Book Read Free

Making an Exit

Page 10

by Sarah Murray


  Born in the midst of conflict, embalming served a number of needs. It preserved the body during the journey home. It gave families certainty that those they’d lost had been correctly identified. Most critically, by making them look as if they were merely asleep, it created the “beautiful memory picture,” as today’s funeral directors would call it, needed to fulfill the Ars Moriendi requirements. By providing visual evidence that the individual had experienced a Good Death, the fledgling embalming industry delivered more than well-preserved corpses—it gave families the confidence that the souls of their loved ones were on their way to heaven.

  * * *

  Before leaving Palermo, I return to the Capuchin Catacombs for one more tour of the dank corridors and their unsettling array of bodies. As the monk hands me my ticket, he gives me a knowing look, as if to say, “See—you think you’re horrified by this place but you’re actually fascinated.” He’s right. And what’s perhaps most arresting is the range of emotions on display here. While the “Beautiful Memory Picture” of the modern embalmed decedent creates an image of rest and peace, there’s no evidence of it in this Sicilian crypt. Here, gravity combined with years of decay has endowed the occupants with such a ghoulish range of expressions that even Waugh’s debonair Joyboy would’ve had a hard time fixing them into something more acceptable.

  With skulls sinking onto shoulder blades, many of the figures have acquired a melancholy shrug. Others simply smile, but with an expression that’s turned into an unsettling grimace. Worse still, many of them appear to have picked up the same type of food poisoning I came down with in China. With arms crossed over their bellies, they appear to be suffering from painful stomach disruptions. In fact, the twisted, tormented torsos look as if they’re struggling to break free of their niches to make a dash for the bathroom.

  One woman wearing a blue-and-white striped dress and what were clearly once smart kid gloves has a particularly striking pose. With her head tilted back, chin sticking out, and empty eyes rolling toward the heavens, she seems to be in some sort of physical agony—or is it spiritual passion? Anyone who’s seen the Ecstasy of St. Teresa will know the pose. Like Bernini’s shockingly sensual sculpture in St. Peter’s, Rome, her head is thrown back, her mouth open (whether in pain or pleasure is uncertain). But unlike the beautiful sculpted-marble face of St. Teresa, this woman’s features have imploded, leaving her with a mash of crumpled yellow leather.

  For nineteenth-century British writer Catherine Gore, the contrast between the attire of the unmarried women and their decayed facial features was most disturbing. While they were “arrayed in their white robes, with their spotless coronals [small metal crowns symbolizing virginity] upon their brows,” she remarks, “beneath, the sunken yellow temples and distorted lips impart to the accessories of an angel the countenance of a fiend!”

  There’s anger and frustration here, too, for some of the corpses have fallen forward and appear to be shouting at an invisible enemy. With a shriveled mask of a face, a torn hole for a nose, and a toothless open mouth, P. Rozario Dal Parco (who died in 1793, according to the handwritten cardboard note pinned to her chest) seems to be wailing silently at some unknown horror. One priest whose bottom jaw has been lost and whose head has slipped onto his chest appears to be chomping into his own robe with what’s left of his mouth.

  Dark humor also echoes through these dingy corridors. A few, with hips hitched up to one side, look as if they’re dancing, while others appear to be cackling with laughter, jaws wide open, arms gripping their sides to control their shaking bodies. Fr. Modesto da Marsa, who died in 1855, seems in a particularly playful mood. As the dead priest peers down at the corpse below him, his foot, which has slipped down from the edge of his niche, pokes at the shoulder of the fellow below. With skin covering only one side of his face, one eye closed and the other a hollow socket, a bishop appears to be winking at us.

  The section for children is most upsetting. The small figures hang together like a collection of horror-movie dolls. As American traveler Nathanial Parker Willis put it in 1844, “a more horribly ludicrous collection of little withered faces, shrunk into expression so entirely inconsistent with the gayety of their dresses, could scarcely be conceived.”

  What were their families thinking? Certainly, this was once considered a prestigious burial place. But would you really want your dead relatives pinned to a wall and left looking miserable in a cold, dark corridor? Anyone seeking evidence of a Good Death according to Ars Moriendi traditions would be hard-pressed to find it here.

