It was hard to miss.  Over the last week the value, purpose and benefit of the funeral ritual was definitely hard to miss.  The beauty and majesty of the funeral was witnessed by millions, and as we have said it was hard to miss.

The inherent presence of ancient funeral wisdom was ever present, from beginning to end, in the rich and symbolic funeral ceremonies for Senator John McCain, and Miss Aretha Franklin.

The messages concerning the dignity of life was unmistakable in each funeral ritual.

Both funeral funerals ritual spoke volumes in both word and action about basic and descent human freedom about human love and the importance of expressing that God given emotion.  Both funeral rituals were steeped in the precious blessings of family and community.

The powerful themes of decency, freedom, love, free expression, community and family were so interwoven in both funeral rituals that the value, purpose and benefit of funerals were soaked into the souls of millions who were glued to their media sources, watching the instantly recognizable symbols of death being used for the very purposes they were developed for over the past thousands of years – these two funeral rituals gave thousands of people meaning when mere words would certainly have failed at that task.  The meaning of any funeral rituals depends on the merging of word and action. One with without the other dilutes the full potential impact that all funeral rituals possess.

Millions of global citizen’s experienced two priceless benefits that go to the core of all funeral rituals:  People feel that they were doing and have done the right thing, and it gives countless people a priceless gift:  Peace of mind.

Both funerals were highly visible, thousands of human beings were involved, there were processionals, and recessionals, and there were hundreds of children also learning the wisdom of the funeral ritual as they stood silently on the streets watching as the impressive funeral corteges passed by.  It seemed that many parents were, at these funerals, NOT asking the question, “Should we let little Johnny go to the funeral?”

It is appropriate to explore six notable ingredients that these once in a lifetime funeral experiences possessed.

FIRST, THERE WAS THE EVENT OF DEATH

Two significant human beings, who had changed the culture in which they lived had died.  The deaths became the source of conversation, analysis, debate, and eulogies. Praise and criticism went hand in hand, as they do with most death ceremonies.  The events of the deaths of Senator McCain and Miss Franklin caused the globe to pause, which in this turbulent times is not an easy task.

SECOND, THERE WAS THE NOTIFICATION OF THE EVENT

In short order the death announcements were made world-wide.  Electronic and paper obituaries appeared everywhere. The obituary is the time honored cry for help.  See, look what happened to me, look what happened to us, slow down, stop and look at what just happened – this is the essence of all obituaries. The obituary was the call to the rest of the world to come, to participate, to experience, and to explore through the funeral rituals just what the lives of these two very divergent human being meant.

THIRD, THERE WAS THE CONFRONTATION WITH THE REALITY OF DEATH

In both funerals the valid confrontation with the reality of both deaths was impossible to avoid, save for turning off the electronic device that millions of people were watching, or by shutting oneself away for what was going on in life.

The validity of these two funeral rituals was established, not simply by the presence of dignitaries, of men and women of wealth and power, but in a very real humble sense the validity of these two funeral rituals was validated by the common ordinary American, or world citizen, who just loved to listen to Aretha Franklin belt out one song after another, or watch John McCain fillet a hapless politician on the floor of the United States Senate.

Without the common people funerals become diluted in their meaning very quickly.

The symbols that people use to establish the reality of death were ever present in both funerals:  The funeral coach, funeral floral tributes, casket bearers, music and then more music, eulogies and then more eulogies, lines of people waiting to pay their respects – ah, now there is an interesting idea:  Paying respects. What an attractive idea in our present times.

One of the premier golden threads that was present in both funeral ceremonies was the simple yet influential idea of decency and respect.  Respect for human beings. Treating people, all people, with compassion and dignity. And once again the funeral ritual held up a mirror to all humanity showing us as President Lincoln said in his first inaugural address “the better angels of our nature.”

FOURTH, THERE WAS GROUP SUPPORT

In times of crisis our social nature tends to reach out to others for group support. With this reach often times comes understanding, love, confirmation and support. Quite simply put, in times of crisis, many of us need human help and we can usually get it from other humans.

This week witnessed the power, for good, of group support.  In both deaths, and the subsequent funeral rituals for the Senator and the Queen, the news reports were full of statements such as these, “It is estimated that 15,000 people filed by the casket.”  Or “Yesterday, 25,000 people stood in line,” or “The funeral lasted for hours.” Each of these statements indicate the presence of human group support which was made all the more impressive because as with most funerals participation is voluntary.

FIFTH, THERE WAS RELIGIOUS AND PHILOSOPHICAL SUPPORT

Religious thinking is based on two simple ideas:  First religions proclaim that life is more than just a biological event, and second religions proclaims that the supernatural exists.

Throughout both funeral rituals there was an ever present awareness of the need to embrace something larger that oneself.  Throughout both funerals the idea of isolated privacy was not present. The doors of both churches were opened, and the human race responded.  Hymns, religious readings, prayers, and moments of silence permeated both funerals, and it offered the ability for human beings to attempt to express the depth of sorrow and loss.

These two funerals also proclaimed philosophical ideas.

There were several common denominators concerning religious and philosophical ideas that were experienced in both funeral ceremonies:

In both funerals the ethic of Reverence for the Dead was highly visible.  In both funerals the wise concept of slowing down, and giving the funeral rituals time to breathe was respected and honored.

Both funeral rituals were instructive.  Both fulfilled a teaching role, about dedication, using God given talents for the benefit of humanity, devotion to a cause larger than one’s self, and by exhibiting the common sense values of charity, compassion and love for one another.

Both funeral rituals were an opportunity for freedom of expression, an opportunity for free speech. Both funerals afforded the opportunity to share belief systems.

SIXTH AND FINALLY, THERE WAS THE FINAL FAREWELL

Last, but certainly not least, was the farewell, the leave taking. As Miss Franklin’s sacred remains left the church, and as Senator McCain’s sacred remains left the church there was a finality and completeness about this act of devotion that was both symbolic and essential.

This final completeness is part of what makes us human.  As the hearses for both people started on the final journey, the final pilgrimage once again the funeral ritual through the actions of living people brought down the final curtain of life.

The lesson which can be gleaned from participated in the days of activities of the funerals for Senator McCain and Miss Franklin is that funerals are good, for everyone.  Funerals are good because the ask people to do things that they need to do, such as slow down, ponder life, embrace others, and offer support.

We live in turbulent times, and funerals reflect this turbulence.  The abbreviated funeral or having no funeral rituals at all continue to grow.  However there seems to be confusion. The funerals of Senator John McCain and Miss Aretha Franklin was packed with good thinking, good actions, and good results.  However probably most of the people reading this work never actually knew John McCain or Aretha Franklin, and yet we all benefited from being participating observers of these two funerals.

Does this not magnify the importance in our own lives when a loved one, who we actually knew dies?  Is it not as important, if not more, that we seriously ponder the value, purpose and benefit of funeral wisdom when someone close to us also dies?

John Donne wrote these moving lines centuries ago, and they come to mind as this writing effort is brought to a conclusion.

No man is an island entire of itself; every man

is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;

if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe

is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as

well as any manner of thy friends or of thine

own were; any man’s death diminishes me,

because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom

the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Complicated times seem to abound around us.  However in the rich and meaning funeral ceremonies that were witnessed this week, it was hard to miss the ancient wisdom inherent in all funeral rituals.  Funerals are good for people. The Queen of Soul, Miss Aretha Franklin knew this truth and United States Senator John McCain knew this truth. Funeral are good – for everybody.

Who knows someplace, somewhere, a human being watching these two funeral rituals just might have been motivated to become funeral professional?  Who knows?

Todd W. Van Beck

You probably think that the “new” low-carbohydrate diet regimes were pioneered by far-seeing and learned medical people like Dr. Atkins.  Well this is totally incorrect.  The truth is that the low-carbohydrate diet was developed by a 19^th century English undertaker by the name of William Banting.

Today, the Atkins diet is a household name and William Banting is forgotten (in most places.)  However Banting is not forgotten altogether. Today in Sweden the term “banting” is still the word most commonly used for dieting to achieve weight loss.  In Swedish ‘Att banta’ means to bant, or to diet.  Only three men is history have been immortalized by having their names enter the English language as verbs.  The first was the Irishman, Captain Charles C. Boycott.  Another was Louis Pasteur, and the third is the focus of this article – William Banting.

William Banting was born in London in 1797.  He was born into an upper middle class family of funeral directors who for four generations held the Royal warrant as the undertaker to Great Britain’s royalty.  The Banting firm held the Royal warrant until 1928.

The London Directories indicate that a firm known as France & Banting appeared at 101 St. Martin’s Lane in 1780 and continued at that location until 1799 (the year in which George Washington died!).  In 1806 William France is listed as an undertaker in Pall Mall and was working with Thomas Banting.  The firm of Banting & France also served as cabinet makers and upholsterers to the Royal family.  In fact the prestigious auction house “Mallett” of London and New York is at the time of this writing auctioning off a King William IV mahogany breakfast table made by the firm of Banting & France.  The auctioneer instructs any potential buyer to “please contact Mallett” for the price!

The history of the France Undertaking firm can be traced back to c. 1713 (this firm is still in business known today as A. France & Son).  It was Banting & France who organized the spectacular state funeral for Lord Horatio Nelson in 1806.  The mahogany coffin for Nelson, which cost 800 pounds was made from the mainmast of the Orient, the flagship of the defeated French during the Battle of the Nile.  The coffin was 6ft 8in long and 26in wide and weighed one ton!  The coffin was created by Mr. Chester Chittenden who was the coffin maker and trimmer for France & Banting.  (The name of the firm flips back and forth over the years from Banting & France to France & Banting.)

 

Even though the Banting & France firm had been responsible for the funerals of royalty for many years it was not until June 10, 1811 when King George III issued the Royal Warrant to the firm and henceforth be formally recognized as the Royal Undertakers.  The Banting family would hold the Royal Warrant until 1928 – 117 years!

Thomas Banting’s son William Banting, the focus of this article was the second generation to hold the royal warrant.  In subsequent generations William Banting 1826-1901 and his son William Westbrook Banting 1857-1932 likewise served under warrant to the Royal Family when any death occurred.

By the time Thomas Banting retired and William took over the family undertaking business the family had done very well.  The Banting family lived in a Georgian town house in Kensington, which was lavishly decorated and furnished.  William Banting’s wife had a impressive jewellery collection worth several thousands of dollars, and in the basement of their four story property William kept an enviable wine cellar which he passed on to his eight children (two boys, six girls) in his will.  It is estimated that William Banting’s estate in 1878 would be worth 4.4 million US dollars today.

William Banting was a good humored man with a distinctive chin beard and a puckish sense of humor.  However Mr. Banting suffered from a major life disability – he was fat, extremely fat.  Standing only 5’ 5” Banting in 1863 tipped the scales at 305 lbs.  Banting had been miserable for a long, long time, and now in semi-retirement he was depressed and in poor health.  Banting’s daily routine would depress a hyena.

Every morning Banting would heave himself out of bed at 8:00 a.m. hoist a corset around his bulging stomach as he struggled to get into his three piece funeral suit.  He could not tie his shoes, and he had to walk down the stairs of his home backwards in order not to place too much weight on his knees.  He also suffered from boils and two carbuncles, he was loosing his hearing because of his weight, his sign was fuzzy because of the weight, and on top of all this he also had an umbilical rupture because of the weight.

None of Banting’s family on either parent’s side had any tendency towards obesity.  However, when William was in his thirties he started to become overweight.  His physician prescribed exercise, so William would go rowing in his boat on the Thames, but all this did was cause him a tremendous appetite and he put back on more pounds than ever – so much for exercise.

Banting went into the hospital more than twenty times because of his obesity.  He tried swimming, walking, riding and taking the sea air.  He drank gallons of physic and liquor potassae (this was a Victorian concoction of the juice from a nut, and liquefied herbs which created a cathartic – it did not work), took the spa waters, tried low-calorie foods, tried starvation diets, took up to three Turkish baths a week for one calendar year and lost only 6 pounds.

The worst however for Mr. Banting, as it is for most people with weight problems, was the cruelty of society.  Banting tried to laugh off the weight jokes, he tried to be thick skinned and not let the comments sting, he tried not to have his feelings damaged, but nevertheless he felt, as all overweight people do, the inevitable sting of such anti-fatism.  The Victorian myth that if you were fat you were extremely attractive because you could afford good food and drink simply wilts when one examines the literature on the subject available in the 1860’s. Overweight people were the object for scorn, even 140 years ago.  One publication “The London Examiner” refers specifically to Banting’s dilemma with his corpulence problem in this sarcastic piece of writing:

“…at the end of 1863 these serious matter were set off by one that provided merriment for many a day and year. A Mr. Banting, who was so fat that he could not tie his shoestrings, had to descend stairs backwards and involuntarily provided cheap entertainment for street boys, wrote to the papers (and afterwards also published a pamphlet) that, after taking innumerable Turkish baths, drenching himself at mineral springs and rowing until he was not only fat but dripping, all in vain and more, he had rid himself of a fabulous number of stones by following a simple course of diet.  A big discussion followed, many imitators adopted his plans with varied results, and “doing Banting” became a household expression.  I doubt whether it is quite extinct yet.  The comic papers and signers made themselves merry; every burlesque and pantomime scored it joke, and Banting found himself great in fame as well as in person, rivaling (for a time) even those weighty immortals, Falstaff and Sancho Panza.”

The Royal Undertaker being compared to Falstaff and Sancho Panza!  Mr. Banting was so stung by the sniggers and snide aside remarks of friends and strangers as he waddled to his undertaking shop at 27 St. James’s Street off Piccadilly, that he eventually avoided social gatherings and public transport altogether just to escape “the sneers and remarks of the cruel and injudicious.”  Banting even started to refuse to appear at royal funerals preferring to leave exposure at such monumental public events to his son.

Banting was extremely vulnerable, in trouble, and he knew it.  He wrote in a desperate tone “If fat is not an insidious creeping enemy, I do not know what it is.”

Here is William Banting’s diet before he wrote “The Letter.”  For breakfast he would eat bread and milk, a pint of tea ladelled with plenty of milk and sugar, and slices of buttered toast.  For dinner he would eat meat, drink beer, and end up with bread and pastry.  For tea time he would eat a meal similar to breakfast, and for supper he would eat fruit tarts or bread and milk.

Finally William Banting read of a physician from Paris who had promoted the idea that starches and sugars accounted for weight gain not simply fat.  The pioneering physician in Paris was hooted off the stage by the medical fraternity. So much for a new idea!

Banting decided that he would develop a new type of diet. This is what he came up with.  For each meal Mr. Banting allowed himself the following:  up to six ounces of bacon, beef, mutton, venison, kidneys, fish or any form of poultry or game; the ‘fruit of any pudding’ – he was denied the pastry; any vegetable except potato; and at dinner, two or three glasses of good claret, sherry, or Madeira; tea without milk or sugar

Champagne, port, beer were forbidden; only one ounce of toast a day.

