The Whole Death Catalog

by Harold Schechter

  As I walked out on the streets of Laredo,

  As I walked out in Laredo one day,

  I spied a young cowboy all wrapped in white linen,

  Wrapped in white linen as cold as the clay.

  “I can see by your outfit that you are a cowboy,”

  These words he did say as I boldly walked by.

  “Come sit down beside me and hear my sad story,

  I’m shot in the breast and I know I must die.

  “It was once in the saddle, I used to go dashing,

  Once in the saddle, I used to go gay.

  First to the cardhouse, and then down to

  Rosie’s, But I’m shot in the breast and I’m dyin’ today.

  “Get six jolly fellows to carry my coffin,

  And six pretty maidens to bear up my pall.

  Throw bunches of roses all over my coffin,

  That they might not smell me as they bear me along.

  “Then beat the drum slowly, play the fife lowly,

  Play the dead march as you carry me along.

  Take me to the green valley, lay the sod o’er me,

  I’m a young cowboy, and I know I’ve done wrong.

  “Then go write a letter to my gray-haired mother,

  And tell her the cowboy that she loved is gone.

  But please not one word of the man who had killed me,

  Don’t mention his name, and his name will pass on.”

  When thus he had spoken, the hot sun was setting.

  The streets of Laredo grew cold as the clay.

  We took the young cowboy down to the green valley,

  And there stands his marker we made to this day.

  “We beat the drum slowly, played the fife lowly,

  Played the dead march as we carried him along.

  Down in the green valley, laid the sod o’er him.

  He was a young cowboy and he said he’d done wrong.

  Lullabies: Ditties of Death

  Anyone who has paid attention to the words of “Rock-a-bye Baby” knows that this ostensibly soothing, slumber-inducing lyric is scary as hell: “When the bough breaks / The cradle will fall / And down will come baby / Cradle and all.” Exactly how is a song about plunging to your death while trapped in a cradle supposed to lull you to sleep?

  As it happens, “Rock-a-bye Baby” isn’t the only terrifying lullaby. In certain parts of the world, parents commonly croon their infants to sleep with lyrics that either describe the imminent death of the child or threaten him with extreme bodily injury if he doesn’t quit crying and go to sleep.

  According to Finnish scholar Kalle Achté, who has made an extensive survey of the subject, his own countrymen—for whatever unexplained cultural reasons—are particularly fond of such unnerving ditties. Popular Finnish lullabies include “Rock the Child into the Grave” and “Come, Death, in Little Socks,” in which “the singer promises to reward death with a pair of socks or shoes for taking the child away.”

  But Finnish babies aren’t the only ones who grow up hearing such dismal tunes. Newborn Estonians are expected to fall asleep while listening to their grandmas sing:

  Rock the child, swing the child,

  Rock the child into death.

  Swing the child into the coffin,

  Cross the arms upon the breast.

  And then there’s this deeply reassuring Russian lullaby:

  Sleep, sleep,

  If you die today

  I shall make a little coffin

  Of pine boards.

  I shall carry you to the churchyard,

  I shall cry and I shall mourn

  When I bury you in a little grave.

  What exactly is going on here? Achté speculates that in a preindustrial world where infant mortality rates were shockingly high, such funereal songs offered mothers a way of confronting their worst fears. And given the hard lot of peasant women in those bygone days, mothers might actually have seen death as preferable to earthly existence and “wished that on their children.”

  Whatever the case, all we can say is, it’s a good thing the target audience for these bedtime dirges are too little to understand the words.

  Six Feet Under: Must-See

  TV for Morticians

  Sure, everyone is aware that death figures prominently in the daily experience of funeral directors. But who knew that their lives are so full of sex, drugs, and extreme family dysfunction? That long-kept secret was finally made public in the hit HBO series Six Feet Under, which came to the end of its five-season run in 2005 but continues to enjoy a healthy afterlife in DVD format.