  Today’s skilled embalmers certainly wouldn’t leave their charges looking like these Sicilian mummies. Even so, I’m thinking that somewhere in my will I must leave a prominent note that says in big, bold letters: “DO NOT EMBALM ME!” If I need to be preserved for any reason, the refrigerator at the morgue will do just fine. But the prospect of having formaldehyde pumped through my arteries and veins does nothing to alleviate my fear of mortality, quite the opposite in fact.

  And as I leave this extraordinary Sicilian necropolis, I can’t help wondering whether the individuals hanging along these walls would have chosen this as their final resting place. For me, this strange display of crumbling “organic matter” might be chilling, but it’s also fascinating. I’m amazed by the desperate need we humans have to project beyond the grave not only our spiritual selves but our corporeal ones, too. We want to live on in body as well as in soul.

  It’s a desire that hasn’t diminished. After all, until recently, claiming their products could prevent a body from decaying was a powerful marketing tool for casket makers. And, at cryogenics labs, people are still signing up to have their bodies deep-frozen in the hope that medical advances will one day permit their reuse. Perhaps the Capuchin monks made similar claims. At any rate, their clients clearly had no clue as to how ultimately ineffective the monks’ preservation techniques would prove. With hindsight, is this really the eternal image of themselves they would have wanted to present to the world?

  4

  Inside the Box

  A FANTASY COFFIN IN GHANA

  As soon as we shake hands, I know I’m going to like Eric Kpakpo Adotey. He’s got sparkly eyes and the sweetest smile. He’s sturdily built, and has a look of youthful vitality, something I feel is a good thing to find in a person—particularly when that person is going to be your coffin maker. Eric and I meet at his workshop in Teshi, a suburb of Accra, the sprawling capital of Ghana. Here, strung along a coastal road like beads on a necklace, are ramshackle shops and shacks housing the offices and workshops of traders, car mechanics, fishermen—and coffin makers.

  In terms of natural beauty, the coastline is not one of West Africa’s finest features. Along a weather-beaten highway, cars and trucks spew diesel fumes into the sticky tropical air while waves from the Atlantic Ocean pound angrily up against the shore. Dusty banana trees are the only signs of green amid an urban landscape of half-completed buildings whose rusted steel rods sprout from unfinished walls. Commercial enterprises—the Lord Our Banner Paints and God’s Way Hairdo among them—share the roadside with stalls whose neat pyramids of oranges are shaded by tattered beach umbrellas. Everything seems to be leaning slightly, with wooden posts propping up plastic awnings and unstable-looking sheds turning for support to their equally unsteady neighbors.

  And there’s plenty of time to take it all in. Traffic in Accra achieves an unusual level of awfulness. It makes for a stressful visit, even when you’re not on a mission to commission your own coffin. Still, two things about Ghana have, on previous visits, left me wanting to return. First, I always come away convinced that Ghanaians are the nicest people in the world. Second, they have the craziest coffins.

  Ghana’s tradition of fantasy coffins is a recent one. It started by accident in the 1950s, when a chief from the Ga tribe who made his fortune in cocoa farming decided to commission Ata Owoo, a well-known carpenter, to build him a giant cocoa pod as a ceremonial palanquin. The chief died before his palanquin
was finished, so it was transformed into a casket and used for his burial.

  Inspired by the chief’s unusual coffin, a Ghanaian furniture maker called Seth Kane Kwei decided to create a personalized casket for his grandmother that would fulfill her lifelong dream—to ride in an airplane, something she never managed to do when she was alive (references to her “final flight” are usually introduced at this point in the story, but I’ll spare you the puns).

  Today, Ghanaians who can afford it are buried in anything from a giant Coca-Cola bottle to a sack of flour or a massive fish. Monstrous chickens and scaled-down elephants are popular models, as are luxury cars. A mechanic who repaired outboard motors went off in a Yamaha 40. Majestic eagle caskets are generally reserved for chiefs, and giant vegetables for farmers. Boldly carved and painted in bright colors, they’re more than coffins—they are works of art.

