by Sarah Murray
But there was another, more philosophical, reason behind the decision. The commission founders believed repatriating the dead would have led to discrimination, since the cost of sending corpses home would have separated rich from poor, creating divisions within an army that had been united in its fight to defeat the Germans.
The proposed ban on repatriation sparked fierce opposition. “It caused a bit of a fuss,” says Francis. “But luckily, our chairman was Winston Churchill, and not a bad speaker.” Churchill’s mighty oratory did the trick. In a parliamentary debate in 1920, he spoke of a fellowship in death that crossed all social, racial, and economic boundaries. The cemeteries, he said, would for thousands of years “preserve the memory of a common purpose pursued by a great nation in the remote past and will undoubtedly excite the wonder and the reverence of future generations.” The opposition caved. The motion of nonrepatriation was passed.
So no bodies were sent home for burial. Instead, dead from the First and Second World Wars lie near to where they fell. In Cairo, they rest in a palm-fringed enclosure near the River Nile. In subtropical Hong Kong, they’re overshadowed by the giant tower blocks that have arisen on the northeast of the island since the cemetery was built. In Thailand, their home is Kanchanaburi, a town at the confluence of two rivers that flow into the Mae Klong, where Japanese prisoners of war built the famous bridge over the River Kwai.
Notwithstanding a few adjustments for climate, topography, and culture (Muslim graves align with Mecca; Hindus were buried after cremation), the format for the cemeteries is replicated in more than twenty-three thousand sites around the world.
In each one, inside a porch just past the wrought-iron gate is a brass door on one wall reading: CEMETERY AND MEMORIAL REGISTER. Behind this door, tucked into a small recess, is a book listing the names of the individuals buried in the cemetery. Inside—it’s guaranteed—are modest gravestones, the same height, evenly spaced, identical in shape, carved from Portland limestone, and neatly arranged to resemble soldiers on parade, with generals and officers buried next to infantrymen and military engineers. Shrubs and flowering borders soften the military precision of the ranks of graves.
A hundred years earlier, in the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo, things were very different. While the bodies of high-ranking military officials might have made it home, ordinary soldiers were shoveled into pits near where they fell. Some were later exhumed, not for reburial but by scavengers who knew the value of the remains. In Victorian England, as dentistry advanced, and false teeth became popular, alternatives were sought for ivory, which deteriorated quickly. Real human teeth were in great demand. War provided the supply.
By contrast, the commission ensured that the war dead were well looked after. And while no casualties of the First and Second World Wars were returned home, relatives could send a personal message to be engraved on the tombstone. Contacting the relatives of each soldier or officer it buried, the commission collected names and dates of birth, asked whether the family wanted a religious symbol such as a cross carved on the stone, and invited them to compose a few lines to be engraved on it.
On the headstones, powerful sentiments and sad histories are encapsulated in a handful of words. The father of Private Albert Ingham, a twenty-four-year-old soldier who was executed in 1916 for desertion, requested the lines, SHOT AT DAWN, ONE OF THE FIRST TO ENLIST, A WORTHY SON OF HIS FATHER. Others are delightfully creative. The family of Hugh Gordon Langton, who was killed at Passchendaele, Belgium, in 1917, wanted to reflect Langton’s skills as a musician so requested a bar of musical notes.
I first saw a Commonwealth war graveyard in Italy. I’d spent the day with friends in a medieval town called Bolsena, about an hour north of Rome. After visiting its churches, we relaxed for a couple of hours in a local trattoria over some pasta and red wine. It was a hot August afternoon. The hills around were yellow and scrubby; the horizons dominated by olive groves and cypress trees. It was the Roman countryside at its summertime best.
On the way home, we spotted a sign with CWGC on it, stopped the car, and entered the cemetery. Suddenly we were in a different country. It was unmistakably England. It was unmistakably English. There, at the entrance, was the brass door reading, CEMETERY AND MEMORIAL REGISTER. Behind the door was a book containing a long list of names. Simple, uniform gravestones were neatly laid out in ranks, like soldiers on parade. And the cemetery lawns were pristine, green, and neatly clipped.
