LIVED ONCE, TWICE BURIED

I still remember what a thrill it was that first day I was able to string a few words together and read a sentence for the first time. It wasn’t long before many of life’s mysteries began to disappear like a cube of sugar on the tongue. Not only did books shed light, I was also quite taken with mundane things like my mother’s grocery lists. I felt I’d discovered her secret language. Then one day I was asked to produce my birth certificate at school. I removed it from my plaid satchel on the short walk to school and for the first time read:

Father’s Occupation: Undertaker

Didn’t the penny just drop! Reading it in black and white somehow brought to the fore the very lifestyle I had taken for granted. And that our home was only up a staircase from all of this undertaking business, well, it cast an entirely new light on the thing.

Just as I was being to understand it all, as best as a young girl could, my father thrust upon me a meeting with the most eccentric character in our town. She immediately began talking the Edgar Allen Poe talk… you know, favorite stories, memorable characters, nevermore, the dreary dreary and Lenore. The woman all but insisted I read his works. I realize now that it was dreadfully demanding of her, as I was too young to fully grasp Mr. Poe’s writings. However, I rose to the challenge and when I ran across The Premature Burial my little heart skipped a beat.

“The grave was carelessly and loosely filled with an exceedingly porous soil; and thus some air was necessarily admitted. He heard the footsteps of the crowd overhead, and endeavoured to make himself heard in turn. It was the tumult within the grounds of the cemetery, he said, which appeared to waken him from a deep sleep, but no sooner was he awake than he became fully aware of the awful horrors of his position.”

The questions, the worry, the browbeating that ensued! I entreated my father to defend his honour. Had he ever witnessed the kind of terror revealed in this shocking tale? “Of course not! The very idea!” said my father. I was then given a bare bones lesson on the effects of embalming.

He failed to inform me that reports of premature burials date back to the 14^th century. I wondered if he ever learned this gruesome history in mortuary school; he didn’t like to talk about it so I never asked.

In 1661 the story of a butcher from Newgate Market in London was published in a pamphlet called “The Most Lamentable And Deplorable Accident”. Mourners were horrified when they heard a shriek from his tomb, but by the time his rescuers reached him it was too late. It was just one of many stories about premature burial avidly read by the public at the time.

By 1700 paranoia about being buried alive ran rife and in 1790 the security coffin was designed. One type involved a tube that protruded from the coffin. Everyday the parson would stroll through the cemetery and have a sniff down the tube. If he didn’t smell the effects of decomposition after a few days, the grave was exhumed.

Bells and whistles! Bells and whistles! By the 19^th century safety coffins came equipped with bells, whistles, firecrackers, sirens and even rockets.

None were more popular than the Bateson Life Revival Device. A rope wrapped around the deceased’s wrist made for a worry-free burial. One tug on the rope and the iron bell securely mounted in a miniature bell tower onto the lid of the coffin sounded the alarm.

In 1902 Rufina Cambaceres a nineteen-year-old girl of Argentina died while dressing for her wedding.

Although it was an unusual occurrence, three doctors certified that she was indeed deceased. The next day she was buried despite the view of several of her relatives who thought she had only fainted. At their insistence her coffin was opened. They gazed in disbelief upon the tragic result. Rufina whose poor hands and face were marked with injuries had been buried alive. Scratch marks were found on the inside of the coffin.

Her parents, deeply aggrieved and heart-broken, erected a statue at the entrance to her mausoleum in the famous Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires as a warning against premature burial.

Perhaps the most vivid and recorded tale took place in Ireland. In 1705 the resurrectionists got wind of the recent burial of one Margorie McCall in Lurgan, Co Armagh. Margorie had been happily married to a doctor until she fell ill and succumbed to a fever. At her wake many of the mourners tried in vain to remove the valuable wedding ring she wore, but her hand, swollen from illness and death, would not allow it. After the wake she was buried quickly for fear the fever would spread.

The very night of her burial the grave robbers crept into the cemetery with their tools eager to claim the golden ring and steal her body to sell on to local surgeons. Digging through the freshly disturbed earth, they scattered the dirt until they hit the coffin. They removed the lid and their lanterns shone on Margorie and her ringed finger. At first they pulled and tugged at it, but her finger was so swollen they soon knew to continue was futile.

There was nothing left to do but try to hack off her finger because they certainly weren’t going to leave the ring for the surgeons. Just as Margorie’s finger began to draw blood she wakened from her stupor and sat upright, eyes wide open and began to scream bloody murder. It was said that the resurrectionists ran for their lives never to return to the trade again.

