Caitlin Doughty's Blog, page 15
March 26, 2019
Inventing Farewell: Poetry as a Mortuary Practice
Poetry, too, is a mortuary practice. Elegy—poetry written to, for, and about the dead—offers consolation because it is an act of tending to a dead person, a gesture of intimate care-taking. Elegy offers language itself to the dead as both tribute and shelter, a symbolic burial ground to hold a person’s name and story, if not a body. In elegy, grief is measured into lines and transmuted into images, a way to make mourning less quiet and lonely.
I taught a course last semester, at Brandeis University, on elegy and contemporary death practices. This humanities practicum was entitled “Inventing Farewell” because every modern generation must re-invent its relations to the dead. It was a pedagogical experiment. The students in this workshop read contemporary poems to discover what they have to offer a modern world searching for meaningful ways to hold vigil, bear witness, care for corpses, and create zones of felt contact between the living and dead. I taught the course out of an emphatic belief, with a polemical edge: that poetry of mourning is a powerful, if neglected, resource for asserting agency in the face of death today.
Immersed in this writing, students were challenged to think of imaginative solutions to real problems. They designed a necropolis or memorial park, brainstormed commemoration practices that could gather the bereaved, proposed neighborhood historical exhibits, wrote their own poetry, created maps of funerary spaces. By the end of the semester, students had portfolios of original work involving the mortuary imagination. Students came to realize that we need not be passive in the terrible challenge of another’s dying.
By Gregory Halili
These students were brave. The assignments were weird. One of the first:
Assignment: develop a draft proposal for a burial ground, city of the dead, or related mortuary or memorial site. Your proposal should be for a distinctive, uncommon place to remember dead people or to be in the presence of their remains. This might be a sort of cemetery, graveyard, necropolis, crematorium, laying-out (corpse preparation) facility, or otherwise. Your goal is to imagine a combination of landscape, architecture, handcraft, technology, visual art, or other resources to invent a city of the dead or memorial space that dynamically engages the worlds of the living. In other words, this city of the dead should refuse their obsolescence or social death, and could be directly connected to other sorts of useful places and institutions.
As you develop your proposal, work through several questions: how does your design affect one’s experience of time and space? What do people do here, how does movement flow here? Is there some stance toward mortality, memory, or history communicated by your design? Is there some aspiration for the future embedded here, or some other commitment? What about the place creates a persuasive sense of value for past lives?
Your draft proposal can take any of several forms: a formal proposal, with detailed descriptions of your design elements; a visual art project, with brief commentary; a narrative, fictional or non-fictional; an essay or piece of creative non-fiction; or another form that will allow you to develop your idea for this place. Due in class.
One of my inspirations for this assignment was Italo Calvino’s novel Imaginary Cities, in which he describes, among so many astonishing hallucinations, the city of Eusapia, in which “the inhabitants have constructed an identical copy of their city, underground. All corpses, dried in such a way that the skeleton remains sheathed in yellow skin, are carried down there, to continue their former activities.” Only a select few from Eusapia can descend into city of the dead. They observe the changes there and return with news of the ancestors.
I take the idea of the mortuary imagination seriously. Death is a sphere, not only of debilitation, but of deep creativity, where emotional courage meets aesthetic invention. As members of the The Order know, mortuary practices are a lightning rod for tensions between tradition and innovation, cultural legacy and cultural renewal. Death positive groups recognize how vital young people are for working through this tension and re-creating symbolic practices around death. Classrooms should be an important space for engaging these tensions and possibilities.
Poets offer emotional and practical ways forward; they help us see into obscure situations and name aspects of loss. Someone dies in an armchair, book in hand, it is as if “a snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room.” As she dies, we’ve arrived at “a time between times, a flowerless funeral” (Mark Strand, “A Piece of the Storm”).
In Elegy for a Broken Machine, Patrick Phillips seeks an image for his father’s corpse before professionals arrive to remove it.
Soon the undertaker’s sons
will come and lift this
strangest of all strange things:
a palimpsest
of what we loved,
a nest in the brittle leaves
(“The Body”)
Patrick Morris, from his series “In Lieu of Flowers”
Elizabeth Alexander, in Crave Radiance, looking clear-eyed at her mother, gives us to see “the miraculous dying body, / its greens and purples…. even as it falls apart, the body / that can no longer make fever / but nonetheless burns // florid and bright and magnificent / as it dims” (“Autumn Passage”).
