The American Way of Death Revisited - Jessica Mitford [78]
Lastly, William Manchester records some reactions to the embalmer’s art as practiced by Gawler’s:
Arthur Schlesinger and Nancy Tuckerman went in through the Green Room. “It was appalling,” Arthur reported. “When I came closer it looked less and less like him. It is too waxen, too made-up.” Nancy echoed faintly that the face resembled “the rubber masks stores sell as novelties.” He urged Bob to “close the casket.” … Walton [William Walton, artist, friend of Kennedy’s] looked as long as he could, with a growing sense of outrage. He said to Bob, “You mustn’t keep it open. It has no resemblance to the President. It’s a wax dummy.”
And closed the coffin did remain. UPI commented as follows:
When Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy decided that President Kennedy’s casket would remain closed while his body lay in state, she acted as many religious leaders wish that all bereaved families would.… They feel that it is pagan rather than Christian to focus attention on the corpse. It is worth noting that in other particulars as well, the conduct of the Kennedy funeral represented a departure from the prevailing funerary practices fostered by the American death industries. There were no flowers, by request of the Kennedy family. At no point did a Cadillac hearse intrude; the coffin, covered by a flag, was transported by gun carriage.
* Today such a funeral would cost $8,000 or more. Bronze sealers begin at $4,000 and run up to $25,000 for the heavier gauges.
12
Fashions in Funerals
Disposal of the dead falls rather into a class with fashions, than with either customs or folkways on the one hand, or institutions on the other…. [S]ocial practices of disposing of the dead are of a kind with fashion of dress, luxury and etiquette.
—A. L. KROEBER, “Disposal of the Dead,”
American Anthropologist, July-September 1927
One of the interesting things about burial practices is that they provide many a clue to the customs and society of the living. The very word “antiquarian” conjures up the picture of a mild-eyed historian groping about amidst old tombstones, copying down epitaphs with their folksy inscriptions and irregular spelling, extrapolating from these a picture of the quaint people and homey ways of yore. There is unconscious wit: the widow’s epitaph to her husband, “Rest in peace—until we meet again.” There is gay inventiveness:
Here lie I, Master Elginbrod.
Have mercy on my soul, O God,
As I would have if I were God
And thou wert Master Elginbrod.
There is pathos: “I will awake, O Christ, when thou callest me, but let me sleep awhile—for I am very weary.” And bathos: “ ’Tis but the casket that lies here; the gem that fills it sparkles yet.”
For the study of prehistory, archaeologists rely heavily on what they can find in and around tombs, graves, monuments; and from the tools, jewels, household articles, symbols found with the dead, they reconstruct whole civilizations, infer entire systems of religious and ethical beliefs.
Inevitably, some go-ahead team of thirtieth-century archaeologists will labor to reconstruct our present-day level of civilization from a study of our burial practices. It is depressing to think of them digging and poking about in our new crop of Forest Lawns, the shouts of discovery as they come upon the mass-produced granite horrors, the repetitive flat bronze markers (the legends, like greeting cards and singing telegrams, chosen from an approved list maintained at the cemetery office), and, under the ground, the stamped-out metal casket shells resembling nothing so much as those bronzed and silvered souvenirs for sale at airport gift shops. Prying further, they would find reposing in each of these on a comfortable mattress of innerspring or foam-rubber construction a standardized, rouged, or suntanned specimen of Homo sapiens, USA, attired in business suit or flowing negligee according to sex. Our archaeologists would puzzle