  Created by Alan Ball (Academy Award-winning screenwriter of the film American Beauty), this critically acclaimed show revolves around the Fisher clan, proprietors of a family-owned funeral parlor. Their lives take an unexpected turn when their patriarch, Nathaniel Senior (Richard Jenkins), is killed in a traffic accident in the opening moments of the first episode. The sudden death of the elder Nathaniel (who, though deceased, puts in regular appearances throughout the series) introduced one of the signature features of the show, each episode of which begins with the shocking (though often darkly humorous) death of a character who is then brought to the Fisher funeral home for disposal.

  The complicated (and occasionally soap-opera-ish) story lines focus on the dynamics among the surviving family members—mother Ruth (Frances Conroy), teenage daughter Claire (Lauren Ambrose), gay younger brother David (Michael C. Hall), and older black-sheep sibling Nate junior (Peter Krause)—along with their assorted lovers and friends. For the more morbidly inclined members of the audience, however, the real distinction of the program has to do with its exceptionally realistic depiction of the day-to-day operations of an old-fashioned funeral home, from the arrangement conference and the embalming (performed for the Fishers by their ace employee Federico Diaz, played by Freddy Rodriguez) to the viewing and service.

  Die-hard fans of the show will want to visit the official website, www.hbo.com/sixfeetunder, which offers a host of nifty features, including obituaries of all the leading characters, trivia games, and an online gift shop where you can order your own “Fisher & Diaz” T-shirts!

  Death is here and death is there,

  Death is busy everywhere,

  All around, within, beneath,

  Above is death—and we are death.

  —PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

  Magazines You Are

  Unlikely to Find in Your

  Doctor’s Waiting Room

  Since every profession from aerospace engineering to zymurgy (the branch of chemistry dealing with the fermentation of beer) has its own trade publication, you won’t be surprised to learn that embalmers have one, too. It’s called—surprise!—the Embalmer. The official journal of the British Institute of Embalmers, this handsomely produced quarterly is “devoted to furthering the interest, acceptance, and practice of embalming throughout the world” (as its masthead announces). To that end, it publishes a wide range of entertaining and informative pieces, including “The Great Salisbury Train Disaster: A Landmark for English Embalmers,” “Advanced Embalming and Reconstruction Workshops,” and “Funeral Service Training in Australia.”

  The occasional issue even features a removable centerfold that—like the kind invented by Hugh Hefner—offers graphic glimpses of exposed human flesh, albeit of a somewhat less erotic nature (unless you happen to be a necrophile). Typical is the pullout in the October 2006 issue, which demonstrates, though a series of explicit full-color close-ups, the advantages of injecting embalming fluid through the superior axillary artery as opposed to the more traditional femoral. It’s quite eye-catching—though if your adolescent son prefers it to the Playboy variety it might be time for that talk with the school psychologist. For more information, check out the British Institute of Embalmers website, www.bioe.co.uk

  Other mortuary mags that deal with topics not normally covered in People, Entertainment Weekly, and the children’s magazine Highlights are:

  A
merican Cemetery (“The Independent Magazine of Mortuary Management”), which offers helpful features such as “Winterizing Your Cemetery” and “Top Ten Marketing Ideas for Cemeteries” (www.katesboylston.com).

  Mortuary Management, a venerable trade publication that has been serving the needs of funeral directors and others in the death biz since 1914 (www.mortuarymanagement.com).

  The Director, the official magazine of the National Funeral Directors Association, offering articles such as “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Grievers” and “Why You Should Bring Those Oversize Caskets Out of the Backroom” (www.nfda.com).

  American Funeral Director, the country’s leading independent trade magazine for funeral directors and other funeral service professionals, now in its 130th year of publication. Recent must-read articles include “Pet Loss Services: Mentally Positioned to Succeed” and “Are You Prepared for the Next Pandemic?” (www.katesboylston.com).