Elegies help us speak to the dead, to hold them in our language communities. In rhetorical terms, apostrophe is the figure for directly addressing an absent person or inanimate object. Discussing apostrophic elegies, my students observed that many writers use these poems to tell dead people the story of their own last moments and funerals. These are a sort of explanation of what is beyond explaining, a way of creating continuity in rupture. From Joy Harjo’s “Death Is a Woman,” to her father:
I walk these night hours between the dead and the living, and see you
two-step with Death as if nothing ever ended.
We buried you in Okmulgee, on a day when leaves already buried
the earth in scarlet and crisp ochre.
Kevin Young begins “Exit Music,” also to his father, with the harsh cityscape they still ambiguously share:
In Baton Rouge bridges
end in midair, arms reaching
for the other shore
The lights & reek
of the cracker factory, refineries
seeping into the dark
I drive Cancer Alley
to the highwayside
where you will be buried
Diminish and Ascend, by sculptor David McCracken
Poets offer compelling forms for speaking to the dead. Doing so is rife with emotional risks; such an address requires bravery and care. In another assignment in “Inventing Farewell,” students are challenged to play on this serious ground:
Assignment: in a paragraph or two, propose a materially rich medium, place, or action for directly addressing the dead, in a ritual or lyrical act. This invention of apostrophe can include architectural or technological design, a particular landscape, exposure to the wilderness, or basic elements such as wind, earth, water, fire. Your idea can include impossible or fantastical features, if you approach this as an imaginary exercise or hypothetical invention. You can think of this proposal as helping us imagine a zone of felt contact between the living and the dead. Due in class.
Reader, what would you design?
When I consider my own response to this assignment, I find only a jumble of images: railroad tracks, water pump, hourglass, footbridge over a river, ink on birch bark…. How do these come together? What is their posthumous logic? I may have some otherworldly courier service in mind, but I don’t know yet.
The history of elegy is an immense mortuary workshop. A storehouse of vivid images, existential equipment. The poets of the dead offer a usable eloquence for those learning the new languages of farewell.
David Sherman is faculty in Brandeis University’s English Department. His first book, In a Strange Room, is about cultural responses to the modernization of death practices around the turn of the twentieth century. He is now finishing a far less academic book, Inventing Farewell, about contemporary artists, activists, and writers trying to create new cultural spaces for dead people. He lives in Cambridge, MA, near lots of old burial grounds and old libraries, often confusing the two.
If you enjoyed this piece, please consider supporting our work. Your contribution goes directly toward running The Order, including resources, research, paying our writers and staff, creating videos, podcasts, events and funding more frequent content. We’d love to keep pushing the funerary envelope in 2019. Visit our Support Us page, for a variety of easy ways to contribute, or become a patron on Patreon for exclusive content and rewards.
March 24, 2019
March 19, 2019
Colonial New York’s Door-to-Door Messenger of Death
Residents of colonial New York knew they were in for bad news when the aansprekerappeared at the door. Dressed all in black, from his dark knee-breeches and long cloak to a three-cornered hat adorned with black crepe streamers, he carried one message: someone was dead.
The aansprekerwas a tradition brought to the 17th-century Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam from Holland. Aansprekermeans speaker in Dutch, and what the appointed figure spoke was death. Before printed obituaries, or today’s digital options, the announcement of a person’s departure was often the job of a specific person. In ancient Rome, a town crier might share this somber news among other public business, while in England, a funeral bidder would often go to home-to-home, offering a sprig of rosemary as a form of invitation.
Before his arrival in New Amsterdam, the Dutch aanspreker was sometimes accompanied by the huilebalk, or weeper, a figure who dramatically cried at the completion of each delivered message (and supposedly flowed more tears when well-tipped). Yet while the aanspreker survived into 20th-century Holland, the huilebalk did not.Blair Jaekelwrote in the 1912 travel book Windmills and Wooden Shoes that the huilbalk had “wept himself out of existence, probably on account of a simple dearth of apprentices.”
In the colonial iteration, the aanspreker worked alone. In the 1896 Colonial Days in Old New York, historian Alice Morse Earle described what unfolded immediately following a death. After a slow tolling of the church bell, the aansprekerwould set out into the streets, knocking on doors and informing relatives and friends of the time and place of the funeral. This “inviting was a matter of most rigid etiquette; no one in these Dutch-American communities of slightest dignity or regard for social proprieties would attend a funeral unbidden,” writes Earle.
