I drafted some of this post about a month ago, but I was not sure I would ever use it. (I do write posts that are never posted.) My wife’s sudden near-fatal health issue brought it back to my mind with a ferocity. I decided to finish it and share it – so here it is…
Back in December, a girlfriend’s father died at 91 essentially of old age, but likely helped along, sadly, by Covid he had caught in early November. We had known him and attended his late December service just before his cremation. She plans to have the ashes of both him and her mother (who died in early 2022, and whose ashes she still has) interred in a Church of England churchyard cemetery here in Devon – in fact, the very same church where her mother had been christened also about 90 years ago.
Why do I reveal that? Just to warn you. This post may cause us to think about stuff we don’t want to think about.
To start, this: Every historian, indeed, anyone passionate about history, should see something of themselves, I suspect, in this quote:
“The appeal of History to us all is in the last analysis poetic. But the poetry of History does not consist of imagination roaming at large, but of imagination pursuing the fact and fastening upon it. That which compels the historian to ‘scorn delights and live laborious days’ is the ardor of his own curiosity to know what really happened long ago in that land of mystery which we call the past. To peer into that magic mirror and see fresh figures there every day is a burning desire that consumes and satisfies him all his life, that carries him each morning, eager as a lover, to the library and muniment room. It haunts him like a passion of almost terrible potency, because it is poetic. The dead were and are not. Their place knows them no more and is ours today. Yet they were once as real as we, and we shall tomorrow be shadows like them. In men’s first astonishment over that unchanging mystery lay the origins of poetry, philosophy, and religion. From it, too, is derived in more modern times this peculiar call of the spirit, the type of intellectual curiosity that we name the historical sense. Unlike most forms of imaginative life it cannot be satisfied save by acts. In the realm of History, the moment we have reason to think that we are being given fiction instead of fact, be the fiction ever so brilliant, our interest collapses like a pricked balloon. To hold our interest you must tell us something we believe to be true about the men who once walked the earth. It is the fact about the past that is poetic; just because it really happened, it gathers round it all the inscrutable mystery of life and death and time. Let the science and research of the historian find the fact, and let his imagination and art make clear its significance.”
– Historian G. M. Trevelyan, Cambridge University, 1927.
I first encountered that quote as an undergrad in a history class some four decades ago. These sentences have probably stuck with me the most: “The dead were and are not. Their place knows them no more and is ours today. Yet they were once as real as we, and we shall tomorrow be shadows like them.”
That thought fundamentally anchors me in being as close as I can identify to forming “my philosophy” as a historian myself and now as an author. I aim to make those I fictionalize in history read as “alive” as we are for now. For as we know none of us will be here forever. It is simply “our turn” to be here.
That quote also came to mind when I saw this recently pop up on Threads from a medical anthropologist:
That “clinical” approach from her does not much appeal to me as a historian. I suspect it would also be unlikely to grab the historian who actually wrote that book on the history of modern graves. Unfortunately that threader does not share the book title with us.
Leaving aside the matter that “one container ship” is statistically essentially insignificant in terms of a continental-sized country such as the United States, one cannot also but sense in that thread an effort to “distance” oneself from death as being something that happens… to others… mostly, you know, old people. Based on her profile pic, that threader appears rather younger than “age 65.” Most importantly, evidently she omits from her “computation” the plain fact that lots of people younger than age 65 also die daily.
Forgetting how existences are often cut short is not an oversight a historian is likely to make. Moreover comments on that post predictably (it being social media) include many of the sorts one would expect. Someone wants to be scattered in Acadia National Park, another considers human burial “a crime” against the environment, another wants to be “composted,” etc., etc.; and you also get a sense that none of them sharing such are actually facing imminent death for themselves.
I don’t mean this to sound ghoulish, but the end of our personal existence is never actually “far” down the road for any of us and is certainly not only something for “the old.” Anyone may die at anytime. Cheery to need to bear in mind, eh?
A decade ago, in February 2014, one of our dearest friends – the first friend of my eventual wife’s I ever go to know back in the late-1990s – died after a long illness. She was only age 45, no children, never married, and her ashes were scattered, according to her Sikh faith, by her parents over the Thames. Since then, her family keeps treasured memories of her, but she has no public “grave.” (Sikhs believe in reincarnation, and that the body merely houses the soul, which upon death is then housed in another body eventually. That is what I was told by her sister and have also read.)
