Contents

The Dark Arts

An Introduction

  We die. We’re embalmed. We’re waked. There’s public notifi- cation. The community comes together for a service, then we’re burned or buried. This is the American funeral.

Our death rituals, like all things American, are unique to the culture, but they share connective tissue with the far corners of the globe dating to antiquity. These often strange rituals, and by extension the men and women plying the dark arts, are almost as mysterious as death itself. Last Rites lifts the curtain and offers a glimpse of why we bury our dead the way we do.

The American funeral rite coalesced in a single moment involving a marble-sized piece of metal.

Ever since the first permanent settlement was established at Jamestown, the American death rite was a simple, austere event, borrowing heavily from English burial traditions. The remains were washed and dressed at home. A local cabinetmaker furnished a custom-made coffin, and the remains were carried by hand and immediately buried in the town’s com- mons or on family land. The family and townsfolk gathered for the repast, and the funeral service was delivered after the burial.

Overnight, the tectonic plates shifted. A seventeen-gram lump of Britannia metal—about the weight of an AAA battery—forever altered the American funeral experience, at least once John Wilkes Booth loaded it into his derringer and fired it into President Lincoln’s head.

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Last Rites

 Lincoln’s death was merely the catalyst for brewing changes coming on the heels of the Civil War’s turmoil. A nation was in intense mourning, grieving its 650,000 dead sons. But there were other, external pressures being put on the old funeral traditions. Population centers were exploding, America was building its infrastructure, and the Industrial Revolution— put into overdrive by the recent war—was luring Americans off their farms and into cities and factories. Americans were more mobile, goods were becoming cheaper and more plentiful, and Americans were outsourcing the care of their sick . . . and their dead.

However, the thing that set America on a unique trajectory, casting off the vestiges of the old ways from across the Atlantic, was embalming. During the war, embalming surgeons had been practicing the new sanitary science of embalming, an archaic anatomical technique imported from Europe, thrust into the spotlight by necessity—for shipment purposes— and legitimized by Lincoln himself. Lincoln ordered the embalming of his good friend and former law clerk Colonel Elmer E. Ellsworth after he was killed during the war, and was so astounded by the results that when his beloved son Willie died of typhoid, he had him embalmed as well. This progression of events made it such that when Lincoln was martyred, it was only natural that Mary Todd Lincoln had him prepared the same way, thus thrusting this obscure wartime technology into the face of a nation.

An astounding 880,000 Americans cast their eyes upon the martyred president, a feat that hasn’t been surpassed in a single untelevised funeral since, thanks to the newly adopted sanitary science of embalming. It was nothing short of a miracle, and it set the stage for the American funeral.

In the next three and a half decades leading up to the end of the cen-tury, the pieces fell into place. Factories started churning out ready-made caskets, replacing the old tradesman undertaker making coffins in his workshop; hearses morphed into specialized vehicles; extravagant floral displays became de rigueur; and the fear of body snatching led to the advent of the burial vault. In a sleepy little town in western Pennsylvania, a man built a personal crematorium. And Americans shifted the care of their sick and dead from the home to institutional settings such as hos- pitals and funeral parlors. From this vacuum stepped the funeral director, a man (almost always a man in those times) versed in all the necessaries needed to properly get someone in the ground.

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 The Dark Arts

  One such man, James White, was a cabinetmaker in rural Milford, Delaware. My great-great-great-grandfather.

I’ve been plying the dark arts my entire professional career, and have found that people tend to view undertakers with suspicion: Who would choose to work in death and misery? Sure there’s grief and sorrow and pain at a funeral. Sometimes a lot. Sometimes enough for a lifetime. But there’s something else if one does it right: closure. Not closure in the sense of “that’s done with and I can move on” but rather in that the in-stinctual need to care for our dead brethren has been fulfilled: the dead are where they need to be. With that closure comes hope—the hope to find the way forward. It’s the same hope found at other rites—baptisms and weddings—but without the accompanying joy.

There’s that old adage about asking a barber if you need a haircut. The same goes for asking the undertaker about needing a funeral. But I hope these pages make clear we’re not here to sell you anything—the rituals surrounding the burial of the dead have been around long before the occupation.

The idea for this book came to me after reading David Oshinsky’s Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America’s Most Storied Hospital. Oshinsky made the story of a hospital—and in the same sense, the men and women who pioneered modern medicine—leap off the page for a layperson. Nothing like that has been done for funeral ser- vice. I find when I’m in mixed company and someone finds out what I do for a living, the questions start, and it’s not because I have anything par- ticularly interesting to say but rather people are honestly curious about the dead and the events and people surrounding them. So, I thought I’d break down the story of the American funeral and answer the questions: Why do we embalm? Why casket and not shroud, or vice versa? Where did the practice of cremation come from? Why is it customary to send flowers to a funeral? The aim is to demystify our death rituals and maybe make funerals a less intimidating experience.

An article from a funeral trade magazine, The Casket, a century and a half ago sums up well the historic underpinnings of the funeral: “The human family have in all ages found it imperatively necessary, if not grat-ifying, to bury or burn their dead, and have naturally sought to rob the unpleasant task of its most disagreeable features. The embalming process of the Egyptians, the cremating practices of the Romans, and the burial customs of other nations all attested to the existence of a sentiment that had reference to the affections and sympathies of the living as well as the character and the future of the dead.”1

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Notes

  THE DARK ARTS: AN INTRODUCTION

1.     Rochester (NY) Herald, as quoted by The Casket 3, no. 5 (May 1876): 6.