Because it was unheard of show up to a Dutch New York funeral without invitation, the aansprekerwas important. How did he impart this sober information? Anyone who has come across a social media post sharing a person’s death alongside the noise of memes and status updates knows how jarring it can be when not given the appropriate sensitivity. In his 1905 A Wanderer in Holland, English writer Edward Verrall Lucasrelates how a woman from Hilversumformally received this jarring aansprekermissive: “”Please ma’am, the baker’s compliments, and he’s dead.”
Lucas, being a famed humorist for such publications as Punch, may have been being a bit satirical. Nevertheless, the aanspreker’s job was a heavy one, and some were more skilled at it than others. So how did one become an aanspreker? Within the small population of New Amsterdam, the appointed funeral-inviter was often also the gravedigger, bellringer, schoolmaster, and chorister. (And by recorded accounts, always a man.) We can get an idea of the breadth of this person’s responsibilities from one aanspreker who fell short. In the 2004 New Netherland: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America, historian Jaap Jacobs includes an 1661 admonition by the burgemeesters, or mayors, of Claes van Elslandt, who was told he should not only take better care of the graves in the churchyard, but also to: look after the bier being fetched and brought back to the proper place; to invite according to old custom everybody to the funeral to announce the death, to walk steadily before the corpse, and to collect, demand, and receive pay only for his service, without demanding and requesting more money on this account.
As of 1691 they were public officers licensed by the mayor, with a man named Conradus Vanderbeck, according to city records, being “appointed and confirmed in the place of inviter to the buyriall [sic] of deceased persons.” Fees could vary due to distance traveled, with the inviter of Flatbush (in today’s Brooklyn) receiving 12 guilders for invitations to the funeral of an adult, and an additional four if he went to New York (today’s Manhattan), not great pay for a long row across the East River. The especially wealthy dead might demand a whole troop of funeral inviters. Harriet Phillips Eaton writes in the 1899 Jersey City and Its Historic Sites that for the elite “there were often ten or even twenty Aansprekers employed to announced the death, and one, usually an old servant of the family, went in the middle of the street, walking slowly with bowed head and face buried in a large mourning handkerchief and led by two aansprekers.”
Later, in 1731, a law passed in New York mandated that these “inviters to funerals” receive 18 shillings for announcing the death of someone over 20 years old, 12 for those between 12 and 20, and 8 for children under 12 years old. (Perhaps the lower charges were an effort not to further burden a grieving family.)
Dutch New Yorkers took the rituals of dying and death very seriously. Before there was a doctor or clergyman in what would become Manhattan, there was a kranck-besoecker, or consoler, who attended to the dying. Friends and family were expected to watch over a person before and after their passing, a solemn task that helped with ample drink and food. Rooms were draped in black; mirrors turned to face the walls. Special foods like doed-koecks, or dead cakes, were made, and either consumed or kept as mementoes.
The aansprekerwas just one part of these elaborate rituals, which encouraged every person in the community of the deceased to pause and mark their passing. It may all see complicated and overly formal now, but in the 17th century these traditions, transported over the Atlantic Ocean to this new home, linked people together, and kept them connected to the place they’d left behind. After the English takeover of New Amsterdam in the late 1600s, these traditions began to fade, as the Dutch Reformed Church was overtaken by the Anglicans, and English eclipsed Dutch. The first Dutch cemetery, located on the west side of Broadway in today’s Lower Manhattan, is gone without a trace, with colossal office towers looming in its place.
In Holland, the aansprekerendured in the early 1900s, still stalking the streets with his dark attire and grim tidings, until he, too, eventually became obsolete. Print obituaries became standard, followed by their digital equivalent. Yet no matter who is tasked with this work, the announcement of death remains sensitive. Whether social media, a phone call, or an email, we’ve all become the modern aansprekers, attempting to soften some hard news in these messages, and create a moment of connection for that person’s memory.
Allison C. Meier is a Brooklyn-based writer focused on history and visual culture. Previously, she was a staff writer at Hyperallergic and senior editor at Atlas Obscura. She moonlights as a cemetery tour guide.