Banting jumped into the diet.  On this diet Banting lost nearly 1 lb per week from August 1862 to August 1863.  After 38 weeks Banting felt better than he had for the post 20 years.  By the end of the year, not only had his hearing been restored, he had much more vitality and he had lost 46 lbs in weight and 12 ¼ inches off his waist.  He suffered no inconvenience whatever from the new diet, and was able to come downstairs forward naturally with perfect ease, go upstairs and take exercise freely without the slightest inconvenience.  Banting even started working funerals again and going to the office in public.  His umbilical rupture was greatly improved, his sight was restored, his hearing improved.  Banting was delighted and he was able to maintain the new eating habit.

William Banting was so thrilled with his “new diet” that he wanted to share the good news with others.  The news of the Banting diet started with a small pamphlet or booklet which Banting wrote entitled “Letter on Corpulence Addressed to the Public.”  It is an interesting footnote in history that the first diet instruction book was not written by a dietician or a medical doctor, but by an undertaker.  It became one of the most famous works on obesity ever written. First published in 1863, it went into many editions and continued to be published long after Banting’s death.

A hundred and forty years later Dr. Atkins reaped millions from his diet, while William Banting asked for no recompense for his publications.  Indeed, the elderly undertaker saw is as a public duty to pass on the “cure” for obesity and gave all the profits from the many editions of “Letter on Corpulence” to hospital charities.  The Banting Letter sold 63,000 copies in Great Britain alone.  In 1868 Banting published a proposal and started a fund from the Letter’s profits to found and endow a new institution for the service of humanity – the Middlesex County Convalescent Hospital.  Banting’s dream was to have an institution for working-class people who could not afford to convalesce but had to return to work to make ends meet thus allowing no time to get over their hospital treatment and hence succumbed to relapses.  The hospital opened in 1868.

Predictably William Banting’s greatest detractors were as Atkins is today the medical establishment.   Some physicians in Banting’s time even started the rumor that Bantings own diet had killed him.  The result was a severe howl of protest and a bitter controversy and Banting’s papers, character and book were ridiculed and distorted.  Center to the attack was that Mr. Banting was just an “undertaker.” The medical people asked this question:  “What does an undertaker know about the workings of the human body?”  The medical community looked their noses down, way down on the undertaking profession.  Again Bantings was hurt and stunned by the attack, however the public was impressed.  Many desperate, overweight people tried the Banting diet and found that it worked.  Like it or not the undertaker had shown the physician something new!

So popular was the Banting diet that a popular song made the music hall rounds:

 

Some time ago where e’er I strayed

I heard the observation made,

To which I close attention paid,

‘How very stout you’re getting.’

Said one, ‘Dear me, you waddle, quiet,

You bid fair to become a fright.’

Another said, ‘you’re such a sight,

You’re like a bladder blown out tight.

And only see where e’er you go

How you’re compelled to puff and blow.

You surely soon will bust your clo’.

If you don’t follow Banting,

If you continue thus so stout,

You’ll fall a victim to the gout,

You really must try Banting.

 

William Banting died in 1878 at the age of 81 years.  He was buried in Brompton Cemetery a short distance today from Harrods’s Department Store.  A few years ago I visited William Banting’s grave in the Brompton Cemetery.  I was in London doing a series of seminars for the Funeral Directors Association of Great Britain.  Finding Banting’s grave was short of impossible and if it had not been for the charming sexton of the cemetery I would never have located the stone.  The area where the Banting’s are interred is somewhat grown over (due to lack of maintenance funds) but the large, dark impressing stone still stands straight.  I was honored to pay my respects to this great funeral director.

William Banting’s papers, his letters, his diary, details of where he was educated, and most importantly his notes concerning Royal funerals and the history of the Banting Undertaking Establishment were inherited by his great granddaughter-in-law who after experiencing a major depression in the late 1950’s and who for some odd reason thought William Banting a “horrid little man,” destroyed ALL the documents by burning them. Unforgivable!

William Banting was truly a philanthropist, he did not profit monetarily from the “Letter”, he simply wanted, by having a good heart, to share his great discovery.  Banting wanted the world to know.  I suspect that William Banting would be extremely pleased to know that 140 + years later, his diet really is known worldwide to thousands, millions, albeit under another name.

Throughout the many years that the Banting firm served as the Royal Undertakers the firm survived through many social changes like transportation of remains by the railroad, the advent of embalming and the extremely lavish and opulent royal funeral décor.  Banting’s client list reads like a Who’s Who of English Royalty (Prince Albert – 1861, Queen Alexandra – 1925, Prince Alfred – 1782, Queen Anne – 1714, Kind Edward VII – 1910, Kind George I – 1727, Kind George II – 1760, King George III – 1820, King George IV – 1830, Lord Mountbatten – 1922, Queen Victoria – 1901).  In 1852 Bantings were responsible for the Duke of Wellington’s funeral.  While Wellington’s funeral was not “royal” in the strict sense of the word it was the grandest public event of the century, likened perhaps only to the funerals of Lord Nelson in 1806 or Sir Winston Churchill in 1964.

In 1900 Bantings had arranged just 16 funerals in the whole year.  By 1903 that number had doubled.  Bantings were expensive, very expensive.  The firm was able to accept only the cream, the carriage trade of London society.  During this period of time the firm was headed by the last of the Banting line of undertaker’s William Westbrook Banting.  On February 27, 1902 William Westbrook Banting reissued his grand-father William’s now famous Letter on Corpulence from the address of the Banting firm 27 St. James’s Street.  The family had used 26 & 27 St. James’s Street for over 50 years.  Queen Victoria’s funeral procession had passed right in front of Bantings from Pall Mall to Piccadilly.  In later years W.W. Banting lavishly refurbished the shop-front in pink marble, which can still be seen to this very day.

By the beginnings of the 1920’s W.W. Banting was rarely involved himself in conducting any funerals, except royal funeral occasions.  The firm basically contracted out every service to other companies, however always ensuring the very best and costliest quality.  A number of other top-ranking London undertakers looked to attract the “Banting” type of funeral practice however they were never able to match the mastery of funeral rituals and ceremonies which was the hallmark of a Banting service.

In 1928 W.W. Banting was 71 years of age and it was time to retire.  Upon his retirement the royal warrant was terminated.  There were no Banting decendents to continue the tradition of the “Banting Service.”  W. W. Banting never married and his brothers had died or moved.  One Banting brother moved to Canada and his child became Dr. Frederick Grant Banting who later in 1923 won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of insulin.  The Banting Institute located on the campus of the University of Toronto is named in his honor, and for years the Canadian School of Embalming was headquartered in the Banting Institute building.

The long history of Banting conducting funerals for the crown was now at an end.  A bid for the royal funerals was made by J. D. Field (who had done much of Banting’s contract work) but in the end the royal warrant went to the better socially connected firm of J. H. Kenyon.  Kenyon’s were to hold the royal warrant for many years, and Michael Kenyon conducted Sir Winston Churchill’s funeral in 1964.  Today, however, the royal warrant has not been reissued.

William Westbrook Banting died on December 9, 1932 at 158 West Hill, Wandsworth.  The death certificate records one brother present and the cause of death as anuria and pulmonary infarct, and carcinoma of the bladder.  His estate was valued at some 92,000 pounds. Mr. Banting’s remains were deposited in the Kensal Green Cemetery in the Banting tomb on December 14 after a funeral service in the chapel of St. John the Evangelist, Notting Hill at 12 noon.  Mr. Banting was described as a man of “independent means.”

What a fascinating legacy!  From funeral service to the royal family for nearly 300 years, to the creation of a diet which today is still used today the Banting family has certainly left their mark.  Still no matter how impressive the funeral history of the Banting firm is, the true historic endurance for the survival of the old English name is and probably will always be the diet and also the possibility of suspicion that Dr. Atkins, rest his soul, just might have had a ghost writer!

 

A fitting end to this interesting story is found in the closing paragraph of William Banting’s “Letter on Corpulence to the Public.”  It reflects Mr. Banting’s hope for those who suffer from obesity.

“I have now finished my task, and trust my humble efforts may prove to be good seed well sown, that will fructify and prod

 

uce a large harvest of benefit to my fellow-creatures.  I also hope the faculty generally may be led more extensively to ventilate this question of corpulence or obesity, so that instead of a few able practitioners, there may be hundreds distributed in the various parts of the United Kingdom.  In such case, I am persuaded that these diseases will be very rare.”

THE HISTORY OF GRAVE ROBBING

 

“Good friend, for Jesus’ sake, forbear

To dig the dirt enclosed here:

Alert he the man that spares these stones

And curst be he that moves my bones.”

-Inscription on the tomb of William Shakespeare 

 

 

INTRODUCTION:

I personally became interested in the subject of grave robbing while I was Chairman of the Mortuary Science Department at Hudson Valley Community College in Troy, New York.  One afternoon I was strolling through the Maple Grove Cemetery in Hoosick Falls, New York (just north of Troy) and I accidentally stumbled upon this haunting epitaph:

 

RUTH SPRAGUE

DAUGHTER OF GIBSON AND ELIZABETH SPRAGUE

DIED JAN. 11, 1846

AGED 9 YEARS, 4 MONTHS AND 18 DAYS

 

SHE WAS STOLEN FROM THE GRAVE BY RODERICK R. CLOW AND DISSECTED AT DR. P.M. ARMSTRONG’S OFFICE IN HOOSICK, NEW YORK,

FROM WHICH HER MUTILATED REMAINS WERE OBTAINED AND DEPOSITED HERE.

 

HER BODY DISSECTED BY FIENDISH MEN,

HER BONES ANATOMIZED.

HER SOUL, WE TRUST, HAS RISEN TO GOD,

WHERE FEW PHYSICIANS RISE.

 

When and where the vocation of grave robbing (also known as resurrectionists) arose and the circumstances under which members of this extremely odd profession operated is not known.  Throughout recorded history, however, grave robbing has occurred.  Violations of mausoleums, graves, tombs, crypts and niches are not a new phenomenon.  In fact when it was the custom to bury priceless gold and silver ornaments, precious gems, and even money with the dead, the practice of grave robbing was common.

It is an interesting point to note that this issue of grave robbing is still subject to perception and relativization.  If a grave is pilfered shortly after death it is a state crime called grave robbing and the consequences can be a stiff jail term.  It the grave is pilfered three thousand years after the death it is called archaeology and the archaeologist can win a prize from the National Geographic Society and might even end up on a program on The Learning Channel.

 

THE PROBLEM:

While pilfering graves to get supposed riches was certainly a factor in motivating grave robbing the real problem stemmed from an inconsistent societal expectation of both the medical and embalming professions. Here was the problem in a nutshell:  The medical and embalming professions were expanding by leaps and bounds and hence the public expected the physicians and the embalmers to know precisely where all the anatomical structures were so surgeries would be successful and the dead beautified. However the public at the same time found dissection morally abhorrent and adding to this inconsistency of attitude was the position of the church:  YOU CANNOT DISSECT A HUMAN BEING THE HUMAN BODY IS THE TEMPLE OF GOD.

 

THE SOLUTION:

Desperate for anatomical material and confronted with these contradictory conditions the medical and embalming professors turned to the ruffians and ghouls of the community who were willing to rob graves to secure the necessary anatomical research material.  Thus vocation of the “resurrectionists” was born.

Make no mistake about this the subject of grave robbing was serious business.  Throughout the centuries the religions of the world deplored dissection or what was known as evisceration.  Oddly most Roman Catholic Pontiff’s were eviscerated at death. This was done in order to obtain saintly relics for use in religious ceremonies, and also as a primitive method of embalming.  But the church as a whole was dead set against evisceration for the common ordinary person.

 

EVISCERATION:  THE MIDDLE AGES

Decomposition creates problems as every embalmer on the face of the earth knows.  Every imaginable problem and nightmare that any embalmer has is usually associated in some way with decomposition.

In the Middle Ages it was the same; however the big difference was that embalming techniques were so crude that many times a quick burial even for royalty who required homage and pageantry was necessary.  For instance in July of 1189, when England’s Henry II died at Chinon, his rapidly decomposing royal corpse could be moved only ten miles before the stench forced a quick burial at the nearby Abbey of Fontevrault.

In the 13^th century the process of evisceration came into vogue as a means of prolonging funeral rituals and for transporting the corpse of a war hero from a battlefield to his homeland.

Even so the Roman Catholic Church stilled vigorously opposed evisceration (except for the Popes) on the grounds that a body should be intact for its glorious resurrection.  A corpse missing organs could not be brought into a house of worship.  Eventually the popularity of evisceration became such a problem that in 1299 Pope Boniface VIII, who knew something about worship (he commissioned so many statues of himself that he was charged with reviving idolatry), formally prohibited evisceration with his Papal Bull DETESTANDE FERITATIS, but the Vatican’s ban proved moot after countless Papal dispensations were granted for Europe’s wealthy families to go ahead and eviscerate their dead.

 

INES DE CASTRO

The story gets stranger.  Evisceration made possible one of the most macabre and weird funerals in history, that accorded to Ines de Castro, the mistress of Portugal’s Pedro I prior to his ascension as King.  By all accounts Ines was absolutely beautiful, but was murdered in 1355 in her royal apartment.  Pedro was inconsolable and had Ines magnificently entombed in the abbey church at Alcobaca.  Upon his father’s death Pedro assumed the crown and wishing his deceased mistress to receive the honor of a queen he had her exhumed.  She had been dead more than two years, but had been eviscerated and embalmed crudely and now Pedro had her dead body propped up on a lavish throne, securely tied, and attired in robes befitting her new station, in life? or in death? or whatever.

Portugal’s clergy, nobility, and commoners paid homage to Ines corpse.  Many kissed the bones of her hands.   A skeleton of her former self (pardon the pun) Ines held a scepter in one hand, and her dry, yellowed hair was draped like a shroud about her ghostly form.  She sat stiffly through a dinner feast and after dark a chariot drawn by six black mules and lighted with five hundred candles as the propped up monarch led a funeral procession extending for several miles from the site of her joyous coronation back to the dreariness of her tomb.  None of this would have been possible without evisceration.

Eventually eviscerations lead to independent heart/bone burial.  Interestingly the relics of a knight, saint, king, queen or pope were seen as possessing miraculous qualities.  Upon the death of such a person the bones were boiled and the flesh removed.  This way the bones could be deposited in appropriate vaults and shrines.  This practice made sense for it allowed the fragments of a saint or martyr to be preserved and saved as holy relics.  The practice allowed a part of the deceased person to be buried in a church or shrine.  Knights were often dismembered and pieces of the body were buried in appropriate places of significance.

The pious Canute, the Dane who ruled England in the early years of the eleventh century encouraged this type of “resurrection” on earth by purchasing in Rome the arm of St. Augustine!

Corpses were even used as objects of punishment for a crime even years after the perpetrator of the criminal deed had died.  Take for instance the fate of Oliver Cromwell.