In reading that “detached” thread, this too struck me. In Christian-imbued cultures like ours, until recently it was commonplace after a funeral when possible to bury the full body of the deceased and then mark the grave with a headstone. (Such is done too in Islam and Judaism, of course.) We who knew the deceased might never go back to that grave ever again, but with it we had drawn a line under their life, we felt, respectfully, and immortalized the person in stone (date of birth, death, etc.) for however long the stone remained.
Increasingly, in our “Christian” culture, we are now cremating remains, which that threader above obviously thinks is a good idea at least from an “environmental” standpoint. Having previously opposed it, the Roman Catholic Church, which my family is mostly (we cremated my late mother’s remains according to her wishes in 2015) stopped opposing cremation several decades ago; but to follow Church “teaching” one is not supposed to scatter the deceased’s ashes into the environment (on a mountain, or at their favorite beach, etc.) or, worse, divide them up to “share” among the family. The ashes are supposed to be interred eventually in “consecrated” ground much as if they were a “whole” body. For example, my father has my mother’s ashes and I am tasked with seeing them interred side by side after he dies.1
Our Anglican Devon girlfriend has spoken with the church vicar, and her parents’ cremated remains will get “graves.” However, it seems all too regularly that ashes are now “stored” indefinitely or otherwise oddly treated by survivors/families. I can think of, right now, about half-a-dozen other people I have known who have died since the early 2000s, who, post-funeral-service, had been taken to someone’s home and, often many years later, remain on a shelf or in a cupboard… awaiting “eventual” interrment. That strikes me as lazy and greatly disrespectful of those who have entrusted us with their earthly remains – especially if they had made clear their wishes and nothing has (yet) happened to make that last wish a reality.
It is one thing to scatter ashes, or even to take them home and then maintain, perhaps, some sort of “shrine” remembering the deceased. However, it is quite another simply to “forget” about the dead person, and to treat their ashes as some “afterthought” left on a shelf needing to be dealt with eventually… whenever we “find” the time to do so.
Another factor strikes me as vital as a historian: memory. For example, this author came to my mind:
Flora Thompson, who wrote most famously a semi-autobiographical novel series eventually entitled Lark Rise to Candleford, which was adapted for television by the BBC, is buried since her 1947 death in a cemetery that is walking distance from our now house (which was not standing in 1947) here in Dartmouth, Devon. I have her best-known books. I have not visited her grave, but I do know where she “is.”
That grave marks her life – start to finish. She plainly lived. And there her remains are.
On an author I knew very well when he actually lived. I could not go to my uncle’s 2015 memorial service because my mother was on her own deathbed and I could not really leave her for what would have required at least an overnight stay and maybe two. (And she did die exactly two weeks to the day after he did.) He professed by his death essentially to be an atheist and did not want a Christian service. I don’t know if he wished this or not, and he likely didn’t care anyway: his ashes were “divided” between his children and (second) wife. No grave anywhere.
Thinking of his, and of others’ ashes uninterred, to end up who knows where eventually, compared with, say, Flora Thompson’s grave, led me here: If we stop burying our deceased, and in particular if we do nothing to commemorate their lives in “stone,” did they really even ever live? After all, one can go to Flora’s Thompson’s grave and will be able to for a long time to come. In contrast, my uncle, having no grave or memorial anywhere, will, essentially, eventually simply vanish from “history”… unlike, say, this woman:
I know I am not alone in doing this as an author. Occasionally, I have walked through graveyards looking for “period” names for my own novels. I always recall that gravestones respect the memory that someone once lived.
We all know that our “Christian” societies are generally not nearly as aligned to observing Christian forms as was once the case. Some assert that is liberating, and in some ways doubtless it is. Yet we also tend to forget such observances were primarily rooted in concerns about death, which until only recently was a far more common occurrence in most people’s daily lives than in ours, especially regarding children.2
Our modern medicine especially since “1950” has largely “pushed” death as a concern aside for most in the U.S. and Europe for what they presume always to be the “foreseeable” future. For major evidence of that, just consider many’s odd reactions to Covid. That 2019 newly-emerged virus for which there was initially no vaccination/cure clearly jolted the complacent outlooks of untold millions who had become sure of the “certainty” of their health largely because of the success of modern medicine and vaccinations, which they had then forgotten to credit for being the major means for such previous “certainty.”
