By the same token, dry, frigid conditions can also preserve a corpse indefinitely. In 1991, a pair of German climbers discovered the body of a 5,300-year-old man garbed in a woven-grass vest, leather loincloth, bearskin cap, and primitive snowshoes. Nicknamed Ötzi (for the region in which he was found), this remarkable Copper Age mummy was so well preserved that scientists were able to determine the contents of his last meal (red deer meat) and the cause of his death (apparent homicide from an arrow to the left shoulder). Other famous “ice mummies” include the so-called Siberian Ice Princess—a 2,500-year-old female shaman whose corpse was adorned with vivid tattoos of mythical creatures—and Juanita, an Inca sacrificial victim found high atop a Peruvian mountain in 1995.
The particular chemical constituents of a burial site can also be conducive to long-term corpse preservation. More than one thousand Ice Age corpses have been found in the sphagnum bogs of northern Europe. The most famous of these—Denmark’s 2,400-year-old Tollund Man—has kept so extraordinarily well that when two brothers discovered him in 1950, they assumed he was a recent murder victim.
Unique soil conditions in the Mexican city of Guanajuato are also thought to be responsible for the numerous mummies exhumed from the local cemetery. These singularly ghastly corpses—victims of a cholera epidemic in 1833—include a tiny infant trumpeted as la momia más pequeño del mundo (the smallest mummy in the world) and a woman accused of witchcraft. Some wear agonized expressions, suggesting that they may have been buried alive. They can be viewed at the Museo de las Momias next time you’re down Guanajato way. (Alternatively, you can see them online at www.mummytombs.com/mummylocator/group/ guanajuato.closeup.htm.
RECOMMENDED READING
For a detailed, scientific look at the various forms of mummification, you can’t beat Christine Quigley’s Modern Mummies: The Preservation of the Human Body in the Twentieth Century (McFarland, 1998). There’s also much to be learned from her earlier book, The Corpse: A History (McFarland, 1996). Johan Reinhard, discoverer of the ice mummy nicknamed Juanita, recounts his adventures in The Ice Maiden: Inca Mummies, Mountain Gods, and Sacred Sites in the Andes (National Geographic, 2005). A particularly fun and fascinating read is Heather Pringle’s The Mummy Congress: Science, Obsession, and the Everlasting Dead (Theia, 2001).
The Hour of Lead
For various cultural reasons—our belief in personal freedom, our pride in not being enslaved to the past—Americans have never had much use for the kinds of rigid social customs that define life in so many other parts of the world. Here in the good old U.S.A., we are free (within strict legal limits) to act as we please. We’re not obliged to do things a certain way just because that’s how they’ve always been done. Even immigrants who try to cling to their long-established traditions generally find themselves adapting to our American way of life, where the only communal rituals everyone is more or less compelled to obey are attending a pizza party on Super Bowl Sunday and undergoing the nightmare of Thanksgiving travel so you can spend time with relatives you don’t particularly get along with.
Clearly, there are distinct advantages to living in a country where every aspect of existence—how you’re supposed to dress, what you’re allowed to eat, whom you’re permitted to marry, when you’re required to pray—isn’t dictated by centuries-old tradition. Still, as is so often the case, the benefits come with a downside. Social rituals, after all, evolved for a reason. Among other things, they come in very handy at moments of crisis, when they provide us with a clear set of behavioral rules that help us cope with the calamity at hand. This is particularly true when people are faced with the greatest calamity of all, the death of a loved one.
Throughout human history, societies all over the world have established specific rituals for mourning. These practices amount to a time-tested communal support system, devised to help the newly bereaved get through the immediate shock and trauma of their loss and begin the process of healing. Some groups in America still adhere to such ancient customs. For example, following the death of a first-degree relative (father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, or spouse), practicing Jews observe the week-long ritual known as sitting shiva, during which the mourner forgoes personal grooming, wears a torn outer garment (such as a shirt or blouse ripped at the heart), sits on a low chair when visitors come to offer condolences, and obeys other rules and prohibitions. Generally speaking, however, there are no fixed mourning rituals for most Americans, who are often left to their own emotional devices when confronted with the death of a loved one.