Oliver Cromwell had been an extremely powerful man during his lifetime, however less than scant courtesy was given to him after his death.  One of the most disgraceful scenes in English history was staged on January 30, 1661.  One observer recorded:

“This day (O the stupendous and inscrutable judgments of God!) were the carcasses of those arch-rebels, Cromwell, Bradshaw (the judge who condemned his Majesty), and Ireton (son-in-law to the usurper), dragged out of the superb tombs in Westminster among the kings, to Tyburn, and hanged on the gallows there from nine in the morning till six at night, and then buried under that fatal and ignominious monument in a deep pit.”

 

Poor Oliver he had only been dead a year when justice was had!  His head was stuck on a spike at Westminster Hall.  Some twenty-five years afterwards on a stormy night it was blown down and legend has it that it was carried home by a sentry on guard.

Reverence for the dead is indeed an ethical standard which has had a shaky history.  Take for instance Louis de Buade, Count de Frontenac (1620-1698) French Governor of Canada.  Pathetic indeed is the history of his heart.  In his youth Frontenac married a lovely and vivacious girl; but their love soon passed into hatred.  Both frequented the French Court where their unhappiness was apparent to all.  In fact Frontenac’s first appointment as Governor of Canada was arranged to prevent complications by getting him out of France.  The proud ruler of New France however always retained a part of his affection for his lady for when he was about to die he requested that his heart be removed from his body and be proffered to his wife as a last tribute.  This was done and the heart that had throbbed with so many emotions was enclosed in a leaden box and was taken across the sea to her.  She immediately spurned the gift and declared she did not want a dead heart which when beating did not belong to her!  The pitiful relic was returned to Canada and was deposited in Frontenac’s coffin in the historic chapel of Recollets in Quebec.

OK enough history about opening up dead people!  The object of this work is not to detail the strange fate of the remains of distinguished people; but is to record the activities of some of the oddest and weird happenings in the history of death care – the activities of the “resurrectionists” whose lives were spent in securing material for anatomical and embalming instruction.

Here is an odd fact.  In the whole history of Anglo-Saxon law probably it would be impossible to find a condition more pathetic and unbelievable than that which the faculty members of the medical and embalming colleges found themselves in during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  On the one hand the law demanded that the surgeon and embalmer should possess the proper skill and knowledge concerning anatomy and the law subjected these professionals to financial loss in the civil courts at the whim or complaint of a dissatisfied patient or bereaved family.  On the other hand the only way of acquiring this anatomical education was by the dissection of actual dead human bodies which had to be stolen. And stealing dead bodies were punishable by fine and imprisonment.  As Plato so eloquently said, “there are times when the law is an ass.”

 

THE RESURRECTIONISTS TO HAYWIRE IN SCOTLAND

“The Strange Case of Burke and Hare and the Eminent Dr. Robert Knox of the University of Edinburgh School of Surgery”

In the 1820’s the School of Surgery at the University of Edinburgh was in a particularly flourishing condition and was held throughout the land in very high repute.

The School was being kept abundantly supplied with dead bodies for dissection although no one asked where the cadavers were coming from.  No one asked because they were probably intimidated by the famous Dr. Robert Knox, professor of anatomy and surgery.  It seemed that Dr. Knox always had a cadaver.  Around this time Dr. Knox was engaged in a great anatomical work, the publication of which would cause a sensation in the world of anatomy and lead to a spin off of one anatomical textbook after another such as Gray’s Anatomy.

Behind the scenes in this world of elite medical academics lurked two extremely unsavory characters that Dr. Knox was in cahoots and he depended upon almost exclusively for his constant supply of corpses – they were a boot-maker named William Burke and his confederate named William John Hare.

The contrast between the worlds of Burke and Hare and the University School of Surgery and Dr. Knox could not have been more different.  Burke and Hare lived with their wives in Tanner’s Close, one of the most miserable quarters in Edinburgh which was really just a dark filthy alley.  Hare’s dwelling was a single room in the basement of a wretched hovel reached only by a long dangerous passage.  Burke faired no better.  He lived on the sixth floor of an old house tumbling into ruins.

The morbid career of Burke and Hare, as purveyors of dead body material seems to have begun in November of 1827.  An old man by the name of Donald died in Tanner’s Close and he died in debt to William Hare in the amount of four pounds.  Hare decided to sell Donald’s body to Dr. Knox and he found a more than willing accomplice in William Burke.  During the middle of the night Burke and  Hare entered the room where Donald’s body was laid out and took the remains and replaced the body with a bag filled with rocks, and in the morning the funeral was duly held, with evidently no one being suspicious.  Late in the night after Donald’s fake funeral Burke and Hare made their way to the University and engaged a student of Dr. Knox’s in the quadrangle.  The student who was a loyal member of Dr. Knox’s anatomical class advised them to go to No. 10 Surgeon’s Square where Dr. Knox lived.  There by darkness of night Donald’s body was sold for eight pounds.  William Hare was thrilled he had not only gotten his four pounds back but had doubled his money.  This was a sweet deal!

At the beginning of 1828 mysterious disappearances began to occur in Edinburgh.  No one paid much attention because the vanishings were mostly confined to members of the poorer classes, especially drunkards, beggars and prostitutes.

Then something happened which raised real suspicions.  A young boy and girl who were widely known on the street vanished.  The girl was famous for her great beauty and the boy who was a beggar was noted for his eccentricities, bright disposition and simple goodness.

The girl vanished first, then the boy.  The people who lived in these squalid conditions tried to attract the attention of the police, but nothing came of the efforts.  Quickly strange rumors began to circulate about secret societies in Edinburgh who lived on human flesh and who carried people off in the dark of night to devour them

There were no secret societies save for the exclusive Burke and Hare club.

In a short time Burke and Hare invented a new method of obtaining corpses for Dr. Knox.  It appears that the two scoundrels tired quickly of the hard labor of digging up graves at night.  Messy, dirty business and sometimes in was raining which made the work extremely distasteful.  So enter the Burke-Hare method.  The method was always the same.  On a suitable foggy evening Burke and Hare would roam about the low quarters of the city and for some suitable victim – hopefully the person, man or woman would be a drunkard.  They would get into a friendly conversation with the hapless person and would tell the person that they had a full bottle of whiskey and some glasses on a table at home.  When everybody would be settled in drinking Burke, who had a fine voice would begin to sing, and as soon as their guest was drunk enough Hare would pass behind and suffocate the person by shutting their mouth and nostrils with his hands while good ole Burke sat on the victim’s chest.  Nasty business to be sure but it really worked very well!

Rifling about graves had been bad enough, but now murder! The neighborhood was in terror.  It furnished food for wild exaggerations and gave to families collecting their members long before sundown.  Doors were locked and barricaded with the utmost care.  Even the beggars and prostitutes disappeared.  People were fearful that suddenly as well as unwillingly they just might disappear.

It was only a matter of time before Burke and Hare were pinched.  The last murder the team did was of a poor old lady named Docherty.  She was reported missing and a search was instituted.  Interestingly the first place the police looked was the dissecting room of Dr. Knox.  The body of the lady Docherty was there.

Both Burke and Hare were arrested and Hare immediately turned Queen’s evidence against Burke and confessed to everything – so much for loyal friends.  Here was Hare’s story. They had begun their work by selling the body of old man Donald.  They had taken it to Dr. Knox who had paid them generously for the material.  Hare confessed that they both had been mighty encouraged by their success and that they had perfected and simplified their system which they had practiced ever since.  Instead of going to cemeteries to disinter dead bodies with so much mess and difficulty they had simply taken to “manufacturing” the corpses.  “So much easier to do,” commented Hare.

In the end Burke and Hare remembered sixteen murders. They also had killed a mother and her daughter and another old woman and her grandson.

Dr. Robert Knox, the great, strong, outstanding and valiant teacher, the most eloquent, the most versatile and most respected professor of anatomy at the university had his life wrecked, ruined, and embittered by the unfortunate circumstances which caused Burke and Hare to cross his path.

In the end the legal authorities in Edinburgh could not find anything to link Dr. Knox precisely with Burke and Hare, but the public knew better and they demanded retribution which they got.  The public demanded its prey and with the encouragement by some of the clergy and by a hostile press and by rivals in the medical profession itself Dr. Robert Knox’s name descended into ignominity.

 

THE EXECUTION OF WILLIAM BURKE

Loyal friends, HUH!  William Burke would be executed and William Hare was let go for turning evidence.

On the morning of Tuesday, January 27, 1829 at four o’clock Burke was taken and removed in a coach from the jail on Calton Hill to the lock up house, a prison immediately adjacent to the place of execution.  The unusual hour was chosen to avoid annoyance from any possible riotous crowd.

All day Tuesday and far into the night workers were engaged in building the scaffold.  A huge storm raged but many people watched the entire construction and some even passed the night in adjacent closets or stairs so they would not miss seeing the execution.  Burke had to listen to most of the construction work and when the last beam was placed in proper position the crowd expressed its abhorrence of what Burke and Hare had done by giving three tremendous cheers.

Shortly after eight o’clock on the morning of Wednesday, January 28, 1829 William Burke was hanged in the presence of a crowd estimated at 37,000 people.  They all showed delight and glee when the hangman pulled the trap door.

When Burke arrived on the platform of the scaffold his composure left him amid and jeers, the curses, and the taunts of the assembled crowd.  “Hang Hare too!” “Where is Hare?” and “Hang Knox!” were mingled with curses against Burke.

In accordance with the sentence of the Court at one o’clock on Thursday afternoon in the anatomical theatre at the University of Edinburgh the body of William Burke was publicly dissected as a continuation of his punishment.  It was perhaps the most exciting, riotous and strange anatomical dissection recorded in Scotland’s history.

William Hare escaped hanging but ended up blind and a beggar on the streets on London.

Grave robbing for a time was called “Burking”.

 

THE RESURRECTIONISTS TOOK THE WRONG BODY!

THE HARRISON HORROR – 1878

In the United States the most famous and fascinating story of body snatching involved a certain John Scott Harrison.  Who?  John Scott who?  John Scott Harrison is significant because he is the only man in U.S. history whose father and son both became U.S. Presidents.  William Henry Harrison was his father and was the 9^th President, and his son, Benjamin Harrison became the 23^rd President of the United States.

John Scott Harrison died in 1878 and was buried in the Congress Green Cemetery in North Bend, Ohio, just 16 miles west of Cincinnati.

One thing marred the burial.  As the funeral party walked to John Scott’s grave it was noticed that the resting place of Augustus Devin a relative of the Harrison’s who had died only the Saturday before had been disturbed.  Indications were that young Devin’s grave had been robbed by body snatchers.  Others thought that only hogs had been at work uprooting the earth.  A close examination, however, revealed the theft of the body.  This discovery made two precautions necessary:

First was to hide the fact from the widowed mother until the body could be recovered, and the other was to take additional safety measures for safeguarding John Scott Harrison’s remains.  Benjamin Harrison and his younger brother John together supervised the actual lowering of their father’s casket into an eight foot long grave that was both wide and deep.  At the bottom as a secure receptacle for the metallic casket was a brick vault with thick walls and a stone bottom.  Three flat stones, eight or more inches think, were procured for a cover and finally with great difficulty the stones were lowered over the casket, the largest at the upper end and the two smaller slabs crosswise at the foot.  All three stones were then carefully cemented together.  For several hours the grave was left open so that the cement might dry.  Finally a great quantity of dirt was shoveled over the stones.  So great was the Harrison’s family fear that some ghoul might attempt to steal their father’s body that Benjamin Harrison paid a  terribly young watchman thirty dollars in advance to guard over the grave for thirty nights.

That was all the Harrison’s knew to do.  Later that day Benjamin Harrison and his wife took a train back to their home in Indianapolis.  Harrison was busy finishing his address which would open up the Indiana Republican State Convention on Wednesday, June 5^th. The grief stricken Harrison’s saw their Indianapolis bound relatives to the depot in Cincinnati.  After the train left they all returned to North Bend except for the younger brother John.  He stayed in Cincinnati in order that the next day he might start his mission of mercy in searching for Augustus Devin.  John was now accompanied by his cousin George Eaton and armed with a search warrant from Squire Wright’s office and assisted by Cincinnati Constable Lacey and Detective Snelbaker, and one other police officer the search got underway.  The first medical school they entered was the Ohio Medical School on Sixth Street between Vine and Race.  Apart from the general fear that the resurrectionists might have been in collusion with the medical authorities their only actual clue was a terribly weak one.  At three a.m. that morning, they were informed, a wagon had passed through the alley on the south side of the college building.  Further, it had stopped at the door in the hall where cadavers were rumored to be dumped off.  Before the wagon had rattled on something or somebody had been taken out.  This was pretty flimsy information and it did not necessarily suggest that young Devin’s body was there, for both John Harrison and George Eaton, now in the new role of amateur detectives, already supposed that their young cousin’s body had been sold much earlier in the same week.

At the suggestion of the older officers of the law a close search of the college was begun.  A problem arose when an obnoxious and protesting janitor, A.Q. Marshall showed them various rooms in the college while all the time maintaining that no bodies would be found.  With the help of a lantern the darkness of an elevator chute was dispelled and the hole below was search without any trace of any body.

At last when the school building had been thoroughly ransacked John and George were ready to look elsewhere.  This is the time when Constable Lacey noticed a taut rope attached to a windlass in another chute.  Immediately he ordered Detective Snelbaker to haul whatever was attached to the rope up.  It was no easy task for as the windlass was pulled it was soon evident that there was a heavy weight at the end of the rope.  At last there emerged into the light a dead body.  A cloth covered only the head and shoulders of what appeared to be the body of a very old man.

John Harrison said, “That’s an old man; we’re after a young man.”  Constable Lacey replied, “Never mind, we’ll see what it is.”  Then he ordered the extremely nervous janitor to assist them in placing the body on the floor.  Lacey, with a stick, then cast aside the cloth.  As he did so, Harrison caught sight of the face stepped back with a cry of horror and exclaimed, “My God, that’s my father.”

Harrison’s eyes bulged from their sockets.  The awful spectacle sickened him physically and tortured him emotionally.  In the spirit of charity he came looking for a widow’s son who was a relative and instead found the corpse of his own father which had been entombed less than twenty-four hours before.  The scene he witnessed was almost beyond belief; John Scott Harrison’s body, caught by a rope around its neck hidden in a black hole in a chute at the Ohio Medical College.

The resurrectionists were swift and quick in robbing the Harrison grave.  In fact they were actually aided although innocently by the young watchman who had been given thirty dollars to make sure the Harrison grave was not disturbed.  Youth has its risk, and when the sun went down and darkness descended over the graveyard the courage of the watchman vanished and he ran home to his mother.  No one was guarding the Harrison grave.  In fact it is probable that the resurrectionist may well have attended the funeral because who ever robbed the Harrison grave knew precisely where it was and the lay of the cemetery grounds.

In his daze the young Harrison engaged the Estep & Meyer Undertakers in Cincinnati to care for his father’s remains until he could consult with his older brothers and other family members.  John Scott Harrison’s body was privately placed in the John Strader Mausoleum at the Spring Grove Cemetery to await a second burial.  Also the Harrison family wanted this entire event be kept secret.

