My grandmother grew up in Brooklyn in the early 1900’s. She told me a story about how she had a mischievous friend who dared her to go into a house if it had a wreath on the front door, indicating that there had been a death in the family. My grandmother said she was too scared to go herself, but her friend would enter the house in order to go look at the dead person displayed in the parlor.
Just before she died last fall, I went to see this same grandmother on her deathbed at the hospital where she spent her last few days. There had been talk of moving her home but it became apparent that she was too weak to transport. The room was clean and bright and my grandmother seemed to disappear into the white sheets, her face obscured by an oxygen mask. Those of us who saw her in those last days and hours kept waiting for the last breath. We knew it was close but we kept asking questions. What will it sound like? What will it look like? What will she feel? Will we watch her struggle? Touching her hand, two days before the last breath did finally come (I heard it was big and steady, like a sigh), was the closest I have been to another’s death—that is, until last Thursday.
Last week I started occupational therapy school and on our second day, we all headed down to the cadaver lab for our first dissection lesson. My group of five women was assigned to body number 19. That’s all the information I will receive about this person, other than what I discover for myself, through the dissection process. I know he freckled in the sun, I know he had to stoop in order not to hit his head as he passed under low ceilings. And I’m beginning to know a lot of anatomical things about him too, which is, after all, the purpose of my lab course.
Another purpose, however, is revealing itself to me. As I stand over the trapezius muscle, trimming fat and connective tissue away so I can see where the muscle articulates with bones, I sometimes brush his arm with my own. I look down and see the wrinkles of his elbow and I think, “This is a person,” and then I go back to the exposed muscles to further my examination. When we clean up at the end of lab, I take a paper towel and wipe down the table and I also wipe his cheek, where some embalming fluid has dripped down. His cheek. Where he was probably kissed a thousand times.
Not too long ago, as is evidenced by my grandmother’s story, ordinary people in America had direct contact with their dead. You might have known was it was like to wash a body and prepare it for burial. You might have known what skin feels like a day after the heart stops. Modern day embalming is meant to mask this process, of course. The cadaver I am working on is embalmed for preservation purposes, so that we may study him. But many people are embalmed for the express purpose of being put on view at a funeral, so that the family may recognize them as they looked in life. Of course, if you’ve ever been to an open-casket funeral, you know that no amount of chemicals and make up can make this person look merely asleep.
The embalming chemicals impede the process of decay, both above and below ground. Once a person is buried in an expensive casket, the chemicals slowly seep into the surrounding soil. There is a movement in this country that aims to reconsider these practices in favor of a more earth-friendly, less-wasteful, more meaningful burial. Mark Harris wrote a book called Grave Matters on this topic.
I’m grateful to the man who donated his body so that I might learn from him—about muscles, bones and organs, but also about how we end our days on the planet in this human form, and whose hands are our shepherds.
The very awesome Foxfire books have a section on home funerals. I think it is among the most beautiful words I’ve ever read. What more tender and loving way to say goodbye to someone than to wash and dress their body for burial? For your friends and neighbors to sit up with you all night, sharing the joys of memories of life well lived as well as the grief of life passing? Death is big business, but it needn’t be. Another tradition to reclaim…
Recently we watched a Japanese film called “Departures”
It was an incredibly moving film about a man who finds himself in the employ of an older man whose job it is to prepare bodies for burial. The man has turned this into an art which is performed in front of the families. He teaches the younger man his craft. I don’t want to say much more other than watch it. It was incredibly moving and showed how being there at death just as being there at birth, can be just as powerful in ushering that soul onto their next stage.
Yeah yeah! Ushering the soul through the transition from birth to death to birth, and ushering our souls through the transitions as well.
Growing up in a Catholic family really taught me to appreciate the fact of the dead body, since 9 out of 10 times at a funeral I was going to see one. So while my fam isn’t going to wash and dress and hang out with their dead relatives in their house and smudge the corpse with sage anytime soon, they do sit in front of the body for a few moments during the wake, sometimes touch it, admire it, cry and laugh about it, and basically get all Italian on it…
I recently watched “A Family Undertaking,” about people who use their legal rights to take care of their dead family members the way we were meant to.
I sought this touching film out after having seen some Memento Mori, funereal keepsake photos. They were shown as a novelty, to show how “weird” Victorian people were. They used to prop their family members up in uniforms or gowns, next to their siblings, or being held in Mama’s lap, often with eyes drawn onto the eyelids.
I couldn’t help but be fascinated by this. I wasn’t repulsed like many people commenting on these pictures. I wanted to know more.
I read up on how people took care of their loved ones; how, culturally, death was seen and dealt with. It stopped being scary at all. I had been interested in Victorian art lately, with all of its ghoulish themes–the use of a loved one’s hair, for instance. I found an image of someone’s daughter, from what seemed like very, very far away ago. I made it into a lovely piece, a Christmas tree ornament, actually. I used forget-me-nots and other things a Victorian lady might use to honor her daughters’ memory.
I don’t know how the girl died, or how she was loved in her life. But I stopped feeling like I was some kind of Vulture for Xenophilia, and instead, I honored the child, in a way she might have understood. She festoons the tree alongside other old traditions many of us today would react to negatively–next to Krampuses, Christmas demons, for instance.
That ghoulishness I felt went away as I remembered my first Catholic funeral. I saw what modern industry did to my husband’s Grandmother. If anything is creepy and ghoulish, it was that. Gabby was literally trussed up and festooned like a holiday centerpiece. She wasn’t even going to be buried in that thing–it was for the “viewing.”
So I saw the film, and saw the humble cardboard boxes decorated by children and friends of the deceased and I thought–that makes sense. How can we make peace with death if its institutionalized and whisked away from us for convenience.
I heartily recommend “A Family Undertaking.”