  * * *

  Over the years, human bodies have been buried in all kinds of things—baskets, jars, earthenware pots, animal skins, dugout tree trunks, canoes, Viking ships, cerecloths (special wax-treated wrapping cloths tied at the head and feet), and even whole suits of armor. For Muslims and Jews, the traditional burial container is a simple linen shroud. For the Egyptians, the preference was for a lavishly decorated mummy sarcophagus.

  The ancient Greeks used stone sarcophagi to inter their dead, and while you might think stone was chosen for durability and protection, this was not the case. The word sarcophagus in fact comes from a combination of the Greek words sarx, or “flesh,” and phagein, “to eat,” and referred to the limestone used for burial containers, which it was thought accelerated the rotting of corpses (they weren’t so far off, as limestone is an alkaline, solutions of which can be used to decompose corpses).

  Coffins were not always used for burial. In seventeenth-century England, many parishes had a coffin that was loaned out to parishioners to contain the shrouded body during the funeral service. Moreover, for many centuries, the graves of ordinary people were merely temporary homes, for eventually their bones would be dug up and placed into crypts, charnel houses, and ossuaries.

  Nor do we always bury people in the earth. Local conditions may demand surface interments, as in New Orleans, where a high water table and marshy ground made it difficult to bury the dead in the earth, leading to the tradition of aboveground tombs.

  And do we always have to be buried lying down? Some would say no. George Hancock, a nineteenth-century Virginian plantation owner, is thought to have been buried sitting upright so he could continue to watch his slaves at work in the valley below. In Buenos Aires, Juan Facundo Quiroga, a nineteenth-century Argentine strongman, is said to have been interred standing up because he wanted to meet God “face-to-face.” Ben Johnson, the English poet and playwright who died in 1637, was buried vertically in Westminster Abbey for a more prosaic reason—by the time he died, it was the only slot left in the part of the abbey he’d requested. Today, managers of cramped cemeteries in Britain and the United States are considering stand-up burials to save space.

  The modern coffin has been through several evolutions. Early American caskets, like their British counterparts, tended to be plain, often made of pine, although hardwoods such as chestnut or walnut were the choice of more affluent customers. Anthropoid shaped (wide at the shoulders and narrow at the feet), they were known as “toe pinchers.”

  Changes came with nineteenth-century industrialization, when toe pinchers gave way to models with straight sides that could be machine made. In the United States, the first patent for a coffin was awarded to Almond J. Fisk in 1848 for three cast-iron models, while other companies such as Cane, Breed, & Co. of Cincinnati secured licenses to produce the Fisk caskets.

  As factory-produced metal coffins became popular, the role of the undertaker—for whom carpentry had once been an important part of the job description—changed. Funeral directors became middlemen for the sale of caskets and burial accoutrements. In recent years, they have become more like event planners and grief counselors.

  Today, caskets can be churned out in impressive volumes. From Batesville, Indiana, the world’s biggest coffin maker produces a thousand a day. Batesville Casket Co. compares what it does to car manufacturing. It buys the paint from the same suppliers and has even found that trends in car colors are later reflected in casket choices. However, the form of the casket—an anthropoid shape or an elongated rectangle—remains much the same, the proportions of the human body having barely changed over the centuries.

  That is, until recently. Rising obesity has prompted the arrival of new super-size coffins. In Indiana, one company has made a business from “serving the oversize needs of the funeral industry.” With names like “Harvest,” “Heartland,” and “Homestead,” the Goliath Casket company offers a variety of sizes—ranging in width from twenty-nine to a massive fifty-two inches (the standard is twenty-four inches). But while the coffins might be larger than average—Goliath’s can handle loads of up to seven hundred pounds—they nevertheless conform to the familiar rectangular proportions.

  Having said that, in some countries, other shapes are preferred. In parts of rural Southeast Asia, for example, bodies are still buried in the fetal position, necessitating a shorter, wider box. The Chinese favor the long rectangular format but one constructed of smoothed, polished, and varnished sections of tree trunks, resulting in caskets with four rounded sections on each side (retaining the original curve of the trunk) enclosing the central shaft. And let’s not forget Ghana, where, when it comes to coffin shapes, anything goes.