In the absence of such sustaining rituals, an entire grief industry has sprung up in modern America. Publishing constitutes one major area of this business. As of December 2007, for example, more than three thousand books were included under Amazon.com’s “Grief and Bereavement” subject listing, the bulk of them self-help manuals with titles such as How to Survive the Loss of a Love, Healing After Loss, How to Go on Living When Someone You Love Dies, Getting to the Other Side of Grief, and The Grief Recovery Handbook. There are also scores of more narrowly focused books addressed to specific forms of bereavement: Finding Your Way After Your Spouse Dies, Grieving the Death of a Mother, Surviving the Death of Your Baby, 35 Ways to Help a Grieving Child, and so on.
Besides this ever-growing mountain of self-help books, there is also the burgeoning field of grief counseling. Practiced primarily by licensed psychologists and social workers (the kinds of trained human-service professionals who, in our secular society, provide the guidance traditionally offered by priests and other spiritual advisors), grief counseling is designed to help bereaved people work their way through the normal process of mourning. A more radical approach—aimed at those whose reaction to a death is so extreme than it can fairly be called pathological—is known as grief therapy.
Though many of the myriad books on the subject insist that there is no “correct” way to mourn, certain general rules apply. To begin with, virtually all experts agree that a bereaved person must allow himself to fully vent his grief. This can be difficult, especially in a society such as ours that doesn’t encourage its members (especially men) to openly express their feelings. Even more than other pent-up emotions, however, suppressed grief can lead to all kinds of physical symptoms, from insomnia and ulcers to migraine and heart disease—a truth recognized at least as far back as the sixteenth century, when Shakespeare put this insight into the mouth of a character in Macbeth:
Give sorrow words; the grief that does not
speak,
Whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it
break.
According to a standard text, J. William Worden’s Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy (Springer, 1982), mourners must accomplish four “tasks”—collectively known as “grief work”—before they can transcend their loss and return to normal functioning. These tasks are (1) to accept the reality of the loss, (2) to experience the pain of grief, (3) to adjust to an environment in which the deceased is missing, and (4) to withdraw emotional energy and reinvest it in another relationship.
Though Worden’s book derives from a pioneering investigation of spousal loss conducted in the late 1960s—a project known as the Harvard Bereavement Study—the basic ideas it sets out were recognized much earlier. In his landmark 1917 paper, “Mourning and Melancholia,” for example, Sigmund Freud describes the “work of mourning” that individuals must undergo in order to restore their psychological equilibrium after a devastating loss. Freud’s findings are concisely summed up by Katherine Ashenburg in her fine book, The Mourner’s Dance: What We Do When People Die (North Point, 2002):
The task, as Freud saw it, involves an acceptance that the beloved person is no more, and a slow, piecemeal, and above all effortful withdrawal of the mourner’s attachment to that living person. This bit-by-bit labor—which entails a mental if not literal poring over keepsakes of the dead, each memory, each dashed expectation—is carried out, as Freud says, at “great expense” of time and emotional energy. While it t
akes place, the “existence of the lost object is continued in the mind.” Although Freud could not explain why this process, which we take for granted, is “so extraordinarily painful,” he did not doubt its effectiveness: “When the work of mourning is completed, the ego becomes free and uninhibited again.”
That “grief work” consists of distinct stages culminating in the withdrawal of one’s deepest emotional attachment to the lost loved object is a truth understood by America’s greatest poet of death and mourning, Emily Dickinson. Her famous poem “After great pain, a formal feeling comes” concludes with a stanza that precisely conveys this wisdom:
This is the Hour of Lead—
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons recollect the Snow—
First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting
go—
RECOMMENDED RESOURCES
Among the hundreds of books dealing with grief and bereavement, the following are particularly useful:
Harold Bloomfield, How to Survive the
Loss of a Love (Bantam, 1976).