Secrecy, though highly desirable, was fruitless.  There was a fire station right next to the medical school and the boys at the firehouse told a newspaper man in Cincinnati the startling facts.  The reporter tracked down all the main participants but no one would talk.  Nobody talked, and the undertakers who had been sworn to silence would not even admit that they had ever heard of John Scott Harrison.  Before long, however, the news broke, not from Cincinnati but from North Bend.  Three Harrison relatives had visited John Scotts grave early in the morning and learned for themselves the distressing news.  They found that the two smaller stones originally placed across the foot of the outer casket had been lifted on end.  Then the ghouls had evidently drilled a series of holes in the outer casket in exactly the same fashion as when young Devin’s body was stolen.  Finally the lid of the inner casket was pried up, the glass seal broken, and the body drawn out feet first.  This was contrary to the usual practice of body snatching which was to take the body out head first giving further credence to the possibility that one of the perpetrators had been present at the burial and had noticed that the smaller stones had been placed over the foot of the vault.

One of the Harrison relatives was sent immediately to Cincinnati to apprize John and George, the searchers for Devin’s body, that they now faced a far holier task in seeking to recover the stolen body of John Scott Harrison.

It was an odd meeting when all the Harrison relatives met in Cincinnati and compared stories.  Within minutes the news that John Scott Harrison’s body had been stolen and then found made for a family meeting of profound grief mingled with stern satisfaction.

Benjamin Harrison was on his way from Indianapolis and the Cincinnati Police were investigating but with little headway.  The guilty men continued to elude justice and the few suspects that were taken into custody were released.  Public indignation remained at a fever pitch and families throughout the area were standing guard at their own relative’s graves in order to insure that their loved ones would not be “resurrected”.

Just before Benjamin Harrison arrived from Indianapolis his older brother Carter decided to make a quick visit to the Ohio Medical College and examine the spot where his father’s body had been discovered.  Here Carter encountered Dr. W. W. Seely, professor of Clinical Ophthalmology and Otology, who also served as Secretary of the College.  It was an unfortunate meeting.  The eminent eye doctor, deeply incensed by the newspapers criticism leveled against the college and faculty had the indelicacy of remarking to the grief-filled Carter Harrison that the entire “affair matters little, since it would all be the same on the day of resurrection.”  Neither the public nor the Harrison family would forget or forgive that remark.

Unfortunately the end of the legal outcome of the Harrison Horror is lost forever for all the records concerning the case were destroyed when the Hamilton County Court House was burned during the Riot of 1886 in Cincinnati.  Also Benjamin Harrison and his family never publicly spoke in the incident again.  One thing was for sure; when the body snatchers took the body of a Harrison they had picked the wrong family!

From this incident action was demanded and four significant things happened which changed the world of funeral service very much.

First the State of Ohio soon passed legislation which made grave robbing a serious crime with both fines and imprisonment as a consequent.  Second Andrew Van Bibber invented what he called the “mort-safe” which was a steel cage which the casket was placed in and pad locked.  It was patented in 1878. In 1879, George W. Boyd of Springfield, Ohio patented the first metal grave vault to use the air bell principle of sealing and which locked from within.  The purpose of both these vaults was not to preserve the corpse but was instead to retard and eliminate the incidences of grave robbing and over time these devices all but eliminated grave robbing.  Finally the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act was enacted which totally eliminated the services of the “resurrectionists” forever.

 

CONCLUSION:

It is a fact that the embalming professors of old were compelled to deal with grave robbers for a time, as were the medical professors.  Unfortunately for everyone it was the only way to get the required practice on a real cadaver.  It was a curious relationship, the union of two respected profession – medicine and embalming – with that of probably the lowest form of human vocation imaginable – the body snatchers!

The famous cynic and pessimist Ambrose Bierce in his “Devil’s Dictionary” gives a wonderful, although somewhat jaded, definition of the body snatcher:

 

BODY SNATCHER, N.; A robber of graves.  One who supplies the young physician with that which the old physician has supplied the old undertaker.

 

Is a concentration on death morbid or healthy?

The question should be what do we do with the fact that the death rate is 100%?  If ever we have an opportunity to correct one of the blanks in our way of looking at things, it is healthy.  Our culture went through something similar decades ago, when we truly believe it to be indelicate or even offensive to talk about birth or pregnancy or puberty.  The language of the time was evasive and indirect.  Instead of saying that a woman was pregnant, for example, one indicated that she was “indisposed” or was “knitting tiny garments.”

We are not aware that in the absence of directness and honesty, half-truths and misconceptions are sometimes bred and honestly take on a life of their own.  American’s attitude towards sex in year’s past was confused, and in turn the subject became morbid and taboo.

The effects of this prudishness lingered on for a long time.  Not until as late as World War II, for example, was the Surgeon General of the United States able to break through the veil of secrecy that had long existed about the subject of widespread venereal disease.  He made a forthright statement about the social dangers of neglect and the need for wise and effective treatment.  All of the evasiveness and subterfuge in the world would not heal one person so effected he pointed out; and the unwillingness to discuss the problem honestly had heretofore placed many innocent persons in danger.  Only when the matter was out in the open could it be faced and could programs for social control and treatment be instituted.

It seems sensible and wise that to repress discussion of any important life subject that has to do with personal and community health is not good.  It seems healthy indeed when free talk breaks into the clear.

Interestingly in the year 2015 the topic of sex is indeed free – it is the other end of the life spectrum namely death which is veiled in mystery, secrecy and anxiety.

 

What major emotions is part of what is called grief?

 Grief is clinically defined as the emotion of loss.  It is where a young widow must seek a means to bring up her three children alone.  It is the angry reaction of a man so filled with shocked uncertainty and confusion that he strikes out at the nearest person.  Grief is the little old lady who goes to the funeral of a stranger and cries her eyes out there; she is weeping now for herself, for an event she is sure will come, and for which she is trying to prepare herself.

Grief is a mother walking daily to a nearby cemetery to stand quietly and alone for a few moments before she goes on about the tasks of the day; she knows that part of her is in the cemetery, just as part of her is in her daily work.  Grief is the deep sympathy one person has for another when he wants to do all he can to help resolve a tragic problem.  Grief is the silent, knife-like terror and sadness that comes a hundred times a day, when you start to speak to someone who is no longer there.  Grief is the emptiness that comes when you eat alone after eating with another for many years.  Grief is teaching you somehow to go to bed without saying good night to the one who has died.  Grief is the helpless wishing that things were different when you know they are not and never will be again.  Grief is a whole cluster of adjustment, apprehensions and uncertainties that strikes life in its forward progress and makes it difficult to reorganize and redirect the energies of life.  Grief is also a universal emotion.  Grief is grief, and pain is pain the world over.

Grief is always more than sorrow.  When therapists and counselors speak about grief, they refer to the whole process that involves the person in adjusting to changed circumstances.  They are referring to the deep fears of the mourner, to their prospects of loneliness, to the obstacles they must face as they find a new way of living.  It is not easy.

 

What are the roots of grief?

 Grief is essentially a deprivation experience.  We lose – or have taken from us – something that we cherished and do not want to give up.  Grief is love not wanting to let go.

It is strange how ill-prepared we often are for this since in reality our lives are so largely made of up of deprivation experiences.  Every time we make a choice we have to give up one alternative in order to take the other.  Even time is a deprivation experience.  Each second that ticks by is a loss.

Death of course is the most acute form the deprivation experience can take.  Divorce is difficult but so many times a corpse is NOT part of the legal transaction – or should not be.  In death not only do we lose what we love and cherish, but we also feel that some important part of our own being has been taken away in the act.

Because our sorrow is for a part of ourselves that seems to have been destroyed, we have a doubly difficult time in getting through the experience and on with the tasks of living.  It is as with the amputee who “feels” pain in the limb he no longer has.  His nervous system still wants to communicate with what was once there, even after that part of him is gone.

Our grief is rooted in emotions which reach out in all directions beyond our own physical being.  Only as we literally pull up by the roots the feelings that no longer have a soil to sustain them are we able to let them take root again and be nurtured.  This nurturing is a real possibility – but unfortunately some individuals get “stuck” in the grief world and stay there.

 

What is grief therapy?

 “Grief” is the general word we use to describe the powerful set of emotions that permeate us when someone dearly loved dies.  “Therapy” is the name given to the process that can help heal the deep hurts of grief.

Much of the current interest in helping the grieving person to handle these deep feelings wisely began to grow out of the research and work of Dr. Eric Lindemann of the Harvard Medical School in Boston.  As a Professor of psychiatry Lindemann pioneered the research in the field of grief and its reactions on body, mind and spirit.  For many years Lindemann’s work was basically the only resource on the subject.  His findings, which some say today are outdated, on the wise management of grief did lay the basic pioneering foundation for the work done by other psychiatrists and psychologists, clergypersons and even funeral directors in helping those who suffer from acute grief to cope with their feelings effectively.

 

Is there any pattern to grief emotions?

 One often hears the comment that every person grieves in their own way.  Certainly this is true of cultural grieving and mourning practices, but concerning the raw emotion of grief there are some patterns which are identifiable and predictable.  The emotions which are part of mourning usually take three different forms.  Sorrow is one.  We mourn for the person who no longer is a part of our worlds; and at the same moment we mourn for ourselves, for our personal loss.  We feel loneliness, emptiness, a painful sadness at having to face life without the person we have known so long and loved so deeply.

Another set of grief emotions clusters around our fears and anxieties.  We are faced with change, maybe sudden change.  We are not sure what lies ahead.  The fear of our own death lurks relentlessly in the back of our minds, and facing of the mystery of death always opens to us the gulf of the frightening unknown.

Another set of feelings has to do with very practical matters of life.  We wonder what we are going to do next – where we will live, how we will pay our bills, how we will find for ourselves some security in a world that has suddenly changed so drastically.  The future may seem threatening and uncertain.  Sometimes we are required to make decisions by ourselves – decisions that were always shared before.  This in itself may make us feel insecure and uncertain.

Emotions such as these usually come pouring in upon the life of a grieving person.

 

Is grief the same for persons of all ages?

 Not at all.  The grief of children, for instance, is usually seen in actions, not in words.  When there has been a death in the family, the child may suddenly become restless, irritable, perhaps even boisterous and noisy.  Without realizing it, they may be seeking some way to calm their fears and loneliness.  What they’re doing is putting up a show – whistling in the dark, so to speak.

With persons who come out of a stolid, unemotional background, grief may be expressed quietly and over a long period.  Those who come out of an emotionally volatile environment may have explosive expressions of grief that pass comparatively quickly.

With older people, grief is often expressed more in physical symptoms than in talk or action.  When the aged speak among themselves, however, their conversations invariably dwell on death, illness and various possible catastrophes; it is as if, in talking about these things, they were getting some control over impending circumstances of life.

Middle-aged people often show their grief by changes in their personality and in the ways they do things.  A widower may drive himself to work long hours, as if he could work his sorrow out of his system.  Another person may lose all interest in work, spending more and more time seeking emotional support in casual companionship.  Sometimes the grieving person will take up the interests of the one they are mourning, as if in doing so they can again share the life of the one so acutely missed.

Grief shows itself in so many ways that it may be almost impossible to identify these acts and emotions for what they are.

 

What emotions in addition to sorrow do we show when someone dies?

Since grief is perhaps the most complex of emotions – and because its roots are so deep – the ways in which it shows itself are not only varied but may even on occasion be unrecognizable.

Sometimes the grief-stricken person will become oversensitive, embittered, and quickly moved to angry words and acts of fury.  Reactions such as these are likely to puzzle and worry; the person may not realize that the anger they direct at family, friend and strangers is not an uncommon part of grief.

At other times a person may turn their anger towards themselves.  The person will condemn themselves for things said in the past (or not said) and done (or not done) in the past.  This is one of the ways the griever uses to give expression to feelings of guilt.  (“Maybe,” they say, “I could have prevented this!”)  This self-accusing emotion may lead to actions that serve as cruel self-punishment.

Sometimes the reaction to acute loss is utter despair.  Life appears to have lost all meaning.  Nothing seems to be worth the effort required to do it.  To try to carry on without the love and companionship of the person who has died appears to be more of a burden than the mourner is willing or able to carry.

If this despair and the anger against the self persists over long periods of time, life can settle into a state of depression which can result in self destruction.

 

Can mental health go wrong when death is mishandled?

 Yes.  It appears clear that unwisely managed grief can be a precipitating factor in severe mental and emotional illness.  The Rev. Dr. Edgar N. Jackson reported in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 1992 that nine per cent of patients admitted to one English hospital were described as requiring treatment for “morbid grief reactions.”

I took a look at my notes from Mortuary College when Dr. Eric Lindemann came to lecture.  Dr. Lindemann that day declared, “For many years psychiatrist and those interested in nervous breakdowns have talked about anxiety and about conflict as things that make people sick.  It is only recently that we realized that depression, sorrow and loss of those who belong to the supportive human environment can be equally severe hazards in a person’ life.  In the wards of mental hospitals the patient’s mental disease had very frequently broken out when some dear person had departed from his life.”

 

How do people show their anger when they are filled with grief?

 Anger is a burningly strong emotion, and like most fiery emotions it tends to spread easily and quickly beyond the limits of controlled and reasoned actions.

When people are suffering from acute grief some of their feelings may show up in the form of anger.  Part of the anger often times may be directed at God.  The mourner may say, “If God took away the life of my dear one, then I will never have anything more to do with God as long as I live.”  In anger people often deny any responsibility for the events that affect their own life and try to place the blame on some remote source or person or both.  The anger at God is sometimes directed at the minister who stands as a representative of religion, or at the funeral director who stands as a representative of the professional/business side of death, or at the hospice worker who stands as a representative of the hopelessness of death, or at the entire hospital who stands as a representative of the failure to stop what has happened.  As one widow said to me, “If God could kill a good man like my husband then God is a cheat and a deceiver.”  I understood her feeling and was glad that she felt safe in venting this anger toward me.

Others turn their anger against the physician, blaming him or her for the unfortunate turn of events.  The medical profession has advanced so rapidly with so many miracle drugs and procedures that many times the reality and truth that the death rate is still and will always be 100% gets hopelessly lost in the shuffle of tubes, procedures, and charts and hoped for miracles.

I remember very well a man burst out at me in anger. In these types of cases where anger is directed at a professional person it is not uncommon for those who make angry outbursts to write a letter a week or two later expressing deep appreciation for the services that were performed during a time of deep emotional stress.  I still have the letter this man sent to me in my file.

The anger that shows up in incendiary words and irrational acts usually spends itself in the safe boundaries – usually.  Indeed, it is less likely to cause later troubles than is anger that is repressed and turned against oneself in self-condemnation and guilt.

 

Is there any relationship between unwisely managed grief and juvenile delinquency?

 Yes, unfortunately.  In speaking with a dozen boys and girls whose lives exploded in violence, promiscuity, drugs and theft, Dr. Mervyn Shoor who was the former psychiatrist in charge of the probation department of the Santa Clara County Juvenile Court said:  “These were not children who hated.  These were children who mourned.”  Then he explained how a death in the family, such as literal physical death or the emotional death of a marriage can cause the kinds of anxiety and guilt that produce self-punishing and self-defeating behaviors.