  Sick Jokes

  Question: What’s funnier than a dead baby?

  A. Anything. Dead babies aren’t funny.

  B. Two dead babies?

  C. A priest, a rabbi, and a lawyer.

  D. None of the above.

  Answer: None of the above. What’s funnier than a dead baby is … a dead baby in a clown costume!

  This, of course, is an example of a particularly tasteless brand of humor, the dead baby joke, of which there are scores of examples (If you don’t believe me, check out www.dead-baby-joke.com). Though this genre didn’t arise until the 1960s, it was preceded by other forms of gross-out humor, some dating back to the turn of the last century. Between 1899 and 1930, morbid little poems known as “Little Willies” enjoyed a vogue in America. Some of these were as sadistic as any sixties-era dead baby joke:

  Willie, with a thirst for gore,

  Nailed the baby to the door.

  Mother said, with humor quaint:

  “Willie dear, don’t spoil the paint.”

  While ghoulish humor like this might seem to reflect nothing more than the debased sensibilities of the audience, psychologists and others tell us that sick jokes actually serve an important function. As eminent folklorist Alan Dundes argues in his fascinating study Cracking Jokes: Studies of Sick Humor Cycles and Stereotypes (Ten Speed Press, 1987), they provide “a socially sanctioned outlet for the discussion of the forbidden and taboo” and thus offer us a way to ventilate and relieve our anxieties. Viewed from this perspective, dead baby jokes can be seen not just as a form of crude adolescent humor told for nothing more than raw shock value, but also as a means of dealing with the most taboo and anxiety-provoking subject of all: death.

  “The Hearse Song”

  Jokes aren’t the only way children have of coping with death anxieties. Another is the creepily comical song “The Worms Crawl In,” aka “The Hearse Song,” a macabre favorite for generations of children. It exists in dozens of variant forms. Here’s one of the best known:

  Did you ever think when a hearse goes by,

  That you may be the next to die?

  They take you to the family plot,

  And there you wither, decay, and rot.

  They wrap you in a bloody sheet,

  And then they bury you six feet deep.

  All goes well for a week or two,

  And then things start to happen to you.

  The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out

  They eat your guts and they spit them out.

  One of the worms that’s not so shy

  Crawls in one ear and out one eye.

  And then your blood turns yellow-green

  And oozes out like sour cream.

  Your eyes fall in, your teeth fall out,

  Your liver turns to sauerkraut.

  So never laugh when a hearse goes by,

  For you might be the next to die.

  Memento Mori

  Not so very long ago, the only people who sported death’s-head jewelry were members of outlaw biker gangs and the kind of teens who paint their fingernails black, cultivate corpse-pale complexions, and decorate their rooms with posters of Marilyn Manson. All that has changed. According to a front-page article by David Colman in the July 27, 2006, Styles section of the New York Times, we have entered the era of “graveyard chic,” when the human skull has become a trendy design logo on everything from necklaces, wristwatches, and bracelets to boxer shorts, umbrellas, and even toilet brushes. “With the full force of the American consumer marketing establishment behind it,” writes Colman, “the skull has lost virtually all of its fearsome outsider meaning. It has become the Happy Face of the 2000s.”

  Memento mori: Renaissance deaths-head timepiece.

  As with so many other phenomena that seem uniquely symptomatic of the modern era, however, there is nothing particularly new about skull-based jewelry and household decor. To be sure, people in past ages didn’t flaunt skulls as a fashion statement or (like an unnamed Manhattan hostess in Colman’s article) blow four thousand bucks on a set of skull-shaped sterling placecard holders with hinged jaws to clasp the cards. But they did, at times, wear death’s-head jewelry and even decorate their homes with human skulls.

  Among the New England Puritans, for example, it was not uncommon for the devout to wear silver skull rings. And seventeenth-century portraits of Puritan dignitaries frequently depict their subjects seated at desks that hold paperweights made of actual human skulls. Mary, Queen of Scots, owned a skull-shaped silver watch, while Martin Luther had a gold ring with a death’s-head in enamel.