Margorie pulled herself up from her grave, walked through the cemetery - a sight of horror one might imagine - and continued home. She knocked on her own door, quickly opened by her husband and there she stood in her burial clothes, dripping with blood and her finger half hanging from her hand. The tale goes that her husband died of shock right on the spot. He was at some point buried in the same plot that his wife had once occupied. Margorie re-married and raised several children. When she did finally die she was buried in the same cemetery where she was first buried alive and where her tombstone reads:

NIGHT VISITORS

Sitting up with the dead

People tell stories in the South of “sitting up with the dead”. These all night family vigils held before funeral parlors first opened their somber doors, and before the practice of embalming changed the face of death, placed the care of the deceased firmly in the hands of the survivors. Families made do in those days.

The coffin was brought to the parlor, or if they couldn’t afford a coffin they might have placed the body on the sofa or the dining room table. Tasks and rituals handed down for generations kept mourners busy and comforted. Often a bowl of water and a cloth set nearby was used to periodically bath the deceased’s face and hands. During hot weather a veil might have been placed over the coffin to protect it from flies. A flyswatter did the trick in lieu of an expensive veil.

Friends made a point of visiting to tell stories of the deceased and to comfort the bereaved.

The body was never left alone at night. Superstitions and fears prevailed. Relatives thought the devil might rush in and take the body away. And if not the devil, the rumours of body snatchers frightened the bejesus out of those who were suffering and thus vulnerable and emotional.

Family members took turns guarding the body, staying awake to be certain that their loved one was well and truly dead. Mistaken deaths were unusual, but not unheard of. Superstitions aside, the family also had real concerns and felt obliged to protect the body from rodents and dangerous burning candles, fireplaces and gas stoves.

Sitting up was such a strong tradition that when my father first opened his funeral home it was not uncommon for a family to request to spend the night. He could hardly refuse, although he was always slightly miffed. After all, what was his purpose if not to protect and serve? When I first became aware of this practice I had a gazillion questions. Where were they going to sleep? They don’t. Where and how would they eat? They brought their own food and ate in our little “hospitality” room. What in the world were they going to do all night? Fight off sleep. Other than that, who knew? Would my mother prepare breakfast for them? No. Once the night passed, they would go home to change clothes, freshen up and prepare for the funeral.

My father said that most of the people who wanted to spend the night at our funeral home had originally been born in the mountains, at least three or four hours away. Their need for ritual pulled and tugged at them; they wouldn’t dream of missing “the sitting up”. My mother thought that in some cases, people from out of town would rather stay with us for free than pay for a night in one of our town’s two hotels.

Most of the time I never saw the night visitors. But I often went to sleep knowing they were roaming around downstairs, floating from room to room, sitting in front of the casket. One night I forgot they were there. I slipped downstairs to get a Coke. When I reached the bottom of the stairs I heard them whispering. It scared me to death! I was wearing my nightgown and felt that sudden horror of being terribly exposed. And I knew if they caught sight of me I’d probably scare them to death. But I was already downstairs and I did want that Coke badly. I thought if I could carefully tiptoe past the chapel, I could then sneak into the room where the Coke machine sat humming away.

They were still speaking in low voices as I went past. I caught a glimpse of a teen-age boy with his long, thin legs stretched out over two of our wooden folding chairs. Three women huddled together. An older man sat straight up in his chair, fast asleep. They’d brought pillows and blankets. These were strewn across the chairs and looked strangely out of place. My father had turned out most of the lights and the night visitors sat in a faint creamy glow. I scurried past them to the room in the back, quickly pulled out a cold bottle and then snuck past them again on my way up the stairs.

The next morning I asked my father if they were still there. “No,” he said. “They left at dawn.”

ye Sign of ye Naked Body & Coffin

From a trade card of a Fleet Street undertaker. 1710

When I walk along London’s streets and pass a funeral director’s shop front, I am compelled to peek through the window. Can’t help it, must be done. Funeral homes in the States are rarely shop fronts, my father’s was set in a rambling old house on a residential street, so I find it fascinating to read the advertising on the windows, to note that an undertaker has set up shop next to a pub, or a newsagent. When I peer through the glass I never see anything very interesting, the interior always looks a bit blah. Most of the time I can’t see anything at all, which I guess is how it should be, but I wonder if they could be just a bit more inviting.