That “mental disconnect” seems how “conspiracy” theories about that virus have been able to take “root” in the minds of too many, including that it was not really that “bad” or even simply did not “exist.” Surely with our modern medicines, we could no longer have “plagues”? They were for “the olden days”? They are not for *us*?
A consequence of that complacency is a strange twist in thinking (if one can call it that) has also since emerged (and obviously been fostered) in some. The pandemic having been fought off thanks to new vaccines should have led to more confidence in the benefits of vaccination, yet a dangerously large number of people reacted entirely the opposite way. Having been so mentally shaken by the pandemic, they lost a great deal of trust in modern medicine overall (the appeal of quackery seems far more “mainstream” now than before 2020) and particularly in preventative vaccinations that had been so successful in reducing mortality since the 1950s. That mistrust has led, for example, to far more parents rejecting seeing to their kids’ vaccinations for measles and other preventable and often quite dangerous illnesses that their parents and grandparents had seen to for them when they were growing up – which is causing numbers of kids in recent years to develop those same terrible illnesses that had been, essentially, wiped out prior to 2020.
Ironic as well regarding such so-called “anti-vaxxers” is that many of them in the U.S. seem the same often staunchly “right wing” people who much admire the legacy of the likes of the author of the Declaration of Independence, and 3rd President, Thomas Jefferson. In that many are clearly woefully ignorant of the fact that Jefferson was a strong supporter of scientific research (he was definitely not a fan of “unquestioning” religion and clergy) and, in terms of medicine, vaccination to prevent smallpox in particular – the first major modern medical breakthrough in preventing a horrific illness that often led to disfigurement and even death for its victims. In 1806, when president, Jefferson wrote to the English physician, Edward Jenner, who had come up with its world-changing vaccine preventative:
Given that wrongheaded mistrust and its related fall off in vaccination rates in the U.S. especially for childhood illnesses that we are seeing, most ironically some young parents are now encountering more childhood illnesses and even deaths than their own parents and even grandparents had faced in their youthful parenthoods. In a tragic sense, because it is just so unnecessary, we have gone basically backwards in the last few years. History is, alas, sadly not always about “progress.”
We have all also seen by now how many type “Happy Birthday in Heaven,” or some such, and maybe put up an emoji or two, on a dead person’s otherwise untouched Facebook or Instagram page. Beyond that, so many clearly don’t want to think more about death.3 Not properly interring a deceased’s remains according to long-standing religious forms our ancestors followed without question – as if in not doing that we are somehow maybe avoiding confronting the reality the dead are dead – seems, perhaps, one way some now try to “sideline” death’s inevitability.
In other words, just put the urn on the shelf next to the television. We’ll get the ashes into the ground eventually; or we’ll just scatter them somewhere when no one is looking. For now, what’s on Netflix?
NOTES
- The ashes are, it is taught, essentially still the body, and are supposed to be properly interred in “consecrated” ground, as in burial, in a cemetery or similar, to await “Resurrection” upon Christ’s “return.” I am not debating Christianity here, only noting that is the historical reason for Christian burial. “Consecrated” ground apparently, now, we have recently also learned, apparently may also stretch to include the edge of a golf course, which seems to me yet another disturbing example of why so many mistrust the Roman Catholic Church as an institution. ↩︎
- The number of under age “18” headstones one sees in “pre-1950s” graveyards, if one actually looks, leads one, honestly, to be taken aback. Aside from greatly improved general life sanitary conditions, such as safe drinking water, childhood mortality rates in the U.S. and Europe began to fall off dramatically around the time childhood-diseases’ vaccinations began to become available and commonplace. Those vaccinations – for everything from measles, to polio, to whooping cough – saved the lives of untold numbers of kids who would have in previous generations died. Indeed, statistically speaking most of us today would probably not be here at all if our parents and grandparents had been so-called (idiotically) “unvaxed.” ↩︎
- In fact, that is becoming a whole new issue. Facebook began years ago setting up processes to deal with deceased people’s accounts. The platform itself will in the near future have more dead “users” than live ones and it will itself become, in a sense, a massive “virtual graveyard.” ↩︎
R. J. Nello 
what a way to start the day. Strangely enough , I woke up thinking of your grandmother.
The ancestors are in our minds.
Give my best to the Mrs.
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