Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

Penalty of Death

The Salem Statesman Journal reported this week that Marion County prosecutors will be seeking the death penalty in their case against Bruce and Joshua Turnridge, who are accused of aggravated murder in the deaths of two police officers in a bomb explosion at a Woodburn bank last December. Aggravated murder is the only crime for which a sentence of death is allowed in Oregon, and though the death penalty and discussion about it are relatively rare in the media here, Oregon does have a long history of executions.

And some of them have fascinating stories behind them, for example:  In 1858, Portland-area settler Danford Balch's teenaged daughter Anna eloped with a hired hand named Mortimer Stump – Balch was so angry about this that two weeks later, when he ran into Stump in a Portland bar, he followed him to the Stark Street Ferry and killed him with a shotgun blast to the head. Balch was convicted of murder and then hanged on October 17, 1859 at a public gallows set up near First and Salmon Streets while 500 people looked on. If this is the kind of grisly tale that suits your tastes, you need to check out Necktie Parties: A History of Legal Executions in Oregon 1851-1905, Diane L. Goeres-Gardner’s history of public executions in the Beaver State. In a series of short, readable chapters, Goeres-Gardner details every legal execution between 1851, when William Kendall was hanged in Salem, and 1905, when Daniel Norman Williams was hanged in The Dalles, the last man to be executed outside of the walls of the state penitentiary. (Or, if you'd rather focus on the political and legal history of executions in Oregon, take a look at A Tortured History: The Story of Capital Punishment in Oregon, by William R. Long. It's a bit more scholarly, and it focuses on the development of the institution rather than on the stories of people who were condemned to death.)

Oregon executes condemned prisoners with lethal injection, as do many other states. But lethal injection has only been widely used by government executioners in the U.S. for about 25 years – historically, prisoners have also been killed by firing squads and in gas chambers, hanged, and electrocuted. In his book Edison and the Electric Chair, Mark Essig explains that electrocution became a truly viable option when Thomas Edison, America's favorite inventor and entrepreneur, threw his weight behind the promotion of the electric chair. Interestingly, Edison was an opponent of the death penalty, but his rivalry with George Westinghouse put him under considerable financial pressure. Edison's company was providing electricity using the direct current method, which was more expensive than Westinghouse's alternating current (the system we still use today). This, Essig argues, led Edison to advocate for an electric execution chair using alternating current. Essig's history examines more than just the interpersonal and political aspects, though – he also provides thorough technical explanations of direct and alternating current, explains how the electric chair works, and describes the experiments that allowed researchers to develop the final model that was actually used for executions.

Not all executions are carried out within the framework of the formal legal system. Eliza Steelwater's The Hangman's Knot chronicles two parallel stories: the history of legal executions in the United States, and the history of lynching. Ultimately, Steelwater is looking to examine why the U.S. still employs the death penalty when most other democracies have long outlawed it. Steelwater is an opponent of the death penalty and it shows in her writing, but anyone interested in this history, regardless of their own political position, should find the book fascinating.

Medical Miracle

Last week, the world learned the identity of the person who received the first successful face transplant performed in the U.S. – Connie Culp of Ohio underwent a 22-hour operation last December during which doctors replaced about 80% of her face with tissue from a donor. Amazing, right?

Connie Culp's groundbreaking procedure sounds like science fiction, but other transplant surgeries have proven so sucessful that they don't get much comment from the public. Curious about how we got this far? Check out Transplant: From Myth to Reality. In a straightforward but engaging style, author Nicholas L. Tilney traces the history of organ transplantation from ancient times to the present, with an especial focus on the development of kidney and heart transplants during the middle of the 20th century.  If you're still curious, you can find more current information and facts about organ transplants at the National Library of Medicine's health information website MedlinePlus.