If you enjoyed this piece, please consider supporting our work. Your contribution goes directly toward running The Order, including resources, research, paying our writers and staff, creating videos, podcasts, events and funding more frequent content. We’d love to keep pushing the funerary envelope in 2019. Visit our Support Us page, for a variety of easy ways to contribute, or become a patron on Patreon for exclusive content and rewards.
March 4, 2019
February 27, 2019
Reckoning With Our History at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened on April 26, 2018, in Montgomery, Alabama, and is America’s first memorial honoring the “legacy of enslaved black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence.”[1] The monument directly represents the murders of over 4,400 people who were targeted by racial terror lynchings. The memorial was developed by the national non-profit, Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), who has been a pivotal leader in developing research and language surrounding the history of violence against Black Americans. While the memorial itself is innovative in many ways, the drive to involve communities directly in reconciliation is a driving force through the Monument Placement Initiative program.
EJI’s dedication to updating the way this violence is talked about is exemplified by their use of “racial terror lynching”, instead of simply identifying “lynching” as a singular act. By including the descriptors of “racial”, it draws attention to the key identifier that drove the violence: race. The inclusion the word “terror” speaks to lynching as not only a singular event of terrorism, but brings forward the larger idea that “terror” was an environment that was inescapable for the Black community.
The memorial is located on a hill, overlooking the city of Montgomery. A visitor enters the memorial by following a winding path that is guided by sculptures and historical writings, situating the history of racial terror lynchings within the context of enslavement, the Transatlantic slave trade, and the Great Migration. This path leads directly to a large, built structure that is peppered consistently with pillar-like rusted steel, rectangular boxes. They are equal in size and the shape of a simple coffin.
The space itself is square, and guided by four open-air corridors, with a “Memorial Square”, located in the middle and unroofed to the natural environment. This first section of the space does not have walls, and the columns rest on the floor, practically at eye level, inviting the viewer to walk up to them and view all of the information clearly. The breeze from outside blows between the columns as one walks through them. Each metal box includes the same information: the county and state at the top, and then a list of the names of those that had been murdered, and the date of their death. Some names are listed as “unknown.” The memorial is made of 805 of these rusted boxes.
As you turn right to head into the second section of the space, the floor becomes a ramp that slants downward, but the rectangular boxes maintain their same height. As you walk down the ramp, the county monuments come off of the ground. The information on them becomes harder to read as you follow the path down, simulating the way in which space from the details of these horrors allows us to forget the names of those that were killed. By the end of the ramp, the columns are hanging above from a mounted steel pole. The third and fourth sections of the square is enclosed and underground, with the columns hanging overhead. In this area, the bottom of the columns are marked with the name of the county. This space is activated by two components: lists of supposed reasons why people were lynched, and a memorial space beneath the floating pillars. Stairs lead the visitor outside from this section.
“Raise Up” at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Photo by Brynn Anderson.
Heading out of the main building, there are stacks of duplicated metal columns: the twin of the each column lays solemnly outdoors, extending the memorial space further. The stacks of these metal boxes, now displayed horizontally like stacks of coffins, take a different shape. They are stacked separately by state. EJI asks that these 805 counties step up and be accountable for this troubling history in their locale by taking the column of their county and displaying it, as part of their Monument Placement Initiative. As EJI prominently states, “Public commemoration plays a significant role in prompting community-wide reconciliation.”[2]When a county makes room, both geographically and conceptually for this monument, it is a first step towards healing historical wounds.
The memorial will begin distributing the columns to counties in 2019, and some counties have already begun to make plans to receive, display, and honor theirs. The process begins with a formal request of interest from a diverse community group of over five members, who may or may not be affiliated with a local non-profit. In preparation for receiving the memorial in 2019 and beyond, EJI suggests their Community Remembrance Project as a place to get started. This project asks that communities work to place a historical marker and do a soil collection of the location of the lynching. As of this writing, eight counties have placed historical markers, five of which are in Alabama. Austin, Texas, is the largest city included in that list. Montgomery County in Alabama is already in the works of accepting and preparing to place their monument, leading as an example for other counties that are grappling with their own troubling histories. While the location has not yet been confirmed, there is a request for a very visible, public space to showcase the steel box.
