American Way of Death

This weekend (literally 5 minutes ago!), I read Shannon Lee Dawdy’s latest book: American Afterlives: Reinventing Death in the 21st Century (Princeton 2021). The book is good, as one might expect from one of the most well-known and respected archaeologists of the 21st century, but I will admit that the book was not quite what I expected. It is not, as the author admits in its first pages, an academic book, but a companion to a documentary that she produced with Daniel Zox. I’ll think a bit about that in my book notes to follow, but it means that the book doesn’t set out to make a single academic statement, but to consider the practices surrounding death in contemporary American culture more broadly.

Just a few weeks ago, two of my friends sat on my front porch talking about their respective fathers’ relatively recent passing. As someone whose father is still living, the conversation was uncomfortable for me especially the sometimes matter of factness about the role that they played both in the end of their fathers’ lives and also the rituals associated with the final arrangements. To be clear, nothing that they said was inappropriate or shocking. In fact, it made clear to me that death was, in fact, part of everyday life. This has got me thinking about my own death and the death of those close to me. I keep hoping that I’ll have some profound revelation that will help guide me to making some dramatic statement or profound plans about what should happen to my body when I die. I have a friend who doesn’t want her body to stay in North Dakota. I find myself far more ambivalent. Dawdy’s book helped me, in some ways, realize that this too was a fine way to view death. I needn’t have plans for my body to be launched into space, or my ashes scattered at some scenic vista, or some kind of party or somber event to serve as a memorial. Water will find its own level when I die largely because death is part of everyday life.

As per usual, I don’t have a review for this book, but I offer a handful of observations. It’s a good book and one well worth reading.    

1. Books and Media. My fiction editor at North Dakota Quarterly, Gilad Elbom, made the observation once that most fiction is becoming the scripts for movies or TV shows. In other words, stories are adopting the pacing, the preoccupation with setting, the neatly defined characters, and the narrative arc preferred by the mass media. Even a casual engagement with recent fiction exposes the reader to any number of cringe worthy moments where the author attempts to describe a scene as if it were already on the screen rather than as something destined for the reader’s imagination and fleshed out by our common experiences. 

Dawdy’s book is one of the first scholarly works that felt as if it were a podcast or documentary. This isn’t a complaint or criticism. It is not just that the Dawdy introduced the reader to vivid characters, individually described, as this is a feature of any number of well-written works of thoughtful, creative, and journalistic non-fiction. Maybe it has to do with the vivid settings of some of the interviews or her personal anecdotes or even the sense of movement through the book which seems readymade for NPR style voice overs. In any event, I expect to see more of this in the coming years as podcast, documentaries, and other forms of popular media serve to shape spaces of transmedia scholarship 

2. Death as an Object. Dawdy brought her archaeological sensibilities to the book through her intense interest in the material aspects of death. Dawdy considers a wide range of American ways of disposing of bodies from traditional practices of embalming to custom made urns, the growing vogue for biodegradable shrouds, the option to have one’s ashes blended with paint, mixed with glass, or even compressed into diamonds or even the mixed with powder and shot off as fireworks!

On Friday, as I was out for my run, I passed by a man paying his respects near the edge of the river where several years ago a body was found. The body belonged to a local resident whose family and friends maintained a little memorial for the individual there with colored ribbons tied around the trees and they sometimes left plastic flowers, balloons, or other mementos. A few years ago, they sponsored a memorial park bench which had a little plaque with the name of the deceased on it. Someone pried the plaque free from the bench, but the bench is still there.

Dawdy’s interest in death rituals (broadly construed) maybe tends slightly toward the formal practices (no matter how idiosyncratic or personal). She doesn’t really consider the impromptu memorials that appear so regularly in small towns: on roadsides, riverbeds, on the backs of cars, and in parks. I’ve often wondered about these and how they worked for the individuals who set them up and people who pass them every day. I can’t help but feeling a tiny bit of kinship with the people who set up these memorials and feel like I have a tiny role to play in the preservation of their memories.

3. 9/11, Katrina, and COVID. The  historical backdrops to this book are the three tragedies that will likely define the first quarter of the 21st century. The 9/11 attacks and the concern shown for the recovery of human remains from the mangled ruins of the World Trade Center seemed to draw people’s attention toward issues of what to do with the body of the deceased. The devastating effects of Katrina on the city of New Orleans and the efforts of the community to recover are essentially synonymous with Shannon Lee Dawdy’s career. In this book, the streets of the French Quarter and New Orleans cemeteries literally frame the book which begins with Dawdy and Zox’s first interviews among revelers in New Orleans and toward the end spends time in Holt Cemetery, the public cemetery in the Crescent City. This framing ensured that the reader understood the book as part of Dawdy’s larger academic and professional project. I wonder whether 9/11 and Katrina marked a watershed in American attitudes not just toward our individual lives but also toward how we understand the social lives of our bodies after death. In the final pages of the book, Dawdy notes that it may be that the imagined community of the United States is dissolving and one of the ways that this is visible is the growing diversity of ideas surrounding death. Maybe these events somehow catalyzed these trends by pushing the debate to the forefront of our minds.

Finally, she recognized that writing (and reading) this book against the backdrop of the COVID pandemic meant that thoughts about death were once again in the forefront of our collective consciousness. And, once again, we reflected on how we want our bodies treated after we die and once again, we’ll discover how these practices strengthen and test social bonds made all more fragile by pandemic itself.

4. Time. It seems like the afterlife of the human body does something weird with time. For example, practices like embalming seem to be an effort to slow time down. The rituals of burial, scattering of ashes, or other end of life rites seem to blur the past of the individual with the present of the mourners. The traditions of celebratory and deeply respectful funerals – of paying respects – especially among marginalized groups who were often not treated with respect in their daily lives. In other words, practices associated with end of life rituals offered a time where the deceased could receive the respect that they did not get in their life. At the same time, there is this intense desire to commemorate and communicate with the future. In fact, the epilogue of the book features future (?) archaeologists discovering the remains of a burial shroud during their excavation. 

I’ve been thinking more and more about the idea of a foreclosed future. A future foreclosed or truncated by the economic uncertainties of late capitalism, the looming climate catastrophe, and the struggle to imagine a future from a present that seems to be accelerating beyond our control. I wonder how the realization that the social, economic, and environmental context for memory is changing will exert an influence over how we treat the physical remains entrusted to our care or plan for our own. It seems so much of the death industry depends on us being able to imagine some sort of a future.