By BRAD WEISMANN
American Afterlife: Encounters in the Customs of Mourning
By Kate Sweeney
2014
University of Georgia Press
What is the landscape of death and mourning in America?
Given our potpourri of cultural traditions, the general ebb of religious
impulses, and the uniquely American terror of aging and mortality, it’s
difficult at best to sketch an outline of it. However, if anyone can delineate
its dimensions, it is Kate Sweeney.
“In a sense, death in today’s America
is always unexpected. Even when it’s
not a literal surprise, it has a power, when first encountered, to deeply jar
people who have come of age bathed in the deep unspoken conviction: This is not
what is supposed to happen to us. To me. Like those strange dreams in which we
find ourselves pushing open the door of a wing of our house we didn’t know
existed but now realize was there all along . . . “
Combining the thoroughness of a beat reporter with the skill
of an eminently readable social historian, she sets out a clear and densely
factual assessment of mourning practices, punctuated with vibrant portraits of
such industry-related individuals as a memorial tattoo artist, a funeral
chaplain, an obituary writer, an online baroness of crematory appliances, and a
photographer who has made memorial portraits of deceased newborns.
Sweeney’s ability to listen and judiciously present leads to
a plethora of diverse voices coming through, loud and clear – but it does not
exempt an appropriate and apt amount of personal statements by the author in
relation to the subject.
Sweeney’s abundance of historical detail contextualizes the
state of the art today. The Puritans had no funeral ceremonies – they buried
their dead in silence. (They did, however, love to compose funeral elegies.)
The double sweep of the evangelical Second Great Awakening and the rise of
gloomy, death-obsessed Romanticism led to a revolution in the consideration of
death and in the commemoration of the dead. Graveyards became cemeteries;
undertakers became funeral directors. In Christendom, at least, the rituals of
mourning, the length of the mourning period, and sumptuary customs as rigid as
though regulated by law.
Another shift Sweeney clocks is that of the casting aside of
Victorian era’s thanatological obsessions in response to the wholesale
slaughters of World War I. Multigenerational families, long the norm in American
life, began to fragment. Old people were a newly segregated underclass. The
aged no longer died at home but in rest homes, nursing homes, retirement homes,
old folks’ homes, senior centers . . . Likewise, the body didn’t sit up all
night on sawhorses in the front parlor.
Sweeney’s travels lead her to folks who can shoot your
remains into space, on put some of you into a necklace or brooch (the
Victorian-era funeral jewelry making a comeback!), or bury you in a nature
preserve in a wicker basket, or do it “right,” the old-fashioned way, complete
with a top-line casket (aka coffin), makeup and fine clothes for the deceased,
a viewing, a funeral, a burial. (Thanks to Sweeney, I finally understand the
transition from funeral chapel to funeral parlor to funeral home to funeral
service. Did you ever wonder why your childhood funeral homes always seemed to
be Victorian mansions? “The large houses provided social prominence, expansive
living areas upstairs for the directors’ families, and large basements that were
ideal for embalming.” Shiver.)
The stats point to a marked increase in cremations and a
decline in funeral ceremonies. All aspects of the American death industry are
in flux. Like many others, it has undergone a radical consolidation in recent
years, one largely overlooked. The old-school family businesses are falling to
corporate protocol. [NOTE: A note from Sweeney herself, just in, clarifies that this last supposition is incorrect. After inroads in the 1990s and 2000s, the preponderance of independently-owned and -run funeral services is restored.] Meanwhile, the market fragmentation has led to a lot of
non-standard, cut-out-the-middleman approaches toward the care and deposition
of the dead, and the observances and needs of the mourning. Even a seeming
firefight between obituary writers and their enthusiasts fades to nothing as
market realities destroy the beat. Death is certain, but a business model never
is.