Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

The Uncomfortable Dead

There's a continuing problem in journalism – in order for something to be news, it has to be, well, new. This means that anomalous stories about shocking events, celebrities, and scandals get lots of press, while everyday problems languish. Los Angeles Times reporter Jill Levoy bucked this trend when she created the blog Homicide Report as a vehicle to report on the everyday murders that plague Los Angeles.  The blog reports on every Los Angeles County death that is ruled as a homicide by the county coroner, and it acts as an interactive database of homicide deaths since 2007, when it began publication.  The victims of Los Angeles County homicides are overwhelmingly Black or Latino, and overwhelmingly male, and most of their deaths would never make the news otherwise – their deaths are examples of that sort of sincere everyday problem that so often doesn't make the news.

Homicide Report honors the life and humanity of each of L.A.'s homicide victims, marking their passing, and helping to provide Angelenos with a larger set of information about the true map of lethal human conflict in their community. Slide over to the world of comic book fiction, and you'll find a similar theme in Potter's Field, by Mark Waid and Paul Azaceta. The hero, a mystery man who goes by the name John Doe, has developed a whole network of contacts (janitors, cops, morgue workers) who help him in his quest to identify each and every person buried in New York City's graveyard for unclaimed and unidentified bodies. Doe isn't solving crimes or meting out retribution, he's simply honoring forgotten people by giving them back their names. Potter's Field is dark, poignant, and ultimately, compassionate – and Azaceta's drawings are absolutely lovely.

People have always made an effort to mark the deaths of loved ones. One way that this manifests in contemporary culture is the roadside crosses and memorials friends and family erect after someone has died in a traffic accident. Holly Everett made a careful study of roadside crosses in Texas, and published her study of their place in folk culture in Roadside Crosses in Contemporary Memorial Culture. The book has many photographs and descriptions of Texas roadside crosses, but I found Everett's discussion of their symbolism to be the most interesting part of the book.  In that section, she argues that roadside crosses memorialize the dead and help survivors remember them; serve as educational tools, reminding passerby of their mortality and encouraging road safety; mark especially dangerous intersections; and act as expressions of protest and a desire for social change. Roadside Crosses is essentially an academic text, but Everett's writing is clear and her observations and analysis should be interesting to anyone who is intrigued by the use of roadside memorials. And, need I mention, it's really the only book on the topic!

Death customs and rituals often honor change, rebirth, and the cycle of life. And although in most contemporary human cultures, corpses do not decompose gently or physically foster the arrival of new life, dead bodies are used as instruments of new growth through learning, in anatomy laboratories. Every medical student learns the basics of human anatomy through the practice of dissection using real human corpses. And, surprisingly, around a hundred years ago it was typical for groups of medical students to have their photograph taken with their cadavers.  Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine, 1880-1930, by John Harley Warner and James M. Edmonson, collects hundreds of these rare images, and puts them in context with a series of essays about where cadavers came from and how they were used in dissection labs, about the development of medical schools in the U.S., and about the culture of medical students during this period.

(If you're fascinated to learn more about the history of medical dissection, corpses, and the like, I can also recommend Body of Work: Meditations on Mortality from the Human Anatomy Lab, by Christine Montross, and Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach.)