  Items such as these are technically known as memento mori, a Latin phrase generally translated as “remember you will die.” For pious Christians of earlier centuries, these grim emblems of mortality had a deeply spiritual function, reminding them of the urgency of attending to their souls in a world where death can come at any instant.

  In other times and places, memento mori served a more worldly, if not hedonistic, purpose—“as an intensifier for enjoying the good life in the here and now,” in the words of thanatologist Robert Kastenbaum. In ancient Rome, for example, miniature coffins were sometimes passed out as party favors to remind the guests to eat, drink, and be merry—“to dance footloose upon the earth,” as Horace writes in his Odes since there will be no such pleasure in the afterlife.

  Danse macabre: fifteenth-century woodcut.

  By the Middle Ages, the memento mori tradition had not only taken on a far more somber emphasis but also assumed a variety of new and often grotesque guises. Largely in response to the devastation wrought by the Black Plague, gruesome depictions of death—focusing on the horrors of physical decay and conveying a visceral sense of the precarious-ness of existence—became a dominant motif of medieval art. In woodcut illustrations such as Hans Holbein’s famous danse macabre series (showing a ghastly grim reaper carrying off the rich and poor alike) and paintings such as Pieter Breughel the Elder’s The Triumph of Death (in which a horde of armed skeletons descends upon a field of victims engaged in a variety of worldly pursuits), viewers were reminded in the most graphically unnerving way of their inescapable fate.

  Though the memento mori craze of the medieval period eventually petered out, the tradition has never entirely disappeared. During the seventeenth century, for example, a genre of still-life painting known as vanitas (Latin for “vanity”) flourished in the Netherlands. Works of this type depict a variety of objects—most commonly skulls, hourglasses, and wilting flowers—meant to symbolize the transience of life and the vanity of all earthly achievements and pleasures. Some people have even gone to the extreme of furnishing their homes with the receptacles in which they plan to be interred. Sarah Bernhardt, for example, liked to relax in a coffin, which she kept in her bedroom. A famous photograph of the legendary actress shows her reposing in the open casket as though rehearsing for her burial.

  Perhaps the most striking and widely publicized memento mori of the present day—one that says as much about our glamour-obsessed, consumerist age as Holbein’s danse macabre
woodcuts reveal about the medieval mentality—is British bad-boy artist Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God: a life-size platinum cast of a human skull encrusted with 8,601 high-quality diamonds, including a fifty-two-carat gem in the center of the brow. The single most expensive piece of contemporary art ever created, it can be yours for a mere $100 million and change.

  Memento Mori Calendars

  Not so very long ago, wall calendars came in two basic varieties: (1) the advertising calendar handed out free by local businesses—insurance agencies, dry cleaners, hardware stores, and the like—and illustrated with cheesy photographs of butterflies, tropical sunsets, and Alpine landscapes, and (2) the “cheesecake” calendar that featured full-color photos of scantily clad cuties or demurely posed nudes and that could invariably be found on the walls of auto repair shops everywhere.

  Things are very different today. Glossy, lavishly produced wall calendars have become a big part of the publishing business and are available for every conceivable interest and taste. Whether you’re a Beatles fan, an aficionado of French Impressionist art, a cat fancier, a Star Wars geek, or a lover of any of a thousand other things—comic strips, pets, vintage cars, rock musicians, Renaissance artists, hit TV shows, franchise films, best-selling fantasy books, et cetera, et cetera, you’ll find a calendar perfectly suited for you. So it’s no surprise that there are calendars for the memento mori crowd. After all, what better way to keep track of the passage of every fleeting day, week, month, and year of your life than with a death-themed wall calendar?

  Sexytime coffins. From the 2007 CofaniFunebri.com “The Last 2 Let You Down” calendar. Courtesy of CofaniFunebri.com.