In order for people to receive organ transplants, someone has to donate their organs. Some organs are donated from living donors – often family members or other loved ones. But there are organs, like the heart and corneas, that no one wants to do without. These are gifts from beyond the grave, given by with the consent of the donor or their family (in Oregon and Washington, you can register as an organ donor at Donate Life Northwest). In her book Body Brokers, Annie Cheney explores a related, but much shadier world, in which "body brokers" buy and sell human remains for medical research and training, commercial use by medical gadget companies, and for use in military bomb tests. Horrific! But fascinating.

Lesley A. Sharp discusses some of the same questions in her book Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies, but she takes more of a sociological angle. What is the value we place on a donor's body, and how do we memorialize the people who donate their organs? What does it mean for human body parts to function as commodities, with monetary value placed on their transfer and use? Can we manage the ethcial challenges of transplants between species? These are lofty questions, and Sharp's analysis is probing and intelligent, but eminently accessible.

On a lighter, more ironic note, transplants, transplant surgery, and transplant patients have always been fodder for fiction, of the human drama sort and the more speculative, science fiction sort. And sometimes these stories are, as they say, ripped from the headlines. When convicted killer Gary Gilmore was executed by the state of Utah in 1977, he asked that his organs be donated for transplant. The British punk rock group the Adverts wrote a hit song, "Gary Gilmore's Eyes," in which the singer wakes up more than a little startled to realize that he's been given the gift of a murderer's sight. Here are the Adverts performing the song on Top of the Pops in August, 1977:

(You can also get "Gary Gilmore's Eyes" on CD at the library. It's on Crossing the Red Sea With The Adverts, and on disc two of No Thanks!: The 70s Punk Rebellion.)

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.

Death and Politics

Yep, it's elections week (finally) and many of us are waiting with baited breath for the outcome of Tuesday, November 4. I debated about whether to post my own ideas on this crazy election year, but as I was reading an article from OPB about undecided voters, I spied a topic from last week's "Think Out Loud" on Cemetery Life. Perhaps it's because I am eagerly awaiting my hold for Neil Gaiman's newest novel The Graveyard Book, but this story really got me thinking...and about something other than the election, which I think makes it perfect for a blog posting!

I went to school at Lewis and Clark College here in Portland, and if you've ever traveled to or from the Lewis and Clark campus you've probably noticed a large cemetery that butts up right against it. This is the River View Cemetery which has been around since 1882. Back in school, my boyfriend (now husband) and I found the cemetery romantic - lingering teenage angst I suppose - and we would sit amongst the headstones and gaze upon Mt. Hood (they do have a wonderful view). I bring this up because cemeteries can mean different things to different people, romantic to some, scary to many, and a window into the past for cultural historian Marilyn Yalom. Her book The American Resting Place explores America's history as seen through its cemeteries and burial grounds. Most interesting perhaps are the beautiful black and white photographs found in the front of the book, that were taken by the author's son.

For Shannon Applegate, cemeteries mean familial responsibility. Applegate inherited her family's small cemetery in Yoncalla, Oregon back in 1997 and in her book Living Among Headstones: Life in a Country Cemetery she recounts her story of becoming sexton after never having worked in a cemetery before. This includes sorting through decades of small notes written on scraps of paper by caretakers of the past, the stomach wrenching despair of having to bury one's own family and friends, and the day-to-day decisions of what to do with all the dirt you get from digging a burial vault. It all makes for an interesting and poignant memoir. As a side note, in the back of the book Applegate includes an iconography of the most common symbols found on headstones. For instance, corn on the headstone signifies that the dearly departed lived to a ripe old age!

And we mustn't forget that cemeteries aren't just for humans. In what one of my dearest friends describes as the best documentary film ever made, Gates of Heaven explores the world of pet cemeteries. Directed by the famous documentarian Errol Morris, this particular film describes the plight of Floyd "Mac" McClure and his lifelong dream to provide a peaceful place for people to bury their beloved pets. But more than that, it is a brilliant look into the lives of middle-class folks in 1970's America, and the interviews are simply priceless!

But no matter how you view cemeteries, here's hoping the outcome of Tuesday's election is a bit more cheery than your average graveyard!