Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

Funeral Rites

For the past 18 years, the Pentagon has carefully kept reporters at bay whenever the bodies of slain service women and men arrived home from war zones. The Obama administration lifted this blanket prohibition on press coverage of returning war dead – the new rule allows the families of fallen soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines to decide whether reporters can be present. Sunday evening, the Pentagon gave the press access to Dover Air Force Base to photograph and report on the arrival of the body of Air Force Staff Sgt. Phillip Myers of Virginia, who was killed in Afghanistan on April 4th. Permission was granted by his family.

The photographs of the ceremony accompanying Sgt. Myers’s body reminded me of the solemn importance we place on tradition and rituals that help us manage the death of our loved ones and neighbors. We humans have crafted a wide array of strategies for tending the dead, celebrating their transition, and mourning their loss. So it’s not a surprise that there are many interesting books about human ways of managing death.  Because it was the photographs of Sgt. Myers's return the the U.S. that got me started on this bibliographic train of thought, the first book I turned to was Soldier Dead, Michael Sledge's thoughtful examination of the United States military's approach to handling the bodies of service people who are killed in action.  Sledge looks at the rituals of military funerals, examines the military's general philosophy about slain personnel, discusses the concerns of families of people who are missing in action, and considers how the military's commitment to locating and recovering bodies affects the United States' relationships with other countries. 

For every culture, indeed for every subculture, there are important elements of a good funeral – the right music, an appropriate remembrance in words or flowers, a ritualized demonstration of the emotion of loss.  But one of the first things many of us think to do when someone we know has died have to do with food. Bake a casserole and bring it to the widow. Plan a memorial lunch. Cook something for the pot luck at the wake. Lisa Rogak’s Death Warmed Over provides a tour of funeral food and the rituals associated with it, from different countries and cultures, for example: raisin pie, traditional at Amish funerals; Norwegian funeral cake, which is given to the head of the mourning family by guests; bowls of rice, placed on top of the coffin at some Vietnamese funerals to weigh down the lid and keep evil spirits out; and kola nuts, which are passed to guests after a traditional Senegalese burial.

For a broader look at human funeral traditions, you might turn to The History of Death: Burial Customs and Funeral Rites, From the Ancient World to Modern Times. Author Michael Kerrigan covers a lot of ground, from the beginning of our ideas of an afterlife to the responsibilities the living have to honor or serve the dead in different cultures. Along the way, he explains funeral rites, mourning traditions, superstitions, and stories about the dying, the dead, and the survivors from many cultures throughout our history.

In the 1960s, Jessica Mitford’s expose of corrupt and confusing practices in the funeral business, The American Way of Death, climbed to the very top of the best seller lists, and inspired new legislation that reformed the funeral industry. In 1996, at the time of her own death, Mitford had just finished a thoroughly revised new edition, The American Way of Death Revisited, expanded with chapters on multinational undertaking and cemetery corporations, grassroots activists who are trying to provide access to low-cost funerals, and many other fascinating developments in the funeral industry. Mitford’s explanations and analysis are wry and thought-provoking, and the book is a surprisingly fast read.

The library has so many materials about funerals, death rituals and traditions, and related topics that it was hard to get to this short list of interesting books! So, I can’t help but tell you: if you’re interested, you can also read about the history of medical cadavers, of cremation, and of roadside memorial crosses. There’s a book about death and burial in the time of Jesus, one recording the details of the funerals of famous people, and another made up entirely of facsimiles of celebrities’ death certificates. There are serveral documentaries about unusual cemeteries.  And in the world of fiction, of course, there are any number of novels about undertakers and pathologists. There’s lots to read.