My father or one of his employees would stand at the door and wave to people passing, or open the door and say things like, “Why hello there Bill, how the world are you?” That’s the kind of thing one could do in a small town. Bill always answered with, “Glad to be coming through your front door instead of the back.” Funeral home humour, you gotta love it.

I feel uneasy about the way funeral directors advertise these days. It all seems so transparent. The use of caring words, phrases, and lyrical descriptions intended to give us hope that the process isn’t going to be as bad as we anticipate. Advertising used to be more direct.

When undertaking became a specific trade in the 18^th century the businesses advertised aggressively and vigorously. In Hogarth’s Gin Lane one can just make out a shop sign in the form of a coffin hanging dismally in the air above the undertaker’s premises.

I guess it’s appropriate, if not necessary, for an undertaker to announce his presence to the locals.

And perhaps they can’t be blamed for offering you a complimentary household product that will remind you that they’re always there, lurking in the background.

My father did his share of advertising. I wish I’d had enough sense to keep the pens and pencils, calendars, balloons and fans that sprouted up like weeds around town over the years. I always began the school year with a satchel full of black pencils with the funeral home’s name boldly embossed in gold lettering. I passed them out to everyone and pretended not to see the rolling eyes, tried to forget the snickering.

To my utter surprise a friend of our family actually did keep a couple of things, one of which I didn’t remember at all. Telephone numbers that begin with letters was before my time. It looks like something you might see in an Alfred Hitchcock movie.

Behold the potholder.

IN THEIR OWN WORDS – 19th Century Post Mortem Photographers

“We are prepared to take pictures of a deceased person on one hour’s notice,” 19^th century photographer’s advertisement

My father went through a period of filming his “work” with his 8mm camera. I grew up with the films thinking it a completely normal thing that we owned such an archive. His films of the dead in their caskets were transferred to first videotape and then DVD. My brother and I took on the project, made sure our family had a few images to remind us of our history and what our father did for a living, as if we needed one. The films never left our home and were never shown to anyone but our family. I broke that tradition when I included a few short clips on my website.

I discovered that my father’s little camera was a gentle intrusion compared to the way the photographers of the 19^th century worked to memorialize the dead. While few of us would choose to pass time pouring over photos of our loved ones on their deathbeds, the Victorians welcomed a way to preserve the memory of their deceased, and especially their children at a time of high infant mortality. Their photos were never meant for the public, but were expressly made for family members for their use in their own private albums, or were given to family members and intimate friends who couldn’t travel to the home of the deceased.

The men (I have yet to discover women) behind the scenes whose task it was to photograph the dead were artists, portrait painters and photographers who created daguerreotypes that ranged from the size of a locket, up to larger stereoscopic images.

In many instances it was both the photographer’s and family’s intentions to portray the deceased as simply sleeping. As an element in the quest of a “Good Death” it was the artistic duty of the photographer to stage death as an almost beautiful state. Props, lighting and positioning were used to reveal the essence of the deceased.

What is particularly astonishing is the amount of manipulation that went into setting up the photograph. Several photographers spoke openly about their procedures. In 1843 at the top of a building in Boston, two photographers, Josiah Hawes and Albert Southworth, set up a studio under enormous skylights. Southworth and Hawes produced daguerreotype portraits of many famous people among whom were Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Daniel Webster.

The first two photos below are self portraits of Josiah Hawes. The third is an eerie little self portrait of Albert Southworth.

When they weren’t busy with celebrities, Southworth and Hawes, like many other studios, produced their share of post mortem photography. Southworth describes the process:

“You can bend [the corpse] till the joints are pliable, and make them assume a natural and easy position … you can carefully turn them over just as though they were under operation of an emetic. You can do that in less than one single minute, and every single thing will pass out, and you can wipe the mouth and wash off the face, and handle them just as well as though they were well persons.”

A Southworth post mortem daguerreotype:

Another daguerreotypist Gabriel Harrison describes his work:

“Gently we moved the death couch in the window in order to get the best light, though by a ray. What a face! What a picture did it reveal … The mother held up a white cloth to give me reflected light to subdue the shadows. All was still, I took the cap from the camera. About two minutes had elapsed, when a bright sun ray broke through the clouds, dashed its bright beams upon the reflector, and shedding, as it were, a supernatural light. I was startled—the mother riveted with frightful gaze, for at the same moment we beheld the muscles about the mouth of the child move, and her eyes partially open—a smile played upon her lips, a long gentle sigh heaved her bosom, and as I replaced the cap, her head fell over to one side. The mother screamed.

“She lives! she lives!” and she fell upon her knees by the side of the couch.

