Creative Commons Flickr image by 10 Ninjas Steve
Creative Commons Flickr image by 10 Ninjas Steve

Some live in the cemetery to be near dead ancestors. In a city with severe housing shortages, however, most cemetery residents have no where else to go. The rent is nonexistent and the homes are comparatively larger, quieter and more private than other cheap, urban housing. Despite a few advantages to the unusual location, the residents, who include newcomers to the city looking for work as well as graduates from prestigious universities, suffer the social stigma of dwelling among the dead. “People living in the city think we’re twisted or sick for living with the dead. But I have gotten used to it. It’s my home,” says one woman.

Some are more than happy to accept the ministry’s offer of relocated housing, presumably with the running water and electricity that many cemetery homes lack. Others are not so keen. Says one elderly woman, living in a one-room flat attached to a mausoleum, “Of course I would say no. We’ve been living here for years. It’s a quiet and nice area. Why would they want to move us?”

Other Resources:

Tomb with a View by Hugh Levinson (BBC)

Cities of the Dead by Heba Fatteen Bizzari (Tour Egypt)

City of the Dead: a History of Cairo’s Cemetery Communities
by Jeffrey A. Nedoroscik (1997, Westport, Conn: Bergin & Garvey) Google BooksAmazon
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