Encountering the Body
When my father was in seminary, I would sometimes accompany him on visits to a woman named Edith who was approaching the end of her life. She wore a brown wig fashioned in an elaborate updo. Her caretaker Jenna would serve us Neapolitan ice cream. My sister and I would point to our favorite porcelain figurines displayed in a row of glass cabinets. When Edith died, her corpse was the first I ever saw. At her funeral, I approached the kneeler before her open casket. I was terrified as I looked down at a cold waxy face tinted with rouge. I could tell she was dead. There was something absent. I could feel this absence reverberating around her body within the sanctuary, paradoxically creating a form or presence. I kept looking back at her coffin, even after it was closed. During the memorial service, I always knew exactly where it was in relation to myself in the room.
Years later while I was traveling in 2016, I became engrossed in a newly released memoir written by mortician Caitlin Doughty. She writes about her experience entering the funeral industry and learning how to embalm and cremate bodies. She points out all the lengths the industrialized world has developed to prevent regular encounters with the dead. It is a privilege to go most of your life without seeing fewer corpses than you can count on a hand. Most are shuffled by in refrigerated trucks on highways and you don’t realize you are stuck next to them in traffic. When we do see them, they are embalmed, painted, and framed in decorative coffins. Doughty explains that dead bodies do not pose any threats, and in fact, it is more dangerous to your health to fly on an airplane than it is to be in the same room as a corpse. She suggests that perhaps their very absence from our every day is the root cause of the major problems in the modern world.
What if we were to not ignore our mortality but embrace it?
When we look at corpses we reflect on our own aliveness and the meaning that entails. In the cemetery I do not see corpses or bodies. I see their absences.
When my father was in seminary, I would sometimes accompany him on visits to a woman named Edith who was approaching the end of her life. She wore a brown wig fashioned in an elaborate updo. Her caretaker Jenna would serve us Neapolitan ice cream. My sister and I would point to our favorite porcelain figurines displayed in a row of glass cabinets. When Edith died, her corpse was the first I ever saw. At her funeral, I approached the kneeler before her open casket. I was terrified as I looked down at a cold waxy face tinted with rouge. I could tell she was dead. There was something absent. I could feel this absence reverberating around her body within the sanctuary, paradoxically creating a form or presence. I kept looking back at her coffin, even after it was closed. During the memorial service, I always knew exactly where it was in relation to myself in the room.
Years later while I was traveling in 2016, I became engrossed in a newly released memoir written by mortician Caitlin Doughty. She writes about her experience entering the funeral industry and learning how to embalm and cremate bodies. She points out all the lengths the industrialized world has developed to prevent regular encounters with the dead. It is a privilege to go most of your life without seeing fewer corpses than you can count on a hand. Most are shuffled by in refrigerated trucks on highways and you don’t realize you are stuck next to them in traffic. When we do see them, they are embalmed, painted, and framed in decorative coffins. Doughty explains that dead bodies do not pose any threats, and in fact, it is more dangerous to your health to fly on an airplane than it is to be in the same room as a corpse. She suggests that perhaps their very absence from our every day is the root cause of the major problems in the modern world.
What if we were to not ignore our mortality but embrace it?
When we look at corpses we reflect on our own aliveness and the meaning that entails. In the cemetery I do not see corpses or bodies. I see their absences.
Doughty, Caitlin. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory. Leicester: Thorpe, 2016.