Listener Calls

Peter:  This is BackStory, the show that takes a topic in the here and now and puts it in historical context.  I’m Peter Onuf, 18^th century history guy.

Ed:  I’m Ed Ayers, 19^th century history guy.

Brian:  And I’m Brian Balogh, 20^th century history guy.  Today on the show, memorialization.  How do we Americans live with our dead, and how has that changed over time?  So far, we’ve been focusing mostly on war dead, but we’re going to open up the discussion now to include ordinary, non-war death as well.  As we do with all of our shows, we’ve been soliciting your ideas about today’s topic on our website, BackStoryRadio.org., and our producers have invited a few of you to join us on the phone.

Peter:  Hey guys, we have a call from the great State of Vermont, in Burlington, we have Josh on the line.  Josh, welcome to BackStory.

Caller Josh: Good morning.

Peter:  Hey, death, a cheery subject.  What’s on your mind?

Caller Josh: Well, I work for a consumer education organization, called Funeral Consumers Alliance, and what we do is try to help people understand what their legal rights and options are.  It’s always interested me when I talk to people what they consider to be, what they call funeral traditions.  A lot of what people consider to be traditional, they seem rarely to be purely organic, but we often say that what the contemporary funeral industry calls a traditional funeral is largely a commercially-created tradition, and I’d love to hear what you guys think about.

Peter:  Josh wants to know if funerals are simply another product that high capitalism has produced with a veneer of tradition – what a cynic you are, Josh.

Caller Josh: I’m a realist.

Ed:  Let me give you an example of something I just recently discovered.  The United States is unique in the ritual of dressing up the dead person with make up and all, which would suggest to me that it’s hardly a tradition if we’re the only people who do it, because the whole idea is that we’re doing this in some universal human trait, but that’s not the case at all.  Where did that come from, do you know?

Caller Josh: Well, yes, I mean the short history of what I call the modern American funeral after the Civil War, really came about because chemical embalming was invented during the Civil War and proved very useful for getting soldiers home from the battlefield.  It was in the last quarter of the 19^th century that it was the first time there was an professional industrial class of undertakers that began to be called “funeral directors”.  As I understand it, before that time, funerals were a much more family centered event, insofar as the person would be cared for, washed, dressed and laid out at home, often by women in the family, and the family would take a more direct role.

Ed:  Ironically, I’m not usually much one for technological determinism, but here’s a case where the embalming process made possible and even suggested that it would be appropriate to string out the funeral process, and you could actually have the viewing and all that.  Not to be morbid, but the clock is ticking otherwise without that process.

Brian:  Josh and Ed, embalming is very important, but also, the rise of the modern hospital and places where more and more people die, is a factor too.  To just cut against the grain a little bit, Josh, that’s not just trying to make a buck, that’s more and more people are not dying in the home in the 20^th century.   So we need to do a bit of reinventing, or recreating, the notion that the family is there and they have been surrounded by loved ones when they die, even though that’s not the case.

Ed:  Do you find that there’s a swelling wave of resentment against these things, or are people coming to you, Josh, with increasing regularity.

Caller Josh: Oh, we have always, the organization had a huge number of inquiries from the public.  But, interestingly, in this economic down turn, something is happening, I think culturally, that our organization has been trying to get people to think about, but the economy is doing a better job, maybe then we have, which is people are not only finding ways to save money on the funeral, it’s an opportunity to rethink the values that we associate with funerals.  People are rediscovering that old traditions can be reinterpreted in ways that don’t cost them a mortgage payment.

Peter:  But to be fair about old traditions, Josh, we go back to the Colonial period, my time, at funerals, it would be required to give out gloves and such; it’s a form of what anthropologists call “pot latch”, gift giving in order to establish and reaffirm social status.  So funerals were very, very expensive in the Colonial period, and this conspicuous display, and one of the austerity measures that Revolutionaries and Patriots promoted was to chill it on the big death deal.

Caller Josh: Interesting.  Does it cut across socio-economic levels?

Peter:  Well, no, because only the rich could do this, and it would be an opportunity to reaffirm it.

Caller Josh: Interesting, because another thing that a lot of us frequently toss around is the poor pay more, and what we mean by that, is we find that people who are middle-class and with higher incomes, more college education, tend statistically to be the ones who go for the simple cremation, and it’s working-class people who often will try to spend more on the funeral.  Is this a modern phenomenon?

Peter:  I think there’s a long history to it, and you might say it’s sort of a “dying up” [laughter].  When you die, you show respect and the respect that this person is as good as anybody, don’t think that because we’re poor that we don’t die well.  This is a moment in which we’re going to assert, you could say, that in death all men are created equal.  And of course, people who are the favored and the privileged and the very wealthy, they don’t need to make this clear in quite that way.

Caller Josh: They don’t need to show it off.  Interesting.

Peter:  Josh, thanks for calling in.

Caller Josh: Oh, thanks, you guys are fun.  I appreciate it.

Brian:  If you’re just tuning in, this is BackStory. We’re the American Backstory hosts, and we’re marking Memorial Day with a show about the history of death and dying.  Peter, who do we have the honor of speaking with next?

Peter:  It’s Sherry, Brian, from the Town of Marion, Virginia.  Sherry, welcome to BackStory.  We’re talking about death and we’re trying to keep up lively conversation.  What’s on your mind?