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These days, the availability of jets and refrigeration technology makes getting a body home a relatively minor logistical exercise. So today, America’s war dead are flown home (something that’s become more public since an eighteen-year ban on media coverage of the returning coffins was lifted in 2009). And for civilians who die overseas, commercial airlines have business lines in shipping corpses. Handled by their cargo divisions, these shipments are growing as globalization creates a mobile world whose inhabitants often want to be returned home after their death.
About six thousand American civilians die overseas each year. For the Brits, it’s more than four thousand. And because the United States is so culturally diverse, hundreds of bodies leave its shores each year, many of them Latin Americans, who make up more than half of the country’s immigrants. And of course, many of the shipments are on domestic flights, from retirement centers in Florida, Arizona, and California back to other parts of the United States.
Angie Berwald knows all about these cargos. She’s president of National Mortuary Shipping and has been working for more than two decades with funeral directors to help families retrieve their “out of town” relatives. Her company is a sort of travel agency for the dead. “We contact the airlines and make all the arrangements,” she says. Even when people have the funeral in their most recent place of residence, in the place where they’re perhaps best known, many still want to be returned to their hometown afterward. “They still want to be buried with their other family members,” says Berwald.
This cargo was once handled in a desultory manner. No centralized operations existed at airlines for handling human remains. Funeral directors had to negotiate with each cargo facility and had no special units designed for handling human remains. “There were just caskets and of course the planes were also limited in their capacity to handle a casket,” says Berwald.
On one occasion, an Irish friend told me, this led to a rather unusual scene at the airport. She remembers a cousin recalling the repatriation of her brother’s body by plane from America. The family, she says, simply stood by the luggage carousel at Shannon Airport waiting for the coffin to come out on the conveyor belt.
Today, corpses rarely travel in caskets, let alone on luggage conveyor belts. They travel in an air tray or a “combo unit,” a wooden and cardboard box designed to transport remains. The remains are placed in a hermetically sealed container, but since most bodies are embalmed before departure, decomposition en route isn’t a problem. In any case, the air trays are designed to prevent leaks. (One ad for air trays shows a man holding an upturned one above his head on a stick. “You wouldn’t use our lead-resistant cremation tray as an umbrella,” runs the headline, “but you could.”) When the remains arrive at their destination, the funeral home provides the coffin.
Post-mortal repatriation is not cheap. In the United Kingdom, the cost of an “inbound” flight can be up to three times higher than a cheap ticket out of the country, according to BRITs (Beat Repatriation Inequality Together), a campaign to lower the cost of bringing home citizens who’ve died abroad. In the United States, the price of a final trip home can be up to ten thousand dollars.
This has prompted the birth of some inventive financial services businesses, many designed for Latino immigrants, whose families often struggle to find the cash for the passage back south. Los Angeles–based Servicios Especiales Profesionales is one. To the sound of a jaunty song called “Tu Tierra en Tus Manos,” or “Your Land in Your Hands” (the lyrics speak of Mexicans traveling nort
h illegally only to end up dying there), the company’s Web site explains that, for fifty dollars, you can buy a “certificate” covering the cost of repatriating a body for up to five years. Another company, Mexpro, has a package called “Tus Brazos Hermanos [your brother’s arms] Repatriation Insurance,” covering everything from legal paperwork and administrative assistance to collection, packing, shipping, and transfer of mortal remains.
The airline industry has its own euphemisms for these transfers, such as “specialty shipments” and “special care” cargo, as well as acronyms—HRs (human remains) and HUGOs (HUman remains must GO, according to one online forum). At American Airlines, customers looking for these services evidently need to ask for the “Jim Wilson desk,” named for the person who established the division. He’s no longer alive, but his name lives on since the American Airlines “Jim Wilson Service” is now a registered trademark.
For the airline industry, repatriation of corpses generates a modest but tidy business. “It’s not a major commodity for us,” a Continental Airlines cargo division executive told the Journal of Commerce. “But it’s one we like to focus on because of the dollar return that we receive from moving these types of shipments.”
