Death is a strange thing in America. It has largely been outsourced to an industry built around the tasteful
(or questionably tasteful) and safe and legal handling of the dead and those who mourn them. My mom, thinking back to her own childhood, told me that she remembers wakes held in her parents’ house. The body would be laid out in the parlor for three days and the whole community would filter in and out, bringing food and condolences and booze and company. It was more like a party or social gathering than what we have today.
And what do we have today? Is there an American way to mourn, other than this focus on the institutions that handle the dead (funeral homes, cemeteries)? I suppose the church is where Americans come together to mourn, but which one? I don’t think there is an
American tradition anymore, if there ever was – funerary traditions are a cultural inheritance based on region (a jazz funeral in New Orleans) or ethnicity (a traditional Chinese funeral in Chinatown) or nationality (boatloads of whiskey for the Irish-Americans) or some motley combination.
I was taken with the ways in which our institutions simultaneously exhibit and conceal death. Last weekend there was a funeral planner (at least, I think that’s what he was) who handled logistics and crowd movement, and the process of preparing the body was done in a part of the funeral home no one ever sees. At the viewing, I was struck by how lifelike the body was – lifelike but simultaneously and decidedly not alive. It was as if the poor kid had just come in from a jog in the cold, laid down, crossed his hands, and gone. And this was a carefully crafted piece of theater.
It all left me feeling pretty unprepared for death. What are my traditions? Do I have any? What songs do I want played at my funeral (Nick Drake’s “Things Behind the Sun,” and a happy track). Why do we have to make our dead look as though they just finished a badminton match, or a bracing dip in Walden pond? It’s all, I suppose, one of those cross-that-bridge-when-I-come-to-it things.
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