Caitlin Doughty's Blog, page 17
November 8, 2018
DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON PODCAST – Don’t Drink the KoolAid!: SEASON 1: EPISODE 4
Each week, on Wednesday you’ll get a new episode of Death in the Afternoon; a podcast about all things mortal. You can listen (and subscribe!) on iTunes or Spotify.
What can I expect from Death in the Afternoon?
Our mission is to educate our audience about death in a unique, relatable, and entertaining way; to further open up conversations about death in a death phobic culture. And sometimes (ok, all the time) let things get delightfully bizarre.
From our podcast you can expect:
The surprisingly heartwarming tale of a woman who just couldn’t say goodbye to her dead family.
Baffling, chilling, and bizarre stories of when people die in a cult.
When embalming goes right, wrong, and WTF.
Plus many more stories plucked from current events, our favorite historical incidents, and death folklore. You can listen to our Season One trailer here.
For each episode of Death in the Afternoon we’ll publish a blog with images, additional reading, watching or listening, and behind the scenes notes about the making of each episode.
Welcome to our fourth episode, Don’t Drink the KoolAid!
Episode description: Unfortunately, being in a cult doesn’t always end well. Beyond promises of salvation and immortality, one thing many cults have in common are dead bodies. This week, as we discuss the disturbing world of cults, we confront the questions: Why shouldn’t we drink the Kool-Aid? How many puppies does it take to resurrect a teen queen? And, what shouldn’t you bring into a doomsday cave? (Spoiler: corpses)
When we were discussing subjects for Death in the Afternoon, we all knew we wanted to do an episode dedicated to cult bodies. Sadly, there here are so many cases we could have covered in this episode, but if there’s a second season of the podcast we’ll likely return to this topic.
As we’ve stated many times before, death sucks. It is incredibly painful, complicated, and messy – which is one of the reasons why it is so important to talk about it, and begin to unravel our feelings. Just because we (your hosts) deal with death on a daily basis, doesn’t really make it easier. Here’s Louise with more on this:
This week was a rather SERIOUS podcast, at least for me. I tend to get very emotional when researching heavy topics, and Jonestown was definitely in that realm. I’m the gal most likely to be typing at a computer in a coffee shop, tears running down her cheeks with a buffer of three empty tables around her because well, who wants to sit too close to that person? (NICE PEOPLE THAT’S WHO.)
Everybody loves when I write in public.
But I’ll be honest, when I listened to this week’s podcast, a podcast where I felt like I did more talking than usual, I wasn’t tearing up, I was listening to my S’s. Jim JoneS…JoneStown…SocialiSt…SoCiety.
I do this every week, listen to my S’s, but I did it a lot more this time. You see, in the past I had a slight speech impediment that I’ve always been very nervous about when I’m recorded.
Now you’re all listening for it aren’t you?
Ever so slightly, I used to make this sort of smacking/sucking/whistling sound when I said my S’s and sometimes T’s. I don’t even know if this would qualify as an impediment, I just know I used to get notes about it all the time in theater school, at auditions, at rehearsals, from friends, from “friends”, from myself when I was confronted with the torture of having to listen to my recorded voice back in the day. (I’m better about it now…mostly.)
The whistling lisp sound – “The Whistling Lisp” shall be the name of my first folksy horror novel – typically popped up when I was in that magical state of being both nervous and tired (so all of college). I’d stop thinking about where my tongue was, I’d stop enunciating (or maybe it was because I had dry mouth and was OVER enunciating?), and I’d let that gap in my teeth get the best of me.
After some training and moving around of my teeth, the whistling lisp has not been a part of my life for a long, long time. But it still haunts me.
The day I recorded the Jonestown segment of the podcast, I’ll admit I was anxious, jet lagged, and under caffeinated. My mouth felt like it was full of spiders.
And while now I can’t even make the sound if I’m thinking about it too hard – as Sarah pointed out when I weirdly tried to demonstrate in the studio – I still live in fear that one day I’ll listen to the podcast and I’ll be a smacking, whistling S-mess.
So there you go, there’s a little behind-the-scenes drama for you. O, podcast life! What a world, what a world!
And don’t join a cult. You’ll make me cry.
Additional Reading:
Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple
370 More Bodies Discovered in Jonestown
As Caitlin mentions during the introduction of this episode, Sarah’s segment on The Great Eleven cult is a story that is almost too incredible to be believed. But, it did happen, and it was even more bizarre than we could cover in a single episode. Here’s Sarah with just a few of the things we had to edit out of this incredible story:
– May and Ruth had a handsome, young chauffer who knowingly allowed the women to lead him into a barn to be willingly shot in the foot with a gun by Ruth, all because an angel had commanded it.