Helen Fitzgerald, The Mourning Handbook (Fireside, 1994).
Sandra M. Gilbert, Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve (Norton, 2006).
Earl A. Grollman, Living When a Loved One Has Died (Beacon Press, 1977).
John W. James, The Grief Recovery Handbook (Perennial, 1989).
Patricia Kelley, Companion to Grief (Simon & Schuster, 1997).
Bernadine Kreis, Up from Grief (Seabury Press, 1969).
Harold Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People (Schocken, 1981).
Eda LeShan, Learning to Say Good-bye (Avon, 1988).
Elizabeth Mehren, After the Darkest Hour the Sun Will Shine Again (Fireside, 1997).
Elizabeth Harper Neeld, Seven Choices: Taking the Steps to New Life After Losing Someone You Love (Delacorte, 1992).
Therese Rando, How to Go On Living When Someone You Love Dies (Bantam, 1988).
Harriet Schiff, Living Through Mourning (Viking, 1984).
Carol Staudacher, Beyond Grief (New Harbinger, 1987).
Judith Viorst, Necessary Losses (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1986).
Alan Wolfelt, Understanding Grief (Accelerated Development, 1992).
Of particular note is Joan Didion’s devastating memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), one of the most powerful portraits of bereavement ever written.
The Internet, of course, abounds with information on loss, grief, and mourning. Among the most useful websites are:
The Grief Recovery Institute (www.griefrecovery.com) Center for Loss and Renewal (www.lossandrenewal.com)
GriefNet.org (www.griefnet.org)
Good Grief Resources (www.goodgriefresources.com).
Particularly good online articles and pamphlets include:
“Coping with Grief and Loss: A Guide to Grieving and Bereavement” (www.helpguide.org/mental/grief_loss.htm)
“Coping with Bereavement” (www.nmha.org/index.cfm?objectid=C7DF9618-1372-4D20-C807F41CB3E97654)
“Life After Loss: Dealing with Grief” (cmhc.utexas.edu/booklets/Grief/grief.html)
“Grief, Bereavement, and Mourning” (www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/internet/ chaplaincy/bereavement/grief.cfm)
Grief and Mourning
Though the words are often used interchangeably, there is a crucial difference between grief and mourning. Grief is the profound pain we suffer when we lose someone or something precious; it is a wound to our souls. Mourning, on the other hand, refers to the ways we cope with grief, the process we undergo to help us deal with our bereavement.
As opposed to grief, which is a completely internal phenomenon, something we feel deep inside us, there is an external dimension to mourning. When Victorian women lost a husband, for example, they signified their grief by wearing black mourning clothes for several years. For this reason, psychologist David E. Balk defines mourning as “the social expression of grief as shaped by cultural prescription, expectations, and norms.” Far more eloquently, Shakespeare nails down the distinction in these doleful words spoken by the fallen monarch Richard II:
My grief lies all within,
And these external manners of lament
Are merely shadows to the unseen grief
That swells with silence in the tortured soul.
Dr. Lindemann
and the Inferno
After Sigmund Freud’s pioneering 1917 paper, “Mourning and Melancholia”—the first work to explore the importance of mourning for the mental health of the bereaved—the most significant essay on the subject is “Symptomatology and Management of Acute Grief” by psychologist Erich Lindemann. This groundbreaking essay published in the September 1944 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, grew directly out of one of the worst disasters in modern American history the inferno that destroyed Boston’s Cocoanut Grove nightclub on November 29, 1942.
A former speakeasy located at 17 Piedmont Street, the Cocoanut Grove was one of the city’s swankiest nightspots. Its tropical décor, complete with artificial palm trees, gave it a romantic atmosphere straight out of that year’s Hollywood hit, Casablanca. Though its legal capacity was limited to 460 occupants, approximately one thousand people were packed into the club on that frigid fall evening.