Other counties are working together to lay the foundation necessary to accept their county column after the process begins. Albemarle County in Virginia is making room for those conversations in light of the recent violence in the city of Charlottesville. In March 2018, even before the memorial opened, Charlottesville began work on a partnership with EJI to appropriately memorialize their history in the murder of John Henry James, who was lynched on July 12, 1898 for allegedly assaulting a white woman. Charlottesville hosted a community discussion, and even put forth a resolution that July 12, 2018 be “John Henry James Day” in his honor.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice was created to be a dynamic response to reconciliation in the United States. This memorial allows for dialogue instead of creating a static response to historical trauma. There are few, if any, memorials that work to engage communities in the contemporary moment, as a way of healing from past violence. Creating a space for conversation regarding the violence done to Black Americans is a vital way to reckon with our past, present, and future. By memorializing the trauma of racial terror lynching at the national and local county level, communities can begin to explore what it means to be accountable in healing the pain that has been caused by this horrific part of American history.
[1]https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/mem...
[2]https://eji.org/national-lynching-mem...
Kelly Christian is a Chicago-based researcher, artist and staff writer for Dilettante Army Her most recent work explores postmortem and funerary photography. Kelly photographed military funerals in Maine during the height of the Iraq War and created her own new media-Daguerreotypes. She has presented her work at conferences and galleries across the country on postmortem photography, embalming, and “corpse-as-culture.”
If you enjoyed this piece, please consider supporting our work. Your contribution goes directly toward running The Order, including resources, research, paying our writers and staff, creating videos, podcasts, events and funding more frequent content. We’d love to keep pushing the funerary envelope in 2019. Visit our Support Us page, for a variety of easy ways to contribute, or become a patron on Patreon for exclusive content and rewards.
Reckoning With Our History at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice
February 21, 2019
February 12, 2019
Creating The Reclamation
The Beginning
I started compulsively studying decomposition because I was a death-phobic 20-year old who’d recently lost my religion. I had also just experienced the unexpected death of my cat, which triggered an equally unexpected existential crisis. I was desperate to find a way to understand and respect, if not accept, my impermanence.
It was early one morning, after many months of death research that I had a vision of a decomposing woman with golden maggots pouring from her mouth, and envisioned a series that honored the process of decomposition and all the ways that nature reclaims us.
The result became The Reclamation; a series of seven (the biblical number of completion). Each figure is a personification of a phase of decay, and the series together is akin to a decomposition mythology. Over the course of 2.5 years, I was fortunate to be supported by a team of Kickstarter backers, collaborators, friends, family and followers. Now, almost three years later, The Reclamation is here, but not without both obstacles and rewards.
Rewards and Sacrifices
It began when I approached my husband, Daniel, and said, “I want to spend a lot of time making art about decomposing human bodies… but don’t worry – it will be pretty, not gross.” It was a surprisingly easy sell given Daniel’s understanding of creative compulsion.
I was keenly aware that The Reclamationwas an ambitious project, and that I’d need a lot of support, time, funds and help. So, we sat together as partners and created a plan to make it happen. During the lifetime of the project, that included everything from me working less at my day job, to Daniel kindly listening to me wax poetic about my forensic science research, and at times, relinquishing large portions of our house in the name of Art. But we didn’t have the resources on our own to bring the project to fruition.
Looking at the basic material costs of bringing The Reclamationto life, I realized I’d need about $2000 – about double the amount I would be able to save. With the prompting of a friend, I decided to Kickstart the project. It was intimidating. I had less than 200 Instagram followers at the time, and most people I talked to didn’t really understand why I would want to do a project about decomposition.
Despite immense gratitude to my eleven backers, I’m not sure that I would crowdfund again. It’s a massive responsibility to try to do justice to the faith of others, and my anxious brain being what it is, feeling responsible to backers brought the benefit of accountability, but also the burden of guilt to the project. Due to unforeseen life changes, as well as the common challenges of projects, The Reclamation ended up taking three times as long to complete and about twice as much funding as I’d originally anticipated. It is also important to note that Daniel and I live debt-free. The Reclamation and my businesses have been built in the black. This is an important value for us, but it also means that my ability to progress has always been determined by funds.
AJ Hawkins wearing her “It’s OK To Decay” shirt.
Creative Funding
During this process I began creating shirts and other death positive merchandise, in part to generate further funding of The Reclamation. The structure of this new store allowed me to earn funds in a way that was more suited to my nature than crowdfunding, however, learning how to run a business took a lot of time away from the project.