– Her Heavenly Highness Queen May would bestow upon each member a special title, such as: The Concord of Taste, Queen of the Scaling Breath on the Inside of the Body, and The Four Winds of the Whirlwind God.
– Cult members included May’s own mother, Grandma Jennie, who was chained to a bed for two months. When questioned about it, she said it was the happiest she’d ever been.
– May’s husband, Ward was also her stepbrother and 20 years her junior. Ward wore his black hair slicked back and sported a fu-manchu style mustache – little, unconnected wisps of facial hair at the corners of the mouth. Ward’s job within the cult consisted of two tasks – stand outside each day and keep count of the number of cars passing by, and when it rained, to collect the rain in a coffee can and measure it, and report his findings back to May.
Ward died alone and broke in 1975. His body would become a cadaver for students at a local chiropractic college to study.
AP photo dated Oct. 7, 1929. Caption: The caskets of Willa Rhoads, princess of The Divine Order of the Royal Arm of the Great Seal, whose body was buried under the home of her foster parents, and of the seven dogs (in the other casket) which were buried in the same grave as part of the cult practices.
The above photo is from the Historical Crime Detective website, which has some great additional reading on the case.
If you want to do more than just read about The Great Eleven, you should definitely hop aboard the Esotouric bus for their Wild Wild Westside tour, where you can also visit some of the locations and learn more about the Blackburns. I cannot possibly recommend Kim and Richard’s tours and events enough, these passionate and knowledgeable LA historians have been uncovering the city’s unknown, and often macabre history for decades.
May and Ruth.
You can get even more behind the scenes goodness from Death in the Afternoon over on Twitter and Instagram. Follow us – let’s be friends…’til death.
Death in the Afternoon is a podcast written, researched, and developed by Caitlin Doughty, Sarah Chavez, and Louise Hung of The Order of the Good Death.
Caitlin Doughty is a mortician and funeral home owner in Los Angeles, CA. Along with Sarah and Louise she runs The Order of the Good Death and the Good Death Foundation, orgs that spread the death positive gospel around the world through video series like Ask a Mortician, blogs, bestselling books, and now, a gosh darn podcast!
Sarah Chavez is the executive director of The Order of the Good Death. As the child of parents in the entertainment industry, she was raised witnessing choreographed Hollywood deaths on soundstages. Her work has been influenced by her unique life and weaves together the relationship between death and food, feminism, Mexican-American death rituals, and the strange and wondrous history surrounding the culture of death itself.
Louise Hung is a writer, researcher, and community manager for The Order of the Good Death. While she can usually be found hunched over her computer working on video scripts for Ask a Mortician, Louise has also been known to tap out a few words about death in folklore, history, pop culture, and Asian or Asian American communities.
Editor and composer: Dory Bavarsky
Engineering: Paul Tavener
DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON PODCAST – Don’t Drink the KoolAid!: SEASON 1: EPISODE 4
November 2, 2018
October 31, 2018
Ampersand’s #RIPrapeculture Party Uses Death as Activism
Photo: Official flyer and advertising for Ampersand’s #RIPrapctulure party. Designed by their Development and Marketing
Committee.
So what are you doing for Halloween this year? I am going to a costume party where I will actively participate in ending rape culture!!
Instead of having its annual Black & White Ball, a traditional charity event where partygoers dress in formal attire while dining on a fancy feast, this year Ampersand Sexual Violence Resource Center of the Bluegrass designed a Halloween themed soirée that celebrated various community activists and partner organizations for their work in fighting sexual violence – Ampersand’s Advocates for Change. Honorees were given the floor to speak and clearly verbalize why work to kill rape culture is communal work and so not the work of one individual person or individual agency. It is about building partnerships and prevention. Killing rape culture is intersectional and multilayered because sexual violence affects us all.
The five Advocates for Change honorees were: Briana Persley, a Crimes Victims Advocate who helped thousands impacted by sexual violence navigate the criminal justice system; 2) Dr. Pam Remer, a world renown UK psychologist awarded for her work in date-rape prevention as social justice training; 3) Ranym Nenneh for her vital support in Ampersand’s 24/7 support line and medical advocacy work; 4) Wendy Turner, a high school teacher who pushes student journalists to tackle issues on fairness, social justice and diversity; and 5) Tarana Burke who began the #metoo movement in 2006 that has garnered world-wide attention and praise for starting a collective conversation that a) promotes awareness and healing through solidarity and that b) roots sexual activism in a collective fight against toxic masculinity.