  * * *

  A longstanding family joke—one my father liked to repeat whenever he got the chance—was born one morning after Fa had just come out of the hospital, when Sam, with a slip of the tongue, asked him whether he would like “tea or coffin” with his breakfast. “Coffin; definitely coffin,” was Fa’s swift response. Toward the end of his life, he became set on the idea of being cremated, which he considered the most practical and efficient means of disposing of his “organic matter.” However, at various points in his life, Fa had looked at other options.

  There was the time he’d toyed with the idea of an ocean burial. Fa “went to sea,” as he put it, when he joined the merchant navy as a teenager. At eighteen, he wrote a detailed technical explanation of nautical navigation, including beautifully executed diagrams and an impressive section on the “Apparent Motion of Heavenly Bodies” (astronomy was another great interest). He remained passionate about ships and the sea. During retirement, he’d collect pictures of his favorite vessels and, out in The Hut, spend hours putting them into scrapbooks and adding explanatory notes. So it’s hardly surprising he’d considered a sea burial.

  However, Sam—ever the practical one—knew how difficult it would be to arrange such a thing and told him in no uncertain terms she wasn’t prepared to take responsibility for organizing it (I believe her exact words were, “Over my dead body”).

  Then there were the brochures for wicker coffins I’d found in his “How to End It!” file. He also seems to have investigated the possibility of a green burial. In the same folder was a list of notes written to himself on a piece of yellow foolscap, dated 1997 (nine years before he died), reminding himself to “find out details of plots, costs included and the presentation of arranging the interment and transport and burial of the body in its willow coffin,” and to “write to W.D.D.C. [West Dorset District Council] and ask if any woodland burial graves are in that district.” Most of the items on the list had ticks against them so he’d clearly been serious.

  When the law in Britain changed to allow burial outside sanctified ground, I remember he and my godmother discussing the idea of being buried at the bottom of our garden. Of course, unless done in secret, this might have seriously affected the resale value of the house. Who wants to buy a place with the corpse of the previous owner fertilizing the flower beds?

  In the West, the graveyard was the traditional destination for the dead. I’ve seen what this might look like
for me. On a recent trip to Hong Kong, I found myself wandering around the old colonial cemetery. Amid the gravestones of nineteenth-century British soldiers, sailors, and administrators, there was one that stopped me in my tracks. On a sturdy marble tombstone in bold capital letters was engraved simply: SARAH. Nothing was written about this Sarah’s life, and the name of the man to whom she had been THE BELOVED WIFE was no longer legible. The headstone recorded her death, as November 20, 1864 (she was just twenty-eight). But what struck me most was the single word, chiselled above the date in alarmingly large letters: DIED.

  In spite of the rather unsettling experience of coming across my own name on a gravestone, a burial place amid trees and lush greenery is certainly an appealing idea. And while talk of burial as a “return to nature” seems odd, since I don’t remember coming from soil, becoming part of the earth on which I’ve trodden for so long might be a good way to go.

  There are other ways to “return to nature.” Some cultures rely on birds rather than worms to remove the bodies of their dead. Traditionally, the corpses of Zoroastrians in Iran were wrapped in white muslin and left in circular towers on top of mountains—Towers of Silence—where vultures picked off the flesh in a matter of hours. In Mumbai, another Tower of Silence serves many of India’s Parsis, descendents of Zoroastrians. Here, though, the practice is coming into question since a shortage of the birds (India’s vultures are facing extinction) is posing a tricky problem for the city’s Parsi community as bodies pile up.

  For Zoroastrians and Parsis, leaving the dead to birds reflected their respect for the earth, which they believe should not be polluted with human corpses. Tibetans, on the other hand, see their sky burials—in which corpses are cut into pieces and left as carrion for mountain birds—as acts of generosity to the natural world, with the dead bringing sustenance to living creatures. A similar idea shaped an ancient practice in the Solomon Islands, where corpses were left out on rocks as gifts for the sharks.

 

‹ Prev