“No,” was my reply; “she is dead now, the web of life is broken.”

The camera was doing its work as the cord that bound the gentle being to earth snapped and loosened the spirit for another and better world. If the earth lost a flower, Heaven gained an angel.”

With that in mind, although this is not his daguerreotype, it perfectly depicts the scene.

And finally, in 1877 Charlie E. Orr wrote in the Philadelphia Photographer:

“Place the body in a lounge of sofa, have the friends dress the head and shoulders as near as in life as possible, then politely request them to leave the room to you and your aides, that you may not feel the embarrassment incumbent should they witness some little mishap liable to befall the occasion. If the room be in the northeast or northwest corner of the house, you can almost always have a window at the right and left of a corner. Granting the case to be such, roll the lounge or sofa containing the body as near into the corner as possible, raise it to a sitting position, and bolster firmly, using for a background a drab shawl or some material suited to the position, circumstance, etc. Having posed the model, we will proceed to the lighting, which, with proper care, can be done very nicely.”

* Quotations from Erin Silver’s Concordia Undergraduate Journal of Art History

THE 1984 FUNERAL BIZ PANIC

Mr. Smith, a retired elementary grade six teacher had just passed away peacefully in the comfort of his own home. Mrs. Smith, who’d lived frugally with him for over forty years, had an exact sum of money set aside for their funerals. In the early 1970’s, in a small southern town, Mrs. Smith could give her husband a modest funeral for $395.00. The price of Mr. Smith’s funeral was the price of his coffin, one made of pressed wood covered in grey felt fabric, a first price, if you will.

Mr. Jones, one of the town’s bankers, had also died. His wife wanted the best, the most expensive casket available, a satin-lined copper. The cost of his funeral and the cost of his casket was one in the same, $3,000.00. The only difference in the two funerals was the type of casket and its price. Both prices included everything else, all additional services, including the kitchen sink.

My father had no idea what it actually cost him to provide a funeral. And he wasn’t alone, most funeral directors failed to itemize the services they provided. At that time the funeral business was truly a service business. Funeral directors in our neck of the woods were primarily community do-gooders. My father used to play one-upmanship with his rival to see which of them could offer the largest number of free services! Boy oh boy, funeral directors were lousy business people. All of that changed in 1984, but my father didn’t live long enough to witness the upheaval.

The Funeral Rule was enacted in 1984 under the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. Funeral Rule ensures protection to those consumers who require adequate information concerning the goods and services they may purchase from a funeral provider. Funeral providers are obliged to comply with the Funeral Rule. They also lay down various consumer rights. Funeral Rule states that funeral industry goods and service providers must respect consumer rights.

US Legal, Inc.

For the first time in their lives many funeral directors had to work out what each item on their long list of services actually cost. My father never had a list of services. He sat down with each family and discussed want they wanted and very simply provided those things.

How many undertakers took stock and embarked on the blind leading the blind journey in 1984, I can’t tell you. The list of services most funeral homes provided included embalming, a hairdresser, nights of viewings, the registry book, memorial folders, the actual service, which included costs of the preacher, musician and extra manpower for larger funerals, it goes on. What exactly did one charge for the three or four hours spent in the embalming room? How to price a large funeral differently from a small one? Who knew? Panic.

Undertakers groaned and complained about the task before them to itemize their services, until, while trudging through the dark mire, all was illuminated. They discovered that the funerals at the lowest price weren’t pulling their weight; in fact, my father never recovered his costs from all of those $395 funerals. Gosh, that was silly, agreed those who had oared the same boat of doom.

Suddenly the federal government was the best friend the funeral industry ever had. Funeral directors began charging for every service they performed, rather than just knocking up the price of a casket by a couple or three notches, as they had for most of their careers. They realized that they couldn’t do things like make a mortgage payment or plan to buy a new hearse unless they recovered their costs.

There you have it: The how, when and why the price of a funeral went up and up and up and…

EMPTY COFFINS

I was loitering around the casket showroom on the day of a delivery. It was the coolest room in the house, a respite on muggy summer days when it was too hot to play outside. The casket room was set in the back of the property where the limbs of shade trees grew close to the building. My father rolled tremendous, long boxes into the room via an outdoor ramp that led directly inside to the casket room. But on this day two noticeably smaller boxes appeared. I stood at my father’s side when he opened the first one. In it was by far the smallest coffin I’d ever seen. The pink satin box looked like a toy. I glanced at him, but said nothing as he opened the second one – a blue satin covered baby coffin. I ran my fingers along the outside of the pink one on which puffy tufts and pleats attempted some kind of design detail. He took the lid off. Inside was a tiny pillow. I asked if it was meant for a baby girl and he said yes, it was.