The surprise success of my “It’s Okay To Decay” design meant that I ended up raising two creative brainchildren at once. The juggle, and at times struggle, was real but the community that grew around The Reclamation and my business was humbling, fortifying and inspiring.
As I write this, and look back on the nearly three years since I first conjured up The Reclamation, that word ‘community’ stands out. During this time I met and assembled a team of five inspiring and beautiful women who brought their own stories and spirit to each painting as we shot reference imagery in my tiny basement studio. I bribed coworkers with cookies to help me cut my frames and panels on the CNC machine, and my husband continued to support me by assisting me with my math and carpentry. Hundreds of people purchased shirts and stickers and art from my store that helped fund purchases of paint and brushes and so. much. glue.
When I began work on The Reclamation, I had never heard of death positivity. Now, as it draws to a close with a gallery show at Ghost Gallery in Seattle in March, I am working part-time as an artist and run own my own death positive, eco-conscious business, KALMA, which launched on January 1st. The Reclamation has even inspired a line of vegan eye shadows called The Decomposition Collection, a collaboration I worked on with Detrivore Cosmetics.
Community and Finding Your Calling
At the beginning of this process I wouldn’t have thought myself capable of these achievements, but I’m grateful to have been surrounded by people who did and do.
Reaching these goals has taken an average of 30-40 unpaid hours of work a week for three years; which can be exhausting and discouraging even when you’re doing what you love. When you embark on these passion projects and adventures of ambition, know that it will be hard, it will require grit and sacrifice, and that you’ll need people to support and center you along the way.
In those moments when I’m worn out or discouraged, it’s the sense of purpose that death positivity brings me that carries me forward. If I were still a Christian, I might call death positivity my ‘ministry’ – an outlet that encourages me to pursue knowledge, cultivate discipline, serve others, and use my gifts to reduce net suffering in this world.
Like many others, I initially thought I would do that by becoming a mortician, but that wasn’t to be my path. I couldn’t have planned to be a ‘death positive artist’ but I find myself here by identifying my unique gifts, following my curiosity, and learning to work for myself.
My best work has always come from within me. The Reclamation was one of the first things I ever did solely for myself and by tapping into these personal struggles, something more fundamentally and relatably human came out. When I made the ‘It’s Okay To Decay’ design, I created it as the ‘death positive t-shirt I always wanted but didn’t yet exist’ and it’s a best seller. When I tried to force myself to make more and more designs, people didn’t connect with them – as they were born of pressure and not inspiration. What is it you wish you understood, or existed in this world, or what service do you wish you’d had in your moment of struggle? Work on bringing those things to fruition and that is where you will find your path.
As we all look for our place in this growing death positive movement, we must be sensitive to the places where we begin to steal one another’s sunshine. Consider whether your death positive business idea is unique or unseen in your area, or whether you can be one of the equally important and necessary people who throws the whole of their effort behind someone else’s related business or activism. Look for the ways you can weave death positivity into your current life; we don’t just need death positive podcasters and morticians (which we do!) but we also need death positive doctors, and school teachers, and lawyers, and landscapers, and friendly strangers at the coffee shop.
Ultimately, being death positive has nothing to do with your day job, and everything to do with being one more person who’s ready to help, hold space and honor one another as we face the hardest parts of being human, together.
Introducing: The Reclamation
PHASE I: Death
So you’re dead, and let’s say you’re lucky enough to have a Good Death – what happens to what used to be you?
Well, once your heart stops, pallor mortis, or paleness, begins to set in. Your blood slowly succumbs to gravity, drawn towards the lowest portions of your body and away from the surface where it used to give a lively blush. Within 15-20 minutes your body begins to cool in a process called algor mortis. Your eyes lose their charming ‘spark’ and are now vacant and glassy.
In my piece ‘Death,’ golden poppies surround the pallid figure; poppies are a traditional offering to the dead in Greco-Roman mythology.
PHASE II: Livor & Rigor
The figure on the left represents livor mortis, (also called blood pooling, lividity or hypostasis). This begins around 15-30 minutes postmortem, but is not clearly observable until 2 hours after death when your body begins to take on a marbled appearance. Soon the highest areas of your body will be pale, while the lowest areas become a deep purple.
The figure on the right represents rigor mortis, which begins around 4 hours postmortem and peaks around 13 hours postmortem. The lack of oxygen in your body causes a chemical reaction that contracts the muscles. This process lasts for around 2-3 days.