At around 10:15 P.M., one of the patrons—a young soldier looking for some privacy while he and his date nuzzled in the downstairs lounge—unscrewed a low-wattage bulb glowing amid the decorative palm leaves above their table. Instructed by a bartender to restore the light, a sixteen-year-old busboy climbed onto a seat and, unable to see the socket, struck a match and held it close to the fake—and, as it turned out, highly flammable—fronds. Almost immediately, the ceiling was in flames.
Waiters quickly tried—and failed—to douse the blaze by squirting it with water from seltzer bottles. Within minutes the flames had swept across the ceiling, raced up a stairwell, burst onto the dance floor, and engulfed the main dining room. Frantic patrons scrambled for the front entrance. Only a few made it through the revolving door before it jammed up with bodies and became a death trap. Others raced to the rear, only to find the back door padlocked—a precaution to keep deadbeats from sneaking out without settling their tabs. Several other doors were unlocked but impassable since they only swung inward and could not be opened against the crush of panic-stricken people struggling to escape. A plate-glass window that might have served as an emergency exit was boarded up.
Nearly two hundred firefighters sped to the scene—twenty-six engine companies, five ladder companies, and three rescue companies. The conflagration was extinguished in fifteen minutes. By then, however, nearly five hundred people had perished inside the building, making it the deadliest nightclub fire in U.S. history.
At the time of the tragedy, Lindemann was chief of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, where many of the survivors received treatment. His observation of their long-term reactions led to the publication of his now-classic essay.
In it, Lindemann describes five consistent symptoms that characterize acute grief: intense bodily distress, preoccupation with the image of the deceased, guilt, anger, and changes in patterns of conduct. A sixth feature—adopting behavioral traits of the deceased—also appeared in a large number of the bereaved. Lindemann goes on to describe a three-stage therapeutic process necessary to restore the sufferer to normal functioning: (1) emancipation from emotional bondage to the deceased; (2) readjustment to the environment in which the deceased is missing; and (3) the formation of new relationships. For this process, Lindemann coined the now standard term grief work.
ASK DR. DEATH
Dear Dr. Death:
When I think about dying, I don’t particularly look forward to the prospect of having my gussied-up corpse laid out for all the world to see. At the same time, I’ve often heard that viewing a loved one’s body at a funeral home is an important part of the grieving process. Is this true or false?
Worried About How I’
ll Look When I’m Dead Dear Worried:
This is absolutely true. Or completely false. Depends on whom you ask. Some experts argue that an open-casket viewing serves a vital psychological function for survivors by forcing them to accept the finality of death. According to the late Erich Lindemann, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, the single “most useful” part of a funeral service occurs “when living persons confront the fact of death by looking at the body. People tend to deny painful reality. But when they experience that moment of truth that comes when they stand before the dead body, their denials collapse. They are facing reality, and that is the first important step toward managing their grief.” Perhaps unsurprisingly (given the profits they reap from preparing corpses for viewing), undertakers tend to heartily endorse this opinion.
Other mental health experts, however, see things very differently, arguing that open-casket viewings have the exact opposite effect. According to these professionals, viewing a cosmetically made-up corpse makes it easier for family members to deny reality by creating the illusion that their loved one is sleeping or resting peacefully. Far from serving a therapeutic purpose, it can also be an actively unpleasant, if not traumatic, experience for some survivors.
As for encouraging children to view a dead body, expert opinion is equally divided. Some psychologists insist that since children are prone to frightening misconceptions about death, it is healthy for them to confront the “reality of the open coffin.” Clifton D. Bryant, editor of the authoritative Handbook of Death and Dying (Sage, 2003), however, states unequivocally that “small children should not be present during viewing” and that “no child, regardless of age, should be forced to view a body.” (If you’ve ever seen the 1957 movie The Three Faces of Eve—in which a little girl develops multiple personality disorder after being forced to kiss her dead grandma on the cheek—you’ll undoubtedly agree with the latter view.)
The Whole Death Catalog Page 31