“Did a baby girl die, Daddy?”

“Yes.”

“What’d she die of?”

“She was born dead.”

“Oh.”

He continued to unwrap the clear plastic wrapping from the blue one.

“What’s that? What’s born dead?”

“Well, it means that the baby died before it had a chance to be born, it’s called stillborn.”

“Will her parents leave the casket open?”

“No, they won’t.”

“They don’t want to see her?”

“No.”

“Why? Why don’t they want to see her?”

“It’s just too hard on them. And she’s too small.”

“Did a baby boy die?”

“No.”

“So why do you have that blue one then?”

“Well, sometimes baby boys die, too.”

“Did the baby girl’s parents know when the baby was going to die? You know, a lot of times you know when people are going to die, I hear you say so and then they do.”

“That’s not the same. I don’t know if they knew. It’s not something you ask a parent.”

“Do you know when I’m going to die?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Do you know when you’re going to die?”

“No.”

“Where’s the baby girl, Daddy?”

He glanced over at the door.

“In the embalming room? Is she in there right now?”

He knew where my question was headed.

“We don’t embalm babies.”

I didn’t know that babies died. Until that moment I thought that only old people died.

I moved away from him and the baby coffins so that he couldn’t see me. I felt a cocktail of sickness, fear and sadness, but I wanted him to think that I could handle it. I felt his hand on my shoulder directing me out of the room, away from the boxes for dead people.

“Come on, let’s go get a Coke and some peanuts,” he said as he turned out the light.

He closed the door and left the blue baby casket in wait of its yet unidentified occupant.

THE GHOST OF SEXTON HOUSE

Southerners learn from the time they’re able to scoot across the floor in diapers that most stories they hear with a drawl and a twang are exaggerated, and none more so than a ghost story.

The Maple Grove cemetery sits on what was once the edge of town. Still small and rural, the town nevertheless grew up around the cemetery. Opposite two gas stations, and at one time, an efficient little milk bottling plant, our cemetery was always on display to those traveling in and out of town and life buzzed along just outside its black rod iron gates. On one corner of the graveyard sits Sexton House where most of the caretakers have lived since 1870.

At the turn of the century the caretaker who owned Sexton house lived there with his wife and daughter. One Saturday his daughter was looking forward to attending a dance. She planned to meet her boyfriend who had given her signals that tonight was the night he would propose. Excited beyond containment she rushed to the second floor to dress. She was in the bath, or maybe not. She was naked, or maybe not. One thing everyone agrees upon is the lightening storm. In the South when the air is pregnant with humidity, before the clouds break water, the sky suddenly grows black and lightening flashes, followed by a long pause and then a shrieking crack of thunder. On this Saturday the lightening storm was so vicious the girl’s parents felt it was too dangerous for her to leave the house and refused to let her go.

The girl was bitterly disappointed, angry to the point of madness. She stood at the window, raised her fist and cursed God. Lightening struck her and before she fell dead to the floor, a lightening portrait of her was etched into the window’s glass. Her parents, who’d heard a terrifying clap of thunder, ran upstairs to check on their daughter, only to find her lifeless body sprawled on the floor.

Soon, people reported that the girl’s etching appeared on nights of lightening storms. Others swore that what they saw was the girl herself, railing at the window.

By the 1920’s the house had become a tourist attraction. The owners at that time painted over the window, but still the number of sightings and tourists grew. In a desperate attempt to stop the congestion in front of one of the town’s few traffic lights, the window was boarded up. This did absolutely nothing to dispel the traffic or squelch the dares of young boys to walk through the cemetery at night.

Years later, another caretaker who’d lived in the house for over ten years decided to remove the boarding and began work on stripping the paint. He never finished stripping the window. One day, while standing in his kitchen, he too fell to the floor when he suffered a fatal heart attack.

I grew up playing in the cemetery and sorely wanted to ask the caretaker about the house, but my father wouldn’t let me. “Leave the poor guy alone,” he used to say. When I was older I drove past the house everyday on my way to high school. My car was full of girls, Cokes, cigarettes and Cheese Nabs, all part of a healthy breakfast. Most of the time our minds were far from ghosts, but once and a while, especially on Halloween nights, we looked up at the window and fully expected to see the etching of the girl, almost dared her to show herself. Someone always screamed, “There she is!”