Caller Sherry: I have two inter-related questions that I’d like to ask if I may.  How has the replacement of the once-common practice of dying at home with the modern hospital experience affected how we view death and life?   And what has our fear and avoidance of the process of dying cost us in terms of how we understand the world in which we live?

Peter:  These are terrific questions, Sherry, and that is how has the death experience been shaped by modern medicine away from home, and then how do we think about it.  Well, I think this is one of these back to front questions where we start with the 20^th century.

Brian:  Yeah, I think that’s fair enough.  I remember reading some study about the average number of deaths you see in the average Hollywood film.  People are getting blown away in very graphic form, and I think that one of the reasons that we have so much mediated violence, violence that is not real, that comes through the media, is we are not exposed to real death and to the real pain entailed in all of that, as people, I think, in Ed’s century, and Peter’s century, were, and that’s my clever way of handing your tough question over to the other two guys.

Ed:  Well I’m going to be contrarian, here.  There’s no doubt that what Brian just said is the case.  I guess that I would suggest is that people want it to be out of the house, and mediated.  People were glad to have embalming.  It spread quite rapidly in the second half of the 19^th century, which says two things:  one, that people didn’t really want the corporeal experience of death, which is just profoundly unsettling and unpleasant and dangerous; on the other hand, what embalming did was allow people to prolong the act of departure long enough that you could come and pay honor to the lost one, to be able to feel some kind of closure.

Peter:  It’s still dying takes place in the home, of course, unless it’s an accident.  Part of our story is when do hospital clean up their acts sufficiently so that that is the indicated place for people in critical, medical condition at end of life to be there, because even now, of course, hospitals are places where you get a lot of infections, it’s the big scandal of modern hospitals, it’s a great place to go and die.

Brian:  And there’s no question that technology is advanced and it became, starting in the 20^th century, but especially after WWII, a lot safer to go to hospitals. But I think we’ve got to talk about cost here, because even though hospitals became safer, the combination of studies that showed rates of infection with trying to cut costs, have led to a movement of getting people out of hospitals as quickly as possible.  It’s also the hospice movement, and that’s really taken off in the last two decades, and it’s in part, been a very important need to treat people in a humane fashion, to not have them die as vegetables with tubes coming out of them, combined with a great interest on the part of insurance companies to cut down on costs.  All right, Peter, you’ve played out the string, we’re going back to the 18^th century, whether Sherry wants to go there or not . . .

Peter:  Sherry, you can hang up any time.  [laughter].  This is the boring part.  But, no, back to the 18^th century…

Ed: People REALLY died back then.

Peter: People just died, and I think it’s true, it’s not as extraordinary as it seems to us, an individual’s death.  The think is that people die all the time in the home and it’s a fact of life, or I should say, it’s a fact of death, it’s right there in your face, you might say. It happens so often, and the idea of death, it’s in the context of the family, and families replace dead people.  Now that sounds pretty brutal, but if you lose a child, often that name would be used for another child.  That is there’s kind of an inter-changeability, because what comes first is the family, not the individual.  Of course, individuals die; it’s a traumatic thing at any time in history, but we’ve made it our very special kind of drama, and trauma, and we have therefore, paradoxically, insulated ourselves from what we take to be the most devastating and hurtful aspects of it, because we’ve made it into a kind of secularized religious experience, whether or not we’re very religious people.

Brian:  Sherry, I want to ask you what prompts your question?

Caller Sherry: What prompted my question?  I grew up in a nursing home in the mountains of Virginia.  We lived downstairs and the patients lived upstairs, anywhere from 8 to 10 patients.  So my formative years were spent with old people, and it was a very rich and wonderful experience that I really cherish.

Brian:  And what was your reaction to the inevitable likelihood that they died all the time?

Caller Sherry: Well, the first person I saw die, I was 8 years old.  He was a retired mill operator.  He adopted my sister and I as his children, and so when he actually died, I was devastated.  I witnessed other deaths, as well, in this nursing home.  These were people with whom we were intimately connected.  This was not an institutionalized home.  But, these experiences shaped my world view.  I knew early that we leave this world, and without romanticizing death, because there is nothing romantic about the process of dying—there is mystery to it.  There is a moment of peace after the process of death that is sacred ground, whether you’re religious or not.  So how it shaped my world view and my value system is that for one thing, I never really cared about material things, because I knew how empty the pursuit of a false material world was, early on.

Brian:  Let me ask you, Sherry, your story is remarkably idiosyncratic in our age.  Do you have any suggestions for ways in which larger numbers of people might experience that mystery, those mysterious moments that you grew up with on a regular basis, or that Peter’s folks back, and Ed’s folks for that matter, experienced on a regular basis?

Caller Sherry: Well, probably to not be afraid of death for the person who’s dying to help them make the transition from death to the next world if that’s what you believe, or to the end of this life and some sort of peace, because people who are dying need to talk about what they’re going through, and they’re prohibited from doing that because people who are still here are afraid.

Brian:  That’s a great point. Sherry, I think we should just devote this show to you, to tell you the truth, to be perfectly honest.

Peter:  Well, thank you for calling, Sherry, great call.

Ed: That was wonderful.

Caller Sherry: Thank you.  Have a good day.

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