“Delinquent behavior by children and adolescents is sometimes a substitute grief reaction,” he said.  “These children were unable to release their feelings in socially accepted ways when confronted with the impact of loss and death.  They could not mourn normally; instead they masked their grief in delinquent behavior.  Their mourning, then, was actually pathological.”

Dr. Shoor’s findings are disturbing to say the least, given that the American public has had a 50% divorce rate for almost half a century. There are thousands of disenfranchised young people in America today.  Shoor’s findings verify an earlier study made by Dr. Rollo May of Columbia University, published in the book, The Meaning of Anxiety.  In a careful study of the causes for the anti-social behavior of fourteen juvenile delinquents, Dr. May found that eleven of the fourteen had, during their early years, suffered the loss of a parent in one way or another, or of one who had assumed the parental role.  Their behavior later in life was the “acting out” of feelings of anger against what seemed to them an injective: events that had, no matter what, deprived them of security and happiness.

Columbine, Dun Blan in Scotland, Paducah, Virginia Tech now Aurora all bespeak the reality of this condition.  These are not the acts of happy secure human beings these acts are not reasoned actions.  They are unfortunately an expression of tremendous emotional forces which are built up and not easily understood and hence not easily controlled.  It is a highly unfortunate event in the experience of life for someone to fatally respond to sorrow with unleashed fury and destruction.  There are other alternatives.

 

What are the important steps in handling one’s grief?

 Since grief can lead to serious illness, it is vital that we handle and manage it rather than be dominated by it.

I have discovered in my career that the wise management of grief calls for at least three important steps.  First comes the painful task of facing the full reality of what has happened.  Bluntly and with determination we must resist detours around the truth of what has happened, no matter how terrible the event it.  We must realize that there is no known easy way to face the death of one who was deeply loved.  We need courage to endure the pain, aware that ours is strangely and essentially a healthy pain, one that has within it its own healing qualities.

The second step centers on breaking some of the bonds that tie us to the person who has died.  This is sometimes referred to as withdrawing the emotional capital from the past so that our feelings can be reinvested in the future.  Life has been interrelated with the person who has died in significant ways.  Parents invest their hope in the life of a child.  If the child dies that investment of hope must be withdrawn, for hope for the future of the child is no longer valid.  Only when a person withdraws this emotional capital can they look toward the future honestly.  Loyalty to a dead person is always counterproductive.  Grieving people need to withdraw their dependence and declare their independence over time.  Otherwise their lives will be perpetually bound to a false sense of security which no long exists.

Third, it is vital to develop ways that will make it possible for the person to find new interests, satisfactions and creative activities for the remainder of life.  New relationships need to be formed, new acquaintances made, as difficult as this might be.  The energy of life will have to be planted in areas where it can be fruitful.

The past is past.  While its memories may be treasured, one cannot live on memories alone and be healthy and/or find happiness.

 

Explain the concept of the Reality of Death?

 Dr. Lindemann, from his study of the survivors of the Cocoanut Grove First has pointed out two major conditions peculiar to those who suffer mental and emotional disturbances as a result of unwisely managed grief.  “One of them is that the person in many of these states cannot remember very well the image of the deceased.”  The distress that comes with fears of viewing the dead body is such that the person will avoid doing it.  Yet in avoiding this act the person makes so vast an emotional effort that they may completely obliterate the body image of the dead person.

“Not being able to remember the image of the deceased, the griever puts it out of their mind, which is somewhat convenient in the beginning,” Dr. Lindemann declares. “It saves suffering and the suffering is avoided by a good many people because mourning belongs to the most painful state than human beings know.”  But to put the dead body image out of mind at the cost of one’s mental health is really too great a price to pay to avoid momentary suffering.  It is far better to fix the body image clearly in one’s mind. This is easily done simply by standing quietly beside the dead body hour after hour, until the full emotional meaning of the death is grasped.  Then, with the dead body image clearly in mind, the work of reorganizing deep feelings can take place in an orderly manner.

This clear image of the dead person becomes the working basis from which reorganization of life takes place.  Seeing is believing.  When the image is not clear and the deceased is put out of mind, the mourner may begin to create illusory pictures that serve ill as a foundation for rebuilding life.

 

What is the “body image”?

 Everybody is aware of his/her own body.  Its state of health is perhaps the most important thing in the world to each individual.  Psychologists know that we all build up a whole bundle of feelings about our own bodies, and this they call “body consciousness.”  Through our own body consciousness an individual is able to imagine what other people are feeling even when nothing is happening to them.  You can imagine the unpleasantness of a tooth extraction even if your own teeth are in splendid condition.  In this way our own body image is projected out toward other people.

American culture today is extremely body conscious, and our absorption with the state of our bodies shows itself in two ways, “body denial” and “body fulfillment.”  Many things we do are acts of body denial, where we say in effect that we do not like this part or that part of having a body.  When we shave in the morning or apply a deodorant, we practice body denial.  When we enjoy a good meal and stretch ourselves with delight, we are engaging in body fulfillment.

Part of our projected body image is an unconscious movement ahead in time.  For instance, we can’t really accept the fact that our bodies will die – or that the bodies of other people will die, either.  So when we think of cremation or dissection many people cringe at the thought of the intense heat or the sharp autopsy knife.  Our imagination, our body image and our body function are all tied together.

When we think of the death of someone else, part of our body image – with all its specials feelings – is attached to the body.  We tend to feel sensations the dead are now incapable of feeling.  We know this doesn’t make sense, of course, but we also know it happens.  We learn to accept the fact that some emotions are outside the sphere of the logical and rational.

In the process of working through grief, the feelings that go with the body image are part of the problem.  They must be understood.  Their sensitivities must be taken into account.  So we try not to do things to a dead body that would stimulate strong reactions relating to our own body image. An example of this would be the Nazi’s treatment of the Jewish dead during the Second World War.  Even the thought of the photographs depicting the horrors of the way the bodies were treated are repugnant to any sensitive person’s emotional sensibilities.  I have spoken to many survivors of the Holocaust and their recollections of what happened to their Jewish brethren created intolerable emotional injury. Thus the respect and reverence for a dead body in funeral ceremonials is a way of protecting the body image of the living from intolerable injury.

 

Why do people often try to deny the reality of death?

 I believe in death care we have all seen this occur.  When someone is called on the telephone with news of the death of a close friend, a typical first response is one of denial.  “No. Oh, no.  It can’t be true.”  The speaker knows, as well as anyone else, that it can be true, and that sooner or later it will be true.  And yet the first impulse is to resist and deny the uncomfortable truth.

Early on in my career I served as a Deputy County Coroner in Cheyenne, Wyoming and I saw denial all the time on the part of parents who received the fateful news from me that their child was dead.  Again and again I found relatives denying reality and clinging to illusion.  And time and again I saw this illusion shattered when the reality of death was established beyond any doubt in their brains when they viewed the dead human body.

I am afraid that some of the funeral and memorial services I see in vogue today appear to be designed more to deny this type of reality and fact than to reinforce the truth of the reality of death that must eventually somehow, someway be courageously accepted.  The somehow and someway is viewing the dead body.

 

Do people in American today have an inadequate view of death?

 Yes.  Interestingly an inadequate view of death usually leads to an inadequate view of life.  When that happens, life can be abused – and sometimes even destroyed.  Let me show you how this can happen.

People who have deep and unresolved fears of death may try to prove to themselves that they are not really so frightened of death.  They may make light talk about the subject of death, joking about graveyards, undertakers and dead bodies.  They may even participate in games designed to prove that they have no fear of death.

The game “chicken” and “Russian roulette” are examples of the immature gamble with life that could only be taken by one who is really saying “See – I am not really afraid of death.”  But the real tragedy is that a person who does such things is actually saying that life means so little to him/her that they would make a plaything out of it.  Certainly that is a tragically inadequate view of the power of death and utter permanency it also blocks the power of living life to the fullest.

Variations on this demeaning view of death show up in other ways – for instance, when a person commits suicide with the strange twist of logic that makes him/her feel than in this way they are cheating death by controlling it in time and place.  The daredevil, the person who deliberately seeks the most dangerous kind of work, or who does the dare for entertainment, or the person who takes unnecessary chances in life are often people trying to prove to themselves that they do not fear death.

Actually what they are doing is quite the reverse.  For them, death is an unhealthy preoccupation that affects every aspect of their living.

 

Should a dead body be looked at?

 Only abnormal interests are served, I think, when one is wants to look at a dead body merely out of morbid curiosity.  But for close relatives, and friends, and the community of support affected by the death, the viewing of a body can be a vital part of coming to terms with reality and establishing the reality of death.  A sorrowing look into the literal face of death confirms the truth of what has happened – truth that our minds and heart desperately wish not to accept but needs to.  Indeed, this moment often starts the process we call “wise management of grief.”

 

You spend a great amount of time talking about establishing the reality of death – but isn’t viewing the body “too painful” and actually “barbaric?”

 There is no doubt that the act of looking at the dead body of one who has been a part of our meaning of life can be painful.  Often the pain is more in the dread of doing than in the actual viewing.

It is this accumulation of dread which must be dealt with, for it can be carried into the future.  The choice is not between a painful act and a painless act.  The pain exists.  It is a fact.  We decide only how we will deal with it – whether we will handle the pain as a sharp, clean stabbing of the consciousness, or whether we will carry a smoldering, festering injury that will infect our whole consciousness increasingly as time moves on.

There is certainly nothing barbaric about facing life or death with complete openness and honesty.  It may be that in subtle efforts to keep from being what we call “barbaric” we come closest to realizing the ruthless and cruel abuse of our own feelings and those of others.

 

I never know what to say. How can a friend help a grieving person?

Much helpful counseling is done over the back fence as a friend talks to friend without restraint about things that are important.  Remember my definition of counseling:  anytime anybody helps someone else out with a problem.  Simple.  In fact, there are times when an understanding neighbor can get closer to the real feelings of another person than can a minister, family physician, hospice professional, funeral director or psychiatrist.  And there are many good people out there who will resist any kind of “professional” help.

One of the wisest things a good friend can do is to listen attentively.  The effort to pour out our painful feelings often relieves emotional pressure more effectively than anything else. Most people want to talk about their problems. To have someone who is ready and willing to be a sympathetic and understanding listener is especially important at the time when grief is most intense. I believe this is a major reason why Hospice volunteers and are often times as effective as and/or at times even more effective in the field than are the Hospice “professionals” who possess the degrees, titles and credentials

In addition to listening to what your friend has to say, it is also important to receive the injured and shattered feelings with attitudes that make these feelings seem proper and right.  Sometimes a shoulder to cry on is a most important part of the ventilating of deep feelings.  To know that someone is willing to feel with you even when you cannot express your feelings very well is important.  And this is often more vital in the weeks and months after the funeral than it is during the when many people are around.

 

Is crying helpful in expressing one’s grief?

 From early childhood the use of the tear glands as a form of expressing deep feelings is a part of life.  As we grow older we may not cry as often as we did when we were children, but when strong emotions need to be expressed it is a useful thing to have these safety valves in good working order.

My psychology professor in Boston wrote, “Whenever stimuli of grief, disappointment, anger, or ‘overwhelming’ joy exceeds the tolerance of the organism, the ensuing state of tension is alleviated by a release of energy from various organs or organ systems which abolishes the tension.  The shedding of tears furthers the homeostatic principle so well that it is the favorite mechanism of release during childhood.  Probably it would so continue throughout life were it not suppressed by the demands of society for emotional restraint and replaced by other modes of discharge.”  This is the clinical way of saying that crying is good for you!

Crying can be a healthy and useful way of discharging pent-up emotions.  When one is faced with so powerful an emotion as grief, weeping is singularly appropriate and helpful.  We should not be afraid to cry – men too and we should recognize that others have the right to cry if and when they want to.

 

How can one help themselves when they are suffering from acute grief?

 Years ago I made the career decision to become a funeral director, and I have been looked at as being strange and odd ever since by many people.  However being a funeral director does place one right in the eye of the storm concerning death, grief and mourning.  I have observed that in my helping others I clarify things for myself about living life.

I have found that my efforts to help other people face their grief and comprehend its meaning has somehow assisted me – not only in handling my own emotions, but also by giving me the feeling that what I am doing serves as a living memorial for the one who has died, and as a living testimony of help to those who survive.

One of the things a person who is suffering from grief must do is to be kind to themselves.  Often we are our own harshest critics, judges and juries.  We say and do things to ourselves that we would bitterly resent were others doing it to us.  It is mandatory that we stand off and look at ourselves, our motives and the events of our lives as if we wanted to be our own good friend rather than our own severe accuser.

Strange as this might sound it is also helpful for us to try to look at events and feelings from the point of view of the person who has died.  Only then can we begin to modify our judgments and reactions in the light of what the understanding love of the dead person might have been were they present to give us the advantage of their counsel and insight.

 

Is there evidence that grief can cause more than mental anguish?

 Yes.  Dr. Jerome Frederick clearly established in his series of article entitled “The Bio-Chemistry of Grief” that “bleak and utter despair” which often accompanies the loss of someone dearly loved is a true factor in bringing about chemical changes within the body.

Indeed, research in psychosomatic medicine reveal clear insights into the relationship between acute and chronic grief and the development of a myriad of pathological conditions including malignant tumors.

Dr. Frederick indicates the connection between cancer and grief by stating that emotions affect the glandular system immediately.  The glandular system controls body chemistry, disturbance of the emotions that can come from unwisely managed grief keeps the glandular system disturbed; the result is a persistent disturbance of the body chemistry, and this can and does account for the cause of irregular and unhealthy cell division.  In addition certain asthmatic conditions, forms of colitis, and even arthritis have been linked to unresolved loss issues in life.

There is clear evidence that unwisely managed grief could be a significant factor in physical as well as mental illness.  This is yet another compelling reason for human beings to form a deep interest in grief, and particularly for all who work constantly with mourners – psychiatrists and clergy, funeral directors and psychologists, internists and pathologists, social workers and hospice workers and even guidance counselors.

It is truly unfortunate, particularly for the innocent mourner, that the “Grief University” does not exist.  Worse yet there seems clear evidence that there is no serious interest amongst “death care” professionals in establishing such a program.  Too, too bad.

 

How long should grief last?

 Longer than most grievers think it should.  It is so risky to make time predictions concerning the length of the human beings reaction to a significant loss in life.  In a real sense grief does not really end, but instead people assimilate the experience into living life and grow through their pain and suffering.  In a culture that demands rapid solutions to any life problems this position is usually not appreciated nor understood, but concerning grief it is true.

With broad brush strokes it can be said that the most distressing physical symptoms of grief – weakness, nausea, faintness, disorientation and generalized misery pass rather quickly – possible in a day or two or a week.

The inclination to weep continually, the uneasy discomfort when in the presence of other people, and the desire to wake up from this nightmare may last for several days.

All of these intense expressions of acute grief really should have lightened up and/or disappeared in four or five weeks.  If these extremely intense reactions and expressions continue unabated for a long time, the griever will basically exhaust themselves and often times will require professional help and/or hospitalization.