In ‘Livor & Rigor,’ the “Mortis Sisters,” as I’ve nicknamed them, are covered in iridescent blowflies looking for a good site to lay their eggs. Depending on conditions of your body and environment you died in, blowflies can arrive and lay eggs on you as soon as the first 24 hours postmortem.
PHASE III: Putrefaction
Chemical changes in the body cause your cell walls to weaken, releasing enzymes and triggering the beginning of autolysis (you digest yourself!) Your body’s existing microflora proliferate, consuming your carbohydrates, lipids and proteins. The microflora takeover marks the beginning of putrefaction. Externally, this causes your body to discolor even further.
Blowflies and flesh flies continue to lay eggs, as the very first eggs laid begin to hatch and feed on your soft tissues. One of my favorite things I learned during my research was how observing larval populations can help forensics teams estimate time of death!
PHASE IV: Bloat
Your microflora produce gases which build up inside of your body. As your tissues swell, the abdomen distends and the pressure causes fluids to leak from … orifices.
Red blood cells leak into your decomposing body, where they are transformed into sulph-haemoglobin and give your skin a distinctive green color.
Maggots thrive on your body, growing in size and number as they feed. The masses of maggots constantly churn as each maggot seeks the center for food and then the outside for cool air. If they don’t reach the surface, the combined heat of their bodies will cook the central maggots to death.
A source of inspiration for this piece was Lara Jensen’s avant garde jewelry collection ‘Vanitas’. Her work plays with both the grotesque and decadent in a way I find very admirable.
PHASE V: Purge
The pressure inside your body reaches it’s breaking point, forcing your abdomen to burst open and purge your liquified insides. Like a deflated ballon that’s gone all wrinkly, your skin is too loose and begins to slip off in sheets.
Once your body has purged, it can make the soil so nutrient-rich that it kills the surrounding plant life – a particularly macabre version of “killing with kindness.” This area of plant death is called a cadaver decomposition island.
Your soft tissues nourish maggots and beetles, as other spiders and insects arrive to consume the larvae.
Fun Fact: I spent about six months trying dozens of different specialty nail polishes, powders and paints to get the perfect green/gold duo chrome finish on my dermestid beetles. The winning color is Chameleon by Revlon, in case you want to copy the lewk.
PHASE VI: Adipocere
In a body that has been decomposing under normal circumstances, the tissues will begin to dry after the purge and decomposition will slow. If the body is exposed, tineid moths will lay larvae that will in turn consume the hair off the corpse.
For a body that has been in a damp and anaerobic environment, adipocere, or grave wax, can form. The fats in the body undergo a process called saponification and the result is a firm cast of the sufficiently fatty tissues. Sometimes, vivianite, a vivid blue mineral, will crystalize on the surface of a body from a reaction of moisture, iron and phosphate.
In ‘Adipocere’, I took the most creative license and employed some fantasy in my depiction. Moths would not be able to access a body that is the right environment for adipocere formation, (though the two events would occur at a similar place on the timeline).
PHASE VII: Dust
With time, and exposure to elements and scavengers, a body will become nothing more than dust and bones. If conditions are sufficiently arid, there may be some desiccated and naturally mummified tissues.
Mushrooms may grow where a body once lay, rebalancing the nutrients in the soil and preparing it for the plant life to come. It’s important to note that most mushrooms don’t really grow *on* bodies. That’s a myth primarily perpetuated by artwork. Mushrooms much prefer to grow on dead plant life and waste than carcasses.
THE END
When I embarked on this project, I hoped to 1) learn about my death, 2) normalize the parts that were scary to me, and 3) create a tool for talking about death. I feel confident and proud to say that I accomplished all 3 of those things. The funny thing is, that while The Reclamation has made me less afraid of death, it doesn’t make me less afraid of dying…and I think that’s okay.
You can find AJ Hawkins on Instagram | Facebook | AJ Hawkins Art | Kalma
If you enjoyed this piece, please consider supporting our work. Your contribution goes directly toward running The Order, including resources, research, paying our writers and staff, videos, podcasts, events and funding more frequent content. We’d love to keep pushing the funerary envelope in 2019. Visit our Support Us page, for a variety of easy ways to contribute, or become a patron on Patreon for exclusive content and rewards.
February 5, 2019
December 28, 2018
Caitlin Doughty's Blog
- Caitlin Doughty's profile
- 8406 followers
