Memorializing Death and Dying

(from my homily today)

Today we often learn about the deaths of friends via email and then we sign virtual memory books on the internet. Funerals and memorials are as varied as the people they celebrate, as are lasting visual tokens, from tombstones to urns. Yesterday, many of us attended the memorial service yesterday and experienced the music and memories that commemorated her amazing life. I carried away from the service a very strong visual image of gardens and flowers. When I remember a friend’s memorial earlier this year, I see light. Tutus dance in my head when I think of a little girl’s funeral last year. When I recall another fellow congregant, I hear Thomas Jefferson. Americans might still be a long way from being comfortable with the dying process, but we have in many ways altered and embraced death and its commemoration.

At the same time that funerary practices are becoming extremely personalized, we seem to have lost a united, public, national approach to commemorating the dead. Nationally, we have only recently completed a memorial to the veterans of World War II and we are still unsure of how to appropriately commemorate the events of September 11^th, almost 7 years ago. Meanwhile, we continue to lose soldiers overseas. How will we memorialize their deaths? Even though images of our war dead are available under the Freedom of Information Act, they are rarely seen. Flags in Connecticut are often flown at half-mast, but this is one of our only visual reminders of the dead. Indeed, Memorial Day itself is questioned—veterans’ groups decry the celebration of the holiday which was moved from May 30 to a convenient three-day weekend of sales, barbecues, and car races. Indeed, the most affecting public commemorations of death—the Vietnam Memorial, the New York Times obituaries for every victim of the attacks of September 11, even the National AIDS Quilt--have all been individualized memorials.

At this crossroads in both private and public mourning, and near this holiday which honors our fallen military men and women, I want to glance back at the way a few cultures have rendered their grief, their loss, their memorials visually, specifically two cultures that took the commemoration of the dead to new heights, comingling public and private mourning: the ancient Egyptians and the Victorians.

It is often hard to present a balanced picture of bygone cultures based on their surviving texts and artifacts. Oftentimes, it is grave goods that do indeed survive but these rarely give us a well-rounded picture of a culture—image if we were to judge 20^th-century American culture by what citizens have buried with their dead? In the case of Ancient Egypt, however, paying attention to their funerary practices is not out of step with their actual cultural practices, as memorializing the dead was a major facet of life. To simplify and summarize—mind you, I’m condensing about 3000 years of religious thought (and how much are we like our ancestors 3000 years ago?), Egyptian beliefs focused heavily on the afterlife, with the preservation of the body being central to the soul’s survival. Thus, mummification was key. During this process, the lungs, liver, stomach, and intestines were preserved in canopic jars, often decorated with the heads of the sons of Horus. The heart was left in place, while the brain was, as I’m sure most of you have heard, removed through the nose and discarded as unimportant. The body was embalmed, wrapped in linens with amulets, and placed in the sarcophagi and tombs that have so enticed robbers and so entranced popular imagination.

In this mummy case from the Art Institute of Chicago, dating to the 10^th century BCE, several of the standard mortuary symbols are visible. The hawk-headed god Horus escorts the deceased and mummified Paankhenamun to the underworld and presents him to Osiris, the ruler of the underworld. The inscriptions surrounding them mention, “may he give a mortuary offering of food and viands, oxen and geese, incense, clothing and every good and pure thing for Osiris.” Around them are winged dung beetles and numerous grave offerings.

And indeed, grave goods were central to the survival of the soul. Tombs were filled and covered with representations and actual good for the afterlife—pictures, engravings, models, and real food, homes, tools, clothing, animals, are preserved, giving us a picture of Egyptian life through death. A soul needed food, friends, furniture, fun. While we often recall the elaborate tombs of the royal rulers, such as the pyramids of Giza, ordinary citizens participated in this cult of the dead as well.

In fact, while Egyptian funerary traditions are perhaps best well known, they are in no way an isolated occurrence. In Viking tradition, great warriors and leaders were buried in long boats such as at Gokstad and Sutton Hoo, complete with armor, jewelry, and other goods. In ancient China, the first emperor Qin was buried in an elaborate mausoleum, along with thousands of statues of terracotta soldiers and horses, no two alike. The importance of the ritual honoring of the dead continues in China. Recent headlines in American papers report the disruption of typical mourning practices in China, where there are more than 50,000 victims of the recent quake in Sichuan province. Neither the Han majority who typically cremate the deceased nor the Qiang who generally bury the dead are able to carry out their traditions, as bodies are being quickly buried in mass graves with little or no ability to identify them. Only posters, reminiscent of the ones in New York after September 11, can commemorate their dead now.

It should be no surprise that the Egyptians were an obsession of another highly ritualized culture dedicated to the mourning and commemoration of its dead. The Victorians, in both England and the United States, were fascinated with the relatively new study of Egyptology, which can be said to begin with Napoleon’s scholars records of Egypt at the end of the 18^th century and to the translation of the Rosetta Stone in 1822. The Victorians, while perhaps not as consumed with the afterlife as the Egyptians, did take their mourning seriously. Epitomizing this dedication to mourning was Queen Victoria herself, who wore deepest black for 40 years in honor of her beloved husband Albert (almost twice as long as they were married). But the complicated rules and rituals of mourning were followed at almost all levels of society. As soon as a person died, clocks were stopped, mirrors covered, crepe hung, straw laid in the streets to muffle the sounds of horses, and funeral clothes and black-lined stationery ordered. Unrelieved black, trimmed in crepe and accompanied by jet jewelry entwined with the hair of the deceased were worn first, later progressing to gray, mauve or lavender, and then white, or “half-mourning.” Wives mourned husbands for two years, their parents for 1 year, grandparents half that, down to 4 weeks for first cousins. What a widow could and couldn’t do—famously captured in the ballroom scene of Gone With the Wind when Scarlett O’Hara in full mourning for her deceased husband dances with Rhett Butler—was often debated, as was, indeed, the whole project of mourning, which was considered vain by some Protestants. But the importance of mourning, of grief, of memorializing the dead was never questioned and appears repeatedly in the literature and art of the period.

It was indeed, the Civil War in the U.S. that brought mourning to its highest, most public, and most artistic level. A recent book, Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War describes how 620,000 war dead profoundly changed American culture, from the difficulty of locating and identifying the lost to the creation of national cemeteries for Union Soldiers and Confederate women’s groups to look after the Southern dead. As communities mourned fallen soldiers and marked their passing with the establishment of Dedication Day in 1866, grand public monuments to soldiers were created. From Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, a memorial to the Unitarian Universalist soldier whose leadership of African-American troops is dramatized in the movie Glory to the shrines at Gettysburg, which was established as a memorial to Union soldiers in 1863 with Lincoln’s famous address. Writes Faust, "The war's staggering human cost demanded a new sense of national destiny, one designed to ensure that lives had been sacrificed for appropriately lofty ends."

While our current Iraq War bares little resemblance to the Civil War, the need, the desire to honor the fallen still exists, even when there is little other agreement regarding the war, when we do not see ourselves as a united states. Individual funerals—with balloons and favorite pop songs, video montages and shards of glass keespakes—honor individuals. But as a nation, how will we dedicate ourselves to their memory?