After the period of intense expressions the true “grief work” begins.  Interestingly it is just about this time when the griever is really beginning to journey through the valley of death that many people think they should be over their loss.

In the end there are truly no calendars, no clocks, and no stop watches where grief is concerned.  Grief is slow wisdom, pure and simple, no matter what Dr. Phil says.

 

I hurt so badly how is grief relieved?

 Grief is basically relieved by time, and also by understanding and exploring the ongoing creative impulses of life itself.  Grief requires self examination, or the danger lurks that grief will ambush the griever and then they are constantly taken by surprise which makes them only more miserable and vulnerable.

With grief the days drag on and on or so it feels.  In our fast lane society this is extremely difficult for a mourner to cope with.  Regardless of the artificial and meaningless pressures which the mourner has to contend with from society, there are long hours of slow-moving days which are weighted with pain and defeat.  Grieving people basically are not fun to be around.

However all people, in all places throughout history have recognized that time has about itself a healing quality.  Just let enough time pass without forcing anything and problems have a tendency to create their own resolution.  As time moves on, things that were out of perspective begin to move back into their proper place.

I remember when I was a child on the farm in Iowa one of our neighbors got his hand caught in a corn picker and four of his fingers were chopped off.  The physicians and surgeons in Omaha were powerless to save the fingers.  Our neighbor fell into deep grief over the loss of something that had been attached to his body from birth – he felt true despair and significant loss.  “How will I farm?”  “How will I harvest my crops?”  Important questions for any farmer to ask!  However today he is 80 years old and farms everyday – over time and it was NOT easy, he learned to assimilate his loss into his daily meaning of life, but it took time.  No magic potion exists for this type of loss.

When someone we love dies it is like a psychological amputation something is chopped off.  Someone we are highly attached to has been cut out of our lives.

When we understand what is happening and give a name to it, it is easier to bear it.  It is meaningless suffering that people find unendurable.  We need to find meaning in what has happened to us.  When we can grasp the fact that death is a part of the cycle of life, then death in general is really not as distressing; rather it is the individual death which we contemplate that presents the problem to us.  But if the individual death is related to a larger than life process, we are then able to see it in the larger perspective in which is exists and this understanding adds to the deeper wisdom about living life.

Life has about itself a certain built-in momentum.  The Greeks called it “kyros.”  Translated into English it means “the right time.”  Kyros shows up all the time in the meeting of problems and in the finding of solutions.  The effort to do the next thing that must be done helps us to relieve the generalized feeling of our grief, and it helps us to know that we are moving on in time.

So we go on about the tasks of the day, and in the words of Winston Churchill “KBO” – “keep buggering on!”  In time the days lengthen into weeks and soon, without our being aware of what has happened, the deep wounds slowly begin to heal and even the scar tissue begins to fade away.  Life will never again be the same as it was, but there is still life to be lived and it still can be good, and might just be better – in time.

 

I don’t like funerals, they depress me, and can’t I have a big party where everybody is having fun when I’m dead?

Today our cultures emphasis on living the care-free life has now even invaded the world of death, dying, grief, bereavement, mourning and funerals.  The phrase “Celebration of Life” has been competing with the word “Funeral” for sometime.

Here we meet with a conflicting set of purposes.  We recognize that there is no easy way of facing the death of one who was important to our structure of life and our experience of meaning.  It is painful – perhaps the most poignant pain that human’s experience.

Naturally we want to ease the pain in any way we can.  One way, one ancient way to do so is by showing compassion, patience, consideration, understanding, kindness and lamenting the dead.  This is quite different from an effort to “make things easy” by throwing a party which contains the real risk of masking and denying the deep strong grief feelings and by trying to prevent their expression.

It will be helpful to discuss some of the ways in which misguided stiff upper lip people, good intended people try to “make things easier.”  They attempt to avoid any show of sorrow by the mourners – weeping, moaning, and sobbing.  They seek to hide the hurt by masking it with drugs.  They try to hide the loss – by hiding the dead body from sight, by cloaking serious emotions with fun and entertainment, by suggesting a hasty vacation that in reality will remove the mourner from the scene of the loss.

As death care professionals we also need to ask ourselves the question whether or not we are being unwitting conspirators in cloaking the reality of death?  Why does one minister give a 30 minute funeral which honestly confronts the reality of the situation, and the next minister gives a 3 minute funeral without mentioning the name of the deceased?  Could it be that one clergy has come to terms with the lamentation of grief, and the other clergy wants to get it over as quickly as possible?  Good question for any professional person to ask themselves.

Party or not, people need to lament their dead and express the deep emotions which are waiting to get expressed.  Concealment of reality by serving champagne and caviar at a party will not change the hard truth of the death.  Concealment is not celebration; concealment will only delay the expression of emotions and therefore distort reality.

 

Why do people joke and make unkind comments about funerals and funeral directors?

The grim events that have to do with death are charged with both mystery and anxiety, and some people sometimes gain emotional release by being able to make light of them.  Humor keeps reality at a distance.  So we have cartoons that make truly serious international political crises seem less foreboding.  We have comedies and comedians to make light of the serious problems of life that distress people.  We tell jokes to shake off the accumulated tensions that gather inside us, and nothing gives a sense of release like a good belly laugh.

I remember when I was a student at the Mortuary College in Boston there was a nightclub in Kenmore Square called, of all things “Lucifers.”  I was a regular.  One Saturday night I asked a young woman who was a student at Emmanuel College to dance.  In the middle of the dance she asked me what I was studying in college.  I told her I was working on becoming a funeral director, and she fainting dead away right on the dance floor.  The subject does created anxiety and dramatic reactions. Many people just do not understand.

It is through humor that we feel that we gain some mastery over the things that may really be mastering us – like a 100% death rate.  We know that we cannot ultimately master or deny death, but instead of fainting when confronted with this reality we can and do make it less an emotional hazard by taking some part of the subject of death and holding it up for ridicule, sarcasm or biting humor.  When Johnny Carson ran into trouble in his opening monologue he always reverted to telling jokes about Forest Lawn Cemetery and Mortuary in Glendale, California because he knew the crowd would laugh hysterically.  Because the funeral director is unquestionably the major symbol of death in any community they are an ever-present target for this kind of humor.  I know of no funeral director in the world who does not experience and contend with this situation.

In the end death humor is rarely directed at the funeral director as a human being, instead people laugh at the subject of death and use the funeral director’s job as a quick, easy and convenient way of doing so.  Most funeral director’s I have encountered understand this fully.

One last thought on humor and death.  I have discovered an interesting psychology.  It is absolutely fine for other people to make joke after joke about death, funerals and funeral directors, but it is NOT ok for a funeral director to make jokes about funerals.  There is a fascinating paradox concerning this situation.  I have concluded that people like to joke about funerals to distance themselves from the reality of the subject, but if the funeral director makes the joke the response is serious and judgmental.  It is as if the public are saying “It is ok for us to laugh at funerals, but how serious can be take a funeral director who laughs at his own profession?  Good heaven’s how could we trust him to take care of our Mom?  We don’t want a comedian as Mother’s funeral director!”

 

Why would anyone want to become a funeral director – isn’t it weird, strange and unbelievably in bad taste?

 You will probably never see Robert Redford or Harrison Ford playing a funeral director on the big wide screen in a movie theater – in fact I can guarantee it! Hollywood has a consistent history of handing funeral director movie roles over to actors like Vincent Price, Bois Karloff, Peter Lorre, and Dan Acroyd.

Weird, odd, strange – those are common adjectives used when people refer to funeral directing as a career.  However as most people know many funeral director followed in a family tradition, and have inherited both their interest and their establishment.

Some became funeral directors quite by accident, as did the college student who took a part-time job in a funeral home and then became so interested in the work that they never left it.

Then there are individuals who are born to be a funeral director.  They have a calling and basically little choice whether or not they will follow what is in their heart and mind.  They are driven to the profession by an indescribable desire to fulfill a mission in life in doing service work that is needed and valued in the community.

 

I went to the funeral home last night and all the funeral director was doing was sitting at the desk dressed in a real nice suit. Does the funeral director have an easy job?

 I suppose we are all inclined to think that the other person has the easy job.  This is usually because we do not see all that is involved in what the other person does.  This is particularly true of working in a funeral home.

In truth the community assigns to the funeral director one of the most difficult of tasks possible, that of ministering to people who are faced with the fact of death – a fact for which the general public have generally had little cultural or intellectual preparation.  In truth funeral directors are obliged to deal with some of the most morbid and gruesome aspects of community life – the suicides, the accidents, the homicides, the child’s death, and the end results of long and devastating illness.  They are also expected to deal with the most distasteful happenings in the community with 100% quiet dignity and composure.

There are few things in a funeral home environment or about funeral work which the funeral director can show pride.  While a fur salesperson can brag about the sale of an expensive mink coat, the funeral director cannot take a similar attitude toward a funeral.  Like the doctor or the clergy the funeral director cannot reveal confidences about their professional activities.

So in answer to the question?  It would take quite an agile imagination to make one think that the funeral director has an easy job.

 

What is the real purpose of a funeral?

The funeral services many major purposes.  It provides an acceptable way for disposing of the body of a person who has died.  It offers an opportunity for the expression of the religious faith that can sustain the bereaved, the people who must face the loss of one to whom they have been closely related emotionally.

Moreover, the funeral gives the community a chance to recognize the loss of one of its members, and in so doing to offer support to the relatives of the dead person.  This is usually a matter of both doing and saying.

To all who mourn, the funeral service provides an emotional outlet for strong feelings, and an acceptable setting within which to express them.

 

What does abnormal/complicated grief look like?

At close range it is often difficult to separate the normal from the complicated.  Under the stress of powerful emotions people say things and do things that are quite out of character.

We must then ask ourselves whether an act that may seem strange and complicated is part of a whole pattern of unusual actions and reactions or merely an isolated occurrence.  And we certainly want to see whether this new way of acting and reacting is becoming more firmly fixed or less so.

Complicated grief usually shows up, as does most mental disturbances, in extremes.  Sometimes what we observe is a seeming inability to react emotionally at all.  The person who is cold, efficient, impersonal, and dry-eyed under powerful emotional stress may be “under-reacting.”  The person who goes all to pieces may be “over-reacting.”  We cannot on the face of it say that the seemingly calm person is handling the situation well; neither can we say, in the face of an explosion of grief, that sorrow is shattering the other.

If the mourner has emotional weak spots in his/her nature they well may show themselves in aggravated forms under the pressure of grief.  Also dysfunctional people usually take their dysfunctions right along with them in the grief experience.  Danger signals to watch for are unreasonable withdrawal from normal functions, excessive anger at others, or intense suspicion of others.  These last may easily be directed at “safe” people like the physicians, minister, and funeral director or even toward members of the immediate family.  Moods of inappropriate elation or deep depression may also be indications that things are not right.

One of the best ways to gauge complicated/abnormal emotional reactions are to observe a person and their behavior a month or so after the death has taken place.  If intense physical and emotional symptoms do not ease at all, and the person is not able to function it is a fairly specific indication that they should have some special help in meeting their problems of readjustment.

 

What is the best way to tell a person bad news?

There is no easy way to tell a person shattering news.  There are, however, some guidelines that ought to be kept clearly in mind.

Whenever possible, the bearer of news should be face to face with the one who is to learn the distressing information, for then at least the bereaved will not be entirely alone in their ordeal.  Even the one who brings the bad news is an ally in facing it.

The sad facts should be presented in as simple and direct form as possible.  Beating around the bush only makes the process for lengthy, complicated, confusing and hence more painful.

The calm, direct approach does not add unnecessary anxiety to a problem that already has enough of its own.  The person who brings the news should stand as part of the solution to the problem and not as another dimension to the problem itself.  Anxiety and fear are easily communicated and amplified, but so also are calmness and confidence.

Having communicated the bad news, it is important to stand by to accept the emotional response and recognize both its importance and its validity.  The first outpouring of feeling may be the important first step toward the acceptance of painful truth and the readjustment of life to it.

To sustain a person in these first painful moments is an important service that may produce good fruits for a long time to come.

 

What about all this fuss and feathers at funerals? I mean what do ceremonies do for people?

 Healthy ceremonies are worthy of such a classification when they serve a useful, healthful purpose for a majority of the people in any given community.

Ceremonies provide an appropriate setting in which people can easily express legitimate feelings relating to important events in their lives or in the life of the group.  For instance a funeral in the Italian community in the North End of Boston, will be very different from a funeral in the Methodist community located in Iowa.

A funeral will serve as a healthy ceremony when it helps the individuals in a community accept rather than deny their far-reaching feelings; moreover, it serves healthful ends when it is conducted in an atmosphere that permits facing reality not only personally but socially.  When a number of other people accept a fact it is increasingly difficult for one or two members of the group to deny it.

A funeral can actually make it possible for the group to verify its faith in the future by saying, in effect, “We also know what is happening to you, for most of us have been through it ourselves.”  Unfortunately private funeral ceremonies so limit the community’s involvement that this faith in the future is usually greatly diluted or missed entirely.

I once served a gentleman whose wife had died.  He was adamant that he wanted nothing concerning ceremony and ritual.  I gently tried to persuade him that he might simply want to place an obituary in the paper to let the community know what had happened in his meaning of life, and he immediately in anger accused me of getting “kick backs” from the newspaper.  So nothing was done to confront and announce to the world what had happened to him.  In a month he was back in my office ready to pay the expenses incurred in disposing of his wives remains.  He looked at me with an expression of such pain and despair and said this:  “You really know who your friends are when something bad happens to you.  You know not one person, not one person has called, written or stopped by to see me.”  I once again suggested that it was not too late to put something in the newspaper and I again, for my own protection, assured him that I was not on the newspapers underground payroll.  The poor man agreed to the obituary.  Months later I ran into him in downtown Omaha and he greeted me with a big smile.  Evidently once the obituary was published the community, who had correctly concluded in the absence of an obituary, that this man wanted to be alone. When the obituary was finally published the community interpreted the news as an invitation to express the communities concern. And express it they did.  Cards and letter flooded in, cakes, pies, cookies, casseroles, and telephone calls arrived daily.  The community liked this man and they were genuinely concerned about him and once the door was opened by implementing the ceremonial event we call an obituary the community gladly the threshold of sympathetic understand and sent this man but thought and action a mighty powerful message – YOU ARE NOT ALONE!  As a footnote the English word OBITUARY comes to us from two sources.  In Latin the word OBITUS mean death and in Greek the word OBITUPOLOS means “a cry for help.”  Interesting is it not?

The ceremony depends for its efficacy not so much on what is said as it does on the group’s expression of its own experiences, and on the recognized, ritualized expressions of faith and feelings.  When words fail people use rituals across the globe.  In this way there is verification of one’s ability to find the way through even so devastating an experience as the death of a loved one.  Private funerals rarely accomplished these important tasks in the search for healing.

This ability to communicate thought and feeling through acts that are commonly understood gives to the funeral its special value.

 

I don’t like funerals. I want a party when I am dead, is this healthy?