At one point, the battle for the “dollar return” on these shipments became fierce enough to prompt airlines to devise marketing schemes similar to those offered to passengers. Through airline loyalty programs, funeral directors could keep the “frequent dier” miles accrued by their clients’ shipments. On Delta Airlines, for example, funeral directors could, according to the Wall Street Journal, save air miles by paying through their credit cards, while JetBlue offered a round-trip ticket to any funeral director who purchased about fifteen shipments for bodies.
These days, says Berwald, cost cutting means airlines have reined in such benefits. “And they’ve cut back on a lot of their larger planes, which creates a problem for us,” she says. “In a smaller plane, the length of the unit won’t make the turn through the door.”
Still, as cash-strapped airlines look for additional sources of revenue, many are investing in new equipment and trying to win more of the business, boasting about “bringing cargo to a better place” and stressing the “care and sensitivity” with which they treat their specialty shipments. You might call it “stiff competition.”
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Amid the few short instructional paragraphs Fa left for us—tantalizing glimpses into his state of mind as he approached his death—he briefly explained why he’d chosen the spot where he wanted us to scatter his ashes. The reasons, he said, were simple—it was a “very beautiful place,” but also, he wrote, “I have my very oldest friends there already (Jim and Dood Anderson).”
My father met Jim and Dood through Sam’s family, when they were her mother’s neighbors in West Sussex. After they moved to Dorset, some years later, Jim and Fa became very close. Considerably older, Jim became something of a father figure to Fa. The two were fellow anglers, spending long afternoons in waders in the middle of some quiet river where the conversation counted for more than the weight of the trout at the end of the line. Jim and Dood lived in a cottage near the church of St. Mary Magdalene. When they died, they were buried in its small graveyard. For these friends, it seems, my father was prepared to put aside his atheist principles and leave his remains in a Christian burial ground.
What a lot we can learn about people from the choices they make in death. The means by which we elect to mark our departure from this world reflect hopes, fears, values, and beliefs. And in the decisions about the body we must leave behind, we also reveal our feelings about love and friendship.
Since the earliest times, families have wanted to be buried in the same tomb or next to loved ones. A beautiful example of this appears on a late-sixth-century BC Etruscan casket known as the Sarcophagus of the Spouses. With their remains housed in the terra-cotta tomb below, the couple appears in a sculpture on top of the tomb, where they recline together in an elegant, relaxed pose. With graceful hand gestures and smiling faces, they appear to be in the middle of animated conversation. United in life, they remain so for eternity.
Sometimes, the dead were buried in several locations to be joined with their various loves. In medieval Europe, women who’d married more than once could be divided up so they could end up near all their husbands. In the case of Eleanor of Aquitaine, the rich and powerful twelfth-century queen, a three-way burial was motivated by the desire to allow her influence to be spread to the broader population. She had a “visceral tomb” for her entrails in Lincoln Cathedral, while her heart was buried at Blackfriars in London and the rest of her body went to Westminster Abbey.
Burial decisions give us glimpses into the nature of friendship and love. When strolling through the chapel of Christ’s College, Cambridge, the late gay activist and historian Alan Bray came across a seventeenth-century double tomb containing the remains of Thomas Baines and John Finch. Linking their marble portraits was a knotted cloth. Curiosity took Bray to other such double burials, such as the memorial plaque in Rome of John Seton and Nicholas Morton, documenting their wish to be buried together. The tombstones led him on an exploration of the centuries-old intimacy that existed between men before homosexual activity came to be viewed as a form of sexual deviance—an intimacy expressed in burial choices.
On the other hand, graveyard preferences can divide families. When Christine Hudson, a British woman from the village of Long Bennington, reserved a place in the same grave as her lover of twenty-five years, Alfred Nocquet, who died in 2007, it sparked a bitter row. Nocquet’s three children by an earlier marriage vehemently opposed the plan, claiming Hudson’s relationship with their father had broken down five years before his death and that they would not want to visit the grave if she were in it. The case went to ecclesiastical court, where the judge ruled in favor of Hudson and called on the family to settle their differences. “This would be the best way,” the judge said, according to a report in the Daily Mail, “that the memory of Alfred Nocquet could be honoured by those who loved him.”