 Funerals are tough ceremonies.  However it is in the rigor of such ceremonies that growth and wisdom the type that rarely is discovered at a party can be found. Customarily wise thoughts do not surface at a party.  Focusing on only the pleasures of life is truly unrealistic.  In fact it is not only unrealistic but unhealthy.  I find it interesting that unhealthy people tend to develop for themselves unhealthy ceremonies.  The interesting secret of life is that we become what we think about most.  So men with an unhealthy streak of cruelty encourage cockfights and get excited while watching violent sporting activities.  Make no mistake these are examples of ceremonies.  A person does not watch eleven university football players beating each other up while chasing an inflated animal hide because they are hoping such a ceremony with prove the academic superiority of the university. People with an unhealthy compulsion for gambling see absolutely nothing wrong with widespread playing of dice and games of chance.  While these two examples of behavior may not seem like ceremonies at first, they absolutely serve that purpose for the persons who use them.

Contemporary funeral ceremonies have already succeeded in unfortunately building detours around reality.  The keystone of the funeral ritual is to help people face reality not detour around it.  Too often the “party” funeral “Celebration of Life” concept of dealing with the harsh realities of death lacks any of the essentials which are necessary for reality to be established in the minds of the bereaved.

People fiddle with reality all the time, but it seems clear that fiddling with death rituals is in the present time on definitely on the ascendance.  Here are some examples of how people fiddly with reality.  Gambling, for example, requires that adult men and women to really believe something patently unreal – that one can “will” the dice to fall in a certain way, or that the power of one’s personal wishes can make a horse run faster at the track, or that a ball will fall into one hole instead of another.

Those who do not want to face the full reality of death can easily today develop ceremonies that make it unnecessary for them to look squarely at death.  Parties are wonderful ceremonies for the happy times of life however we are not talking about happy times.  Parties surrounding death most often lack several essentials which the human experience has found useful over the veil of time in dealing with the reality of death – namely a dead body, time to cry and lament, a serious atmosphere for reflection and evaluation of life, and an acknowledged period of mourning for the survivors.  Insofar as the “party” at death concept serves as escapes from reality they tend to be unhealthy expressions.

Similarly, people with morbid curiosity and abnormal apprehensions concerning death may try to satisfy their pathological needs through excesses in the other direction, which has just as disastrous consequences.  An example of this excess would be when a person goes dangerously into debt when purchasing a funeral.

It is important to realize that the reaction to a ceremony is a highly individual and personal thing.  In the final analysis, ceremonies must be judged on how they help the people involved to fulfill their important emotional needs which is to get a firm grasp on reality.

 

Why do people try to avoid looking at death?

 There is simply something threatening about looking into the face of death – this threat exists in all cultures across the globe.  Throughout my career I have seen in hospitals and other institutions when the last flicker of life of a mortally ill person fades away that almost immediately the nurse or physician in attendance will pick up the sheet and cover the face of the man or woman who had died just seconds before.

Morgue entrances at hospitals are almost universally located next to the garbage dumpster at the back end of the building, and today hospitals have gone so far as to invent camouflaged laundry hampers to transport a dead body to the morgue.  It is somewhat as if they are saying, “This is something we cannot bear to look at.”

But why?  My entire career in funeral service I know that many people privately think “How can he stand to do that job, looking at dead people all day long!”  But why?  It is because the person who died is worse off?  That we do not know, although we do know that the time of physical suffering is past.  Perhaps the explanation is that the death is a reminder of our own mortality, and that this is a fact we do not usually want to acknowledge and hence it is a threat.

“One can no more look steadily at death than at the sun,” said La Rochefoucauld, the French sage.  Yet even a lifetime devoted to avoiding the reality of death would not make it possible for us actually to avoid it or its meaning for our lives.

Thus when we would “look away,” we need the firm but gentle urging that denies the escape and faces the reality.  One of the real benefits of a funeral is that it makes it possible for us to face this harsh reality without gruesomeness.

 

Why do people get so emotionally upset when the subject of death is raised?

 This question assumes a universal response that I do not believe to be invariably true.  Mature men and women, who have thought about death, and who have developed a well thought out philosophy of both life and death can think and talk about death quite casually and without personal apprehension.  But it takes time, thought, and effort to develop this life asset.

The groups which have mature attitudes towards death, however is minimal in our population.  It is quite true that for many, in fact the majority of contemporary human beings, the whole subject of death are fraught with anxiety and discomfort such as the subject of sex was viewed 100 years ago.  This may be caused by a number of things.  Sometimes it is caused by childhood experiences when death was not talked about nor confronted and so became especially distressing to contemplate as an adult.  For others the mention of death may immediately recall one particular death that was so poorly managed that it created emotional damage which has never been accepted and hence not dealt with.  For example a car driven by a friend of mine struck and killed a woman who stepped out from between two parked cars.  My friend was unable to avoid the accident, and this fact was clearly established without question by the police and by a court that investigated the accident.  He was never charged with anything legally.  However his emotions were charged so greatly that even now, many years later, the mention of death, any death, still triggers memories for my friend of that horrible moment when he saw what was happening in his life and was helpless to do anything about it.

The mention of death also is a stark reminder about our own fate, and this is in itself quite distressing for people who have not developed an understanding of the meaning of their own existence.  To think about death when one is not sure of the meaning of their life is bound to be upsetting.

 

I have left instructions – NO VIEWING – of my body. How effective is a funeral service without a body?

 It is hard to argue with the fact that without the dead body there would be no reason for a funeral.  It is also hard to debate the fact that the corpse is an essential in the larger view in life of what has really happened.  However dead bodies are controversial and this controversy is heightened when some people talk about their own dead body and what they want or do not want.  The fact that they will be dead and it won’t make any difference to them seems often times to add to the anxiety of the subject instead of bringing a quite sense of resignation to the truth of that statement.

Beyond all anxieties and concerns the presence of the dead body is one of the essentials of a funeral.  The presence of the body makes the funeral service specific.  There is a clear identify to the event.  It clearly becomes a ritual for the person who is there represented by their dead remains.  When a dead body is not present by choice or by necessity (lost at sea for example) the ritual tends to become very much like other rituals, but a death ritual is much different from a wedding rituals, how meaningful would a wedding be without a bride and groom, or a christening without an infant? Hence without the dead body the death ritual can lose much of its meaning.

If the purposes of the funeral ritual are to be served then a ritual with its unique characteristics is necessary.  A funeral ritual without a dead body present is somewhat like a baptism or marriage by proxy, or a birthday celebration without the birthday boy or girl present.  The ceremony can certainly be carried out, but it lacks individual identify.

 

What about putting make-up and cosmetics on a dead body?

 When a body is prepared for the funeral ritual an effort is made to recreate a resemblance to the appearance the person had while alive to which the mourner’s can connect and identify.  Proper respect for the dead body determines that it should not be made ready for viewing in an unkempt and disheveled condition.  So just as in life the hair is combed and the face shaved.

Let’s look at this issue a little closer.  It is not secret that in our culture many people try to improve on the achievements of nature by special cosmetics applied to their faces.  I was in Las Vegas and counted over 300 pages of plastic surgeons in that city alone.  That was proof enough for me that many people, many, many people try to improve on the achievements of nature by special treatments to their appearance.

My mother has a favorite saying “I can’t go yet – I don’t even have my face on!”  Naturally she is not speaking of the face nature gave here, but of the improvements in color and design that she wants to make on improving nature.

Since the efforts to prepare the dead body for viewing take into account the appearance of the person while they lived it is quite natural that the modified appearance cosmetics provides would have to be considered.  What often times are objectionable to may is the occasional inappropriate use of make-up.  Too much cosmetics, painting up the dead body, are examples of this.  However as not every clergy gives wonderful sermons, and as not every nurse gets all the paperwork correct and on time, it is true some funeral directors are not skilled at cosmetics, that’s life.  Last thought on this cosmetic subject:  remember the main purpose of the funeral is to establish the reality of death in the minds of the bereaved and the thickest cosmetic you can possible have at a funeral is a closed casket lid, then all reality is truly covered up.

 

What is the secret in healing grief?

All my career grieving people have asked me “How do I get the pain to ease up?”  Good question.  Answer – go out and do something nice for somebody else.  This is truly the secret grief tonic, and it works amazingly well.

Looking out for number one may be in fashion today, and certainly the emotion of grief is a self absorbed experience, however lending a helping and giving hand to others has never gone out of style.  Maybe that’s because doing nice things for other people has always had a lot going for it – like the tendency to make people happy, the giver and the receiver.  This does take effort, which grieving people may not immediately have the energy to tackle, but in the end it is good grief medicine.

When you do something nice for someone else the griever actually lose themselves in the other person.  This process can help block out depression, make us less aware of our own challenges (like coping with grief) and help us surmount our person problems.

Doing nice things for and giving to others, is what can be called prosocial behavior.  It is a way of putting others before your own ego and pain, of reaching out to the people around you.  And that can only increased well-being because without some connection with others, life doesn’t have much meaning does it?

 

What does a funeral have to do with the dignity of man?

The way various cultures treat the bodies of those who have died tends to reflect their philosophy as to the innate worth and dignity of the entire human family and experience.  In a society where, for example, the state decides who is important and who is not, the irreverent and reckless care of the dead is common place.  Nazi Germany’s treatment of the Jewish dead during the Second World War is a premier example of this fact.  In fact throughout history civilization have in part been gauged and evaluated as to their advancement concerning the dignity of human beings by how they care for their dead.

There is an alarming pattern in contemporary American culture to disregard the dead.  We hide them from sight, to dispose of them and quickly as possible, and to spend the least amount of time in their presence.  This pattern of disregard threatens the whole ideas of the human’s special quality to attest that life is more than just a biological event.  When the body that has served as the physical residence of the spirit is treated with disregard, disrespect, and disinterest on the part of the living the basic assumptions that we cherish about life named regard, respect and interest are challenged.

The care we show for the dead is really, then, a means we employ to guarantee respect for life.  Reverence for life has on the flip side reverence for the dead.  Indeed, what we are talking about here is a matter of the value we place upon life itself.  If we make any part of the human experience – birth, childhood, adulthood, old age – any part cheap we cheapen all the rest of it.  It is regrettable easier to downgrade respect for human nature than to build it up again.

For a long period of time we quite naturally and tenaciously clung to values that dignified the human innate qualities of being. Today however we are certainly gazing with dismay on contemporary practices that allow for this basic respect, regard and interest to wither away.

If death is anything it is democratic.  The Grim Reaper is the best example of an equal opportunity employer in existence.  When we look at how we care for the dead, we are also looking into a moral mirror of how we take care of the living.  Sometimes the reflection in the mirror is hopeful and optimistic, sometimes, many times, today, it is not.

 

You talk a lot about ceremonies. They seem to me to be too much, too much, too much.  Why are ceremonies so important?

 Ceremonies are usually elaborate ways of doing things that really don’t have to be done at all except to satisfy important emotional needs.

It is certainly easy and possible to get a diploma without attending elaborate commencement exercise, but nonetheless “graduation days” are wonderful occasions, particularly for the parents who paid the bill, which mark important milestones in life.

A couple can be just as legally married by obtaining a license and having a justice of the peace mutter a few legal words, yet many thousands of people are not satisfied with just that.  They choose instead to spend hundreds or even many thousands of dollars that might otherwise be invested or used for furnishing the home to have a big wedding with many friends in attendance, a grand reception with an expensive dinner and flowers, gowns, and much, much more.  They take pictures of it so that they will never forget this wonderful moment.  None of this wedding ceremony is legally necessary, but it serves an important purpose in the lives of the participants.  They seek to surround a most important event in their life with all the meaning, dignity, tradition and joy they can employ.  What is absolutely amazing is they do all of this and the divorce rate is 53%.  Spend $20,000 or $200,000 and the marriage lasts a year.  However people still do the ceremony.

Actually, as with most ceremonies, it is an investment in meaning, not permanency.  It is perhaps difficult to justify in terms of hard dollars and cents, yet so important to the emotional needs of the participants that wherever you find human beings you will find elaborate ceremonies, made lavish with an extravagance that reason alone won’t easily justify.

I remember all the times I have watched the changing of the guards and Buckingham Palace, or the ceremonies at the Royal Horse Guards, or watching Princess Diana’s funeral on television, or even reruns of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth with all the great pomp and ceremony and simply being enthralled with the sophistication of the British rituals.  Of course I know very well that the English monarch has not really had any political power for centuries, but that logic and rational view means nothing to me when I am caught up in the splendor of the ceremony.

It my be the simple baptism of a little baby in a small village church with its quiet joy; the meaning of the social ceremony has its value ultimately not in what it costs (however no one should ever go into debt over a ceremony) but in what it does for the participants.

 

Where is the grief pill? Isn’t it good to try to remove pain and discomfort from life?

 In answering this question we must recognize that there are different kinds of pain.  Some we would gladly remove; some we must hold on to as valuable.

For instance, most people would generally agree that it is a good thing to remove the physical pain that goes along with a dental extraction or a surgical procedure.  Here the function of pain as a danger signal has served its purpose.  Now a competent professional person can remove the source of the pain without danger to the person.  Pain teaches us, warns us, and guides us in many ways that help us keep our bodies healthful and intact.  Without pain we could easily be cut, burned, frozen, or poisoned.  I watched my niece put her finger in the flame of a candle one evening at dinner.  She immediately started crying.  I looked at her and said “I bet you’ll never do that again?”  She meekly replied, “No I won’t Uncle Todd.”  So some pain is a good thing.

There are emotional pains, however, that cannot be removed without hazard to the person experiencing them.  For instance, it is not a comfortable thing to suffer from a guilty conscience.  Yet if we did not experience the dismay that comes with guilt feelings, we would not know the meaning of moral choices.  And it we had no basis for moral choices our whole structure of society would simply fall apart.  No one of us would be able to depend on anyone else.  Trust would evaporate.  Moral responsibility can never be separated from the discomfort that comes with feelings of guilt.

So also our feelings of grief tend to show not only the value we have placed upon the life of the person we mourn, but also demonstrate the value we place upon life in general.  To try to blot out that discomfort would be to threaten the whole structure of human values.  Some pain is so valuable for personal and social good that we cannot blot it out without doing incalculable harm.

Clementine Churchill, the wife of Winston Churchill wrote potentially about her husband’s pain and suffering’s as Prime Minister of Great Britain in the Second World War.  She wrote with tender affection in the year before her own death of the tears of grief which would roll down Churchill’s face when the decision was made to send this division or that one into battle, and then there would always be more tears when he read the casualty lists.  However, no matter how great was Churchill’s pain and suffering he knew the pain was valuable and indispensable for the personal and social good and safety of the entire world in the face of Nazi domination.  Mrs. Churchill wrote that “I knew that he knew without many month and years of blood, tears, toil and sweat against Hitler and his thugs there would certainly be incalculable harm done to the human race.”  In other words the pain which Churchill suffered in destroying Hitler was in the end good, and some historians would go so far as to say the greatest good in the modern history.

 

Hardly anyone alive today has ever heard the name John Scott Harrison.  However John Scott Harrison has the distinction of being the only man in American History whose father and son became President of the United States.  John Scott Harrison’s father was William Henry Harrison the 9^th President and his son Benjamin Harrison became the 23^rd President of the United States.

 

THE SUDDEN DEATH OF JOHN SCOTT HARRISON

On May 25^th, 1878 John Scott Harrison died suddenly at his home Point Farm located close to North Bend, Ohio about 16 miles west of Cincinnati a place which overlooks the Ohio River.

Funeral services were held at the Presbyterian Church in Cleves, Ohio on May 29^th.  There were two funeral sermons.  First, blind and infirm Horace Bushnell gave a address extolling the virtues of Mr. Harrison.  Then the Rev. Mr. R.E. Hawley, acting pastor, concluded the services by sketching Harrison’s life.  In the crowd was the family of John Scott Harrison and in particular was his highly successful lawyer son from Indianapolis Mr. Benjamin Harrison who was already was at the helm of the Indiana Republican party and within 19 years would become the nations 23^rd President.

At the conclusion of the funeral the family filed past the open coffin and cast a last look upon the person who had so frequently and so successfully influenced their lives.  Interment was in the Congress Green Cemetery where the Harrison family plot and vault was located on a hill commanding a broad and beautiful view of the Ohio River Valley.

 

CONCERN IMMEDIATELY BECAME AN ISSUE

One thing only marred the burial service.  As the funeral party walked to John Scott’s grave it was noticed that the resting place of 23 year old Augustus Devin, a nephew of Benjamin Harrison and who had just been buried himself less than a week before John Scott’s death, had been disturbed.  Though placed in his grave only the Saturday before indications were that young Devin’s grave had been robbed by body snatchers.  Others thought that only hogs had been at work uprooting the earth; however on close examination it was revealed that indeed there had been a theft of the corpse.  This discovery made two precautions necessary:  one was to hide the fact from Devin’s widowed mother until the body could be recovered, and the other was to take additional safety measures for safeguarding John Scott Harrison’s remains.  To this end Benjamin Harrison together with his younger brother John supervised the actual lowering of his father’s body into an eight-foot-long grave.  At the bottom, as a secure receptacle for the metallic casket was a brick vault with thick walls and a stone bottom.  Three flat stones, eight or more inches thick were procured for a cover.  Finally and with great difficulty the stones were lowered over the casket, the largest at the upper end and the two smaller slabs crosswise at the foot.  All three were carefully cemented together.  For several hours the grave was left open so that the cement might dry.  Finally under guard a great quantity of dirt was shoveled over the stones.

 

GHASTLY GHOULS GO TO WORK

Benjamin Harrison took a train back to Indianapolis late on the day of his father’s funeral so that he might have a few days to finish his address which would open up the Republican State Convention on Wednesday, June 5.  The Harrison family saw Benjamin and his wife off at the depot and the all returned to North Bend except for the younger brother John.  He stayed in Cincinnati in order that he might begin a search in the morning for Augustus Devin’s body.

In the morning, armed with a search warrant, John Harrison and his cousin George Eaton started their search.  They were aided by a Constable Lacey and a Detective named Snelbaker.  The search began at the Ohio Medical College on 6^th Street located between Vine and Race on the south side.  Apart from the general fear that the resurrectionists (that was the name the public gave to grave robbers) might have been in collusion with the medical school their only actual clue was indeed a weak one.  At three o’clock that morning they were informed a wagon had passed through the alley on the south side of the college building and had stopped at the door where all anatomical bodies were dumped – literally.  They further learned that before the wagon had rattled off something or some body had been taken out.  This information did not necessarily suggest that young Devin’s body was there, for both John Harrison and George Eaton, now playing the role of Sherlock Holmes supposed that their young kinsman’s body had been sold much earlier in the same week – and as will be see they were absolutely correct.

At the suggestion of the police officials a close search of the college was begun.  An obnoxious protesting janitor named A.Q. Marshall showed them the various rooms of the college but he stoutly maintained that no bodies were to be found.  With the help of a lantern the darkness in the chute where bodies were usually dumped from the street dispelled the darkness, still no trace of any body.

 

THE TERRIBLE DISCOVERY

At last when the building had been thoroughly searched young John and George were ready to look elsewhere.  Constable Lacey, however, noticed a taut rope attached to the windlass.  Immediately he ordered Detective Snelbaker to haul it up.  It was not an easy task for as the windlass was pulled it was soon evident that there was a heavy weight at the end of the rope.  At last there emerged into the light a body.  A cloth covered only the head and shoulders of what appeared to be the body of a very old man.

John Harrison dismissed the discovery simply because Augustus Devin was a very young man – not an old man.  In any event the body was placed on the floor and Lacey with a stick case aside the cloth.  As he did so Harrison caught sight of the dead man’s face and exclaimed in horror that the dead body was none other than his father, John Scott Harrison!

Harrison’s eyes bulged from their sockets.  The terrible sight sickened him physically and tortured him emotionally.  In good faith he came looking for a widow’s son, and he had found instead the corpse of his own father not entombed less than twenty-four hours before.  The scene was almost beyond belief: John Scott Harrison’s body caught by a rope around its neck, hidden in a black hole in the Medical College of Ohio right in downtown Cincinnati!  In his daze the youngest of the Harrison’s thought only of the grave at North Bend – a grave bricked in and covered with nearly a ton of stone slabs, cemented and then covered with earth.  Still deeply agitated John Harrison engaged the Cincinnati undertaking firm of Estep & Meyer located at 214,216 and 218 West Seventh Street and owned by T.B. Estep and G.B. Meyer to care for his father’s body until he could consult with his older brothers and other family members.  Above all he was determined to keep the matter secret.

Secrecy, though highly desirable, was doomed to failure.  A reporter from the Cincinnati Commerical learned the startling fact from the fire department boys next to the medical college.  The reporter tracked down Harrison, Eaton, and the Estep & Meyer Undertakers, but to no avail.  Nobody talked and the undertakers who had been sworn to silence would not even admit that it was John Scott Harrison’s corpse which had been uncovered.  Before long, however, the news broke – not from Cincinnati but from North Bend.  Three relatives had visited the Harrison tomb early and the morning and learned for themselves the distressing news.  They found that the two smaller stones originally placed across the outer coffin had been lifted on end.  Then the ghouls had evidently drilled a series of holes in the outer coffin in exactly the same fashion as when young Devin’s body was stolen.  Finally the lid of the inner coffin was pried up the glass seal broken and the body drawn out feet first.  This was contrary to the usual practice of body snatching indicating that one of the perpetrators had been present as the burial and had noted that the smaller stones were placed over the foot of the vault.

Young Archie Eaton was sent immediately to Cincinnati to apprize his brother George and his uncle john, the searchers for Devin’s body, that they now faced a far holier task in seeking to recover the stolen body of John Scott Harrison.  At the last moment Carter Harrison decided to join Archie Eaton in the short trip to Cincinnati.

The subsequent meeting of the two Harrison brothers in Cincinnati was one of the strangest in history.  When they met John Harrison informed the others that he had discovered the body of John Scott Harrison, while at the same time Carter Harrison informed the others that John Scott Harrison’s body had been stolen.  It was a moment of profound grief mingled with stern satisfaction.

Benjamin Harrison had literally only arrived in Indianapolis when he was urgently called back to Cincinnati.  The Cincinnati Police efforts availed little.  The police rounded up the usual suspects but they were all released.

Just before Benjamin Harrison arrived from Indianapolis his older brother Carter decided to make a quick visit to the Ohio Medical College to examine the spot where he father’s body had been discovered.  At the college he encountered Dr. W. M. Seely who was the Secretary of the Medical College as well as a Professor.  It was a terribly unfortunate meeting.  The eminent physician, who was already incensed by the newspaper criticism leveled at the medical college and the faculty had the indelicacy of remarking to the grief stricken Carter Harrison that the entire affair really mattered little since it would all be the same for everyone on the day of resurrection.  Neither the public nor the Harrison’s would forget nor forgive that remark.

 

THE ARREST OF THE JANITOR

Before Benjamin Harrison arrived his brother Carter swore out a warrant for the arrest of A.Q. Marshall the janitor at the Ohio Medical College.  Marshall was arrested on the charge of receiving concealing and secreting John Scott Harrison’s body which had been taken unlawfully and maliciously from its grave.

Marshall was no sooner committed to cell 61 at the Hamilton County Jail than the entire college faculty rushed to his defense.  The medical men pooled their resources the posted a $5,000.00 bond for their janitor’s bail.  This show of support for one which the public had come to regard as an accomplice in the grave robbery angered the citizens of Cincinnati even more.  Several people suggested mob action in defiance of the law, but this was quickly vetoed by Benjamin Harrison.  However Harrison made is abundantly clear that he would exhaust all the necessary legal processes to insure justice both to his family and to the family of Augustus Devin.

In Cincinnati things went from bad to worse when the Medical College of Ohio took the position that the attention this case was commanding was hurting their chances of obtaining additional cadavers for dissection.  The press had a field day!

 

PROTECTION FOR JOHN SCOTT HARRISON’S BODY

While the public argued both sides of the controversy the body of John Scott Harrison was quietly re-interred in the vault of Jacob Strader (who was a close family friend of the Harrison’s) at Spring Grove Cemetery.

Reports of John Scott Harrison’s reburial helped to keep alive public indignation in the Queen City.  Crowds milled in and out of the alley attempting to peer into the now celebrated cadaver chute.  Local reporters interviewed as many people as possible.  They concluded that hysteria was growing and the question on the lips of thousands was “what can we do with the bodies of our loved and lost ones to save them from the ignominy of the ‘chute and windlass and dissecting knife of the Medical College?’”

 

THE SEARCH FOR AUGUSTUS DEVIN’S BODY GOES ON

The mystery of Devin’s body went unsolved until Friday, June 14^th.  On this date a clue which eventually broke the case emerged.  In the ensuing weeks medical professors from both the Ohio Medical College and the Miami Medical College both in Cincinnati admitted that like most other medical schools in the country they were under contract with “certain persons” who would guarantee a yearly supply of cadavers for dissection and anatomical demonstration.  It was during these conversations that the fact leaked out that Cincinnati was a shipping center for this “dead traffic,” which moved on to smaller cities like Fort Wayne and Ann Arbor.

Then on June 14^th another janitor, but this time from the Miami Medical School cracked and confessed collusion with the notorious resurrectionist Charles Morton, alias Gabriel, alias Dr. Morton, alias Dr. Christian, and alias Dr. Gordon.  The janitor confession basically indicted the entire medical profession across the United States.

The janitor confessed that when Miami Medical College recessed for the summer good ole Dr. Morton had bribed him to use the medical building basement as headquarters before preparing and shipping bodies to other cities.  It was an excellent hiding place as well as an efficient workshop, for with the exception of two hours each day no member of the faculty was near the school.  Consequently the good doctor Morton had worked unmolested for about a month – and in that time young Augustus Devin and old John Scott Harrison were two of his clients.

 

QUIMBY & COMPANY

The janitor also revealed that many bodies had been prepared and shipped from Cincinnati to the Medical College at Ann Arbor, Michigan, but the address on the barrels containing the cadaver’s read “Quimby and Co.”  This was clue enough for the police whose previous search of the Miami Medical College had yielded nothing.  The police left for Ann Arbor immediately and easily traced the barrels to the medical college where they found a vat of brine containing several bodies already prepared for use in the fall and winter school sessions.

“Quimby & Co.” as was suspected proved to be a blind by which the Michigan medical school avoided suspicion and detection.  All shipments so addressed had been delivered to the college and signed for by college employees.  The police made a quick check of the May and June arrivals and in short order they were convinced that young Devin’s body, stolen on May 22, had been shipped from the Miami Medical College on  May 24 and had arrived in Ann Arbor on May 25^th.  In no time the police identified one of the cadaver’s as that of young Devin and a telegram was send immediately to the family in North Bend.

 

DEVIN’S REBURIAL

Young Devin’s remains were expected at North Ben at 10:00 a.m. on Sunday morning, June 16, 1878.  Long before the scheduled arrival and despite the threatening skies better than five hundred people gathered to follow the body for the second time to the grave in the family plot in Congress Green Cemetery.  The townspeople lined the hill leading to the cemetery while relatives and close friends waited at the depot.  Shortly before ten, word came that the body would not arrive for another twenty-four hours.  This announcement caused no little disappointment and impatience in a community eager and bent upon seeing the body reverently buried again.

On the following morning a driving rain compelled hundreds to stay at home.  The Harrison’s, however, including Benjamin, were counted among the one hundred and fifty prominent citizens assembled at the station in final tribute to young Augustus Devin.  The family had scheduled no services, but once the coffin was placed in the freight room it was opened and all present filed past slowly and prayerfully.  By the hour the procession had reached Congress Green the small company of mourners had swelled to a large concourse.  More than one made the observation that just four weeks to the day had elapsed between the first and second interment.

Long after the funeral cortege had left the scene there remained around the sacred enclosure a volunteer guard composed entirely of citizens.  This was a practice instituted the night after the robbery of John Scott Harrison’s grave.  No precaution was overlooked; even citizens late in getting home at night were halted by their self-appointed sentries.

 

THE SLOW GRIND OF JUSTICE

In the end the final verdict of this case has been clouded by time.  The records concerning all the indictment’s and law suits were burned when a angry mob burned the Hamilton County Court House in Cincinnati to the ground in 1886.  Dr. Morton seems to have vanished from the face of the earth.

In December 1879 the body of John Scott Harrison was reinterred without ceremony in the Harrison Family Tomb by Estep & Meyer Undertaker’s for a charge of $4.00.  He rests in this tomb to this very day.

The ultimate issue of these private civil suits is relatively unimportant when compared to the lasting social benefit which occurred to the American people as a result of finding John Scott Harrison’s body in 1878.  For in less than two years the Ohio Legislature passed a statute which effectively helped to relegate resurrectionism to a dark and forgotten page of history.  The best feature of the 1880 law, an important landmark in medical history, was an increase in the maximum penalty for the body snatching practice.  This new law (a precursor for the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act), bearing unmistakably bright teeth, proved an important step in the legitimate donations of dead human bodies to medical schools across the county. This lessened the popular odium previously associated with anatomical research on ghoul-given bodies.  In time young up and coming surgeons became more adept, people lived long, and a more educated public cooperated with the medical profession.

On the funeral side of things as a direct result of the Harrison Horror Andrew Van Bibber who was an inventor in Cincinnati in 1878 invented what he called the “mort-safe” and patented the devise.  It was the first attempt at developing the modern burial vault.  Then on the heels of Van Bibber’s invention in 1879, George W. Boyd of Springfield, Ohio patented the first metal grave vault to use the air bell principle to seal.  The purpose of both of these vaults was to stop the incidences of grave robbing and the devices worked extremely well.

So often today we say that the use of the burial vault is to protect the remains – from the elements found in the ground.  True to be sure, but historically the burial vault was developed to protect the remains, but not from the elements in the ground, but from grave robbers.  It is strange how the purpose of inventions change over time.