The price of a post-mortal place next to the right person has a monetary as well as an emotional cost—and you have to wonder at what some are prepared to pay. For a Marilyn Monroe fan, the price was $4.6 million. This was the sum achieved for a crypt looking directly onto the actress’s resting place at Westwood Village Memorial Park in Los Angeles when in August 2009 Elsie Poncher, who wanted to sell her late husband’s crypt to pay off the mortgage, put it on eBay.
The bidder later backed out of the deal, so other buyers had to be sought. But there’s another story here, too. Like rings handed back, houses sold, or life insurance policies cancelled, the exchange of funereal real estate is another sign of a broken marriage or a love affair gone sour. Richard Poncher had bought the crypt in 1954 from Joe DiMaggio when Monroe was divorcing him on the grounds of mental cruelty. Joltin’ Joe softened, though, when Monroe died in 1961; for twenty years after her death, DiMaggio had six red roses sent to her grave three times a week.
Of course, if you want to be certain of ending up next to someone, you need to do more than book the spot. You should make sure distance does not keep you from them. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, this was a serious concern for the more mobile among the nobles of Europe. Often, the wills of husbands and wives provided for a joint burial at home, along with arrangements for the return journey.
Cecily, Duchess of York, mother of two English kings, was careful to leave sufficient funds to guarantee a burial alongside Richard, her husband, who was killed in battle. When she died in Hertfordshire in 1495, the duchess made a seventy-mile posthumous trip—accompanied by a retinue of householders and clerks—to Fotheringay in Northamptonshire, where she joined her “most entirely best beloved lord.”
For Fa, people and place coincided. To reunite him with his friends Jim and Dood in his chosen corner of Dorset, all Sam and I needed to do was to hop into the car and drive through a few country lanes in the company of hi
s ashes. But whether we’re laid to rest after a short car ride, a long journey accompanied by a medieval retinue, or a flight managed by the Jim Wilson Service, “home” doesn’t necessarily have to be our place of birth—it can be wherever our loved ones are.
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So what about Martha Goodlad? In 1785, as she lay dying in Calcutta, did she contemplate sending her remains back to England for burial in the family churchyard? Probably not—in her day, transit to Britain by steamship from India meant a three-month journey. In the days before refrigeration, that would have left her corpse in a shocking state by the time it arrived on the docks in London. Calling up the Jim Wilson desk was not an option for Empire’s citizens. So Martha was laid to rest in the place where she’d lived, a place whose connection with her native home now exists largely behind the dusty covers of British colonial history books.
The Park Street Cemetery is not the only “corner of a foreign field” where Europe’s colonial bodies lie. Between 1600 and 1947, when India gained independence from British rule, about two million Europeans (most of them British) were buried on the subcontinent, according to the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia. South Africa, Sudan, Iran, Hong Kong, and other parts of the world once ruled by Europeans also house colonial cemeteries in various states of dilapidation.
The chances of Britain’s empire builders dying were high, particularly in a place like India. On the plains, the heat was unbearable, and if you didn’t expire from cholera, malaria would get you. There were poisonous snakes and deadly scorpions. You slept under a mosquito net. You kept a mongoose to fend off the snakes. You banged your shoes together before putting them on to make sure no scorpions were lurking in the toes.
The memories of those who were born or lived in colonial India—their oral histories were recorded by Louisiana State University in the 1990s—paint a picture of an existence in which death was always around the corner. “You had to be very vigorous and tough to live,” recalls G. N. Jackson. “The place was full of bilharziasis. There were Baghdad sores, terrible thing, great holes in your skin that wouldn’t heal, dysentery all through the hot weather. Cholera. You had to be tough, you had to take care of yourself.”