Photo: Briana Persley, one of Ampersand’s Advocates for Change honorees. Persley was honored for her work as a Crimes Victims Advocate at the Fayette Commonwealth Attorney’s office for 15 years. During that time she helped thousands of individuals impacted by crime navigate the criminal justice system. Over the years she worked with multiple victims who experienced sexual assault, domestic violence, and numerous other violent crimes. She also invests in and supports prevention education programs to prevent violence in her community. Photography by Sarah Caton of Space, Place & Southern Grace
The Halloween themed party allowed Ampersand to send a very strong message to rape culture – we know your many faces and your cankerous tricks, but we are killing you everyday; you will die by a thousand cuts.[1] Death iconography was used to support this declaration. In the opening picture, a cemetery with gravestones that read “R.I.P rape culture,” “Here Lies Toxic Masculinity,” and “Victim Blaming” spotlighted by the Ampersand in the full moon was the official advertising and marketing campaign for the party. Looming in the back, Ampersand, shining brightly, is the watchful eye over the cemetery making sure rape culture does not rise again. Halloween and tombstones was the perfect marriage for the #RIPrapeculture soiree because it ingeniously uses death and burial to subvert life, a life that has normalized sexual violence against women and girls, the objectification of women, misogyny, ownership of women’s and girl’s bodies by men and boys.[2] Whether through death work or deathways, women’s voice and women’s knowledge has long been a tool of activism and agency.
Branded as a Halloween party with a mission, Ampersand reached beyond its donor list and list of volunteers to invite everyone in the greater Lexington, Kentucky area to the event. As a result, over 200 guests packed into the Aviation Museum of Kentucky on October 13thfor food and fun but namely to spend time honoring Ampersand’s Advocates for Change, listening to their stories all the while invited to join the movement to end rape culture that has swelled since #metoo. Some dressed as the Mad Hatter and Peter Pan, all costumed attendees were met with a tarot card reading station and a live band pumping out tunes from the 1980s. Attendees – young professionals, Gen Xers, college students and Lexington’s Rollerderby Team – all danced the night away empowered to say R.I.P to rape culture, R.I.P to toxic masculinity, and R.I.P. to victim blaming.
Photo: Pictures of partygoers at Ampersand’s#RIPrapeculture Party on October 13, 2018 at Aviation Museum of Kentucky in Lexington, Kentucky. Photography by Sarah Caton of Space, Place & Southern Grace
Lively and festive, the #RIPrapeculture Halloween party promoted community empowerment and collective togetherness in the fight to end rape culture. The folks at Ampersand visually reminded everyone that they were apart of something important. From the door, attendees were greeted by large posters in the entryway that read “RIPrapeculture” and “We Believe Survivors”. Each table held Ampersand brochures and were stocked with cards asking attendees to write to survivors creating a personal connection that was beyond sympathy and sorry. A staff member was also seated at each table to answer any and all questions. So from the cards and conversation, attendees were being invited to join the movement to end rape culture and not just “giving to charity” and disconnected from an issue that affects us all.
Photo: Ampersand Sexual Violence Resource Center of the Blue Grass has a mission to support persons impacted by violence as well as to engage the community in changing rape culture. To learn more, to donate, for anti-oppression resources, please visit www.ampersandky.org
This shift from having the annual Black & White Ball to a #RIPrapeculture Halloween party is not a superficial one but one that reflects the ideological transformation and purposed intersectional outreach rebranding Ampersand has recently undergone. Formerly the Bluegrass Rape Crisis Center with a customary reactive approach to sexual violence, i.e. providing services for the survivor who works up enough courage to verbally seek out aid, Ampersand is now taking a more proactive and intentionally intersectional approach. The former type of model is as limited as it can be ineffective but one derived from our cultural beliefs that a) rape, sexual assault, molestation is the problem of the person assaulted and b) these types of sexual crimes are only committed by a few “ ‘sick’ individuals out there”. (As in outliers to our normal constructions of “well” individuals. “Out there” as opposed to not inour homes, families, inner circle).
Ampersand understands that sexual violence bears its country’s marks and so is part and parcel of U.S. culture, i.e. normalization of objectification, misogyny, toxic masculinity, and submissive femininity. Ampersand, then, has decided to be proactive in addressing sexual violence by creating programs and services that illustrates the very intersectional nature of sexual violence and creating bold initiatives that engages the community in fighting to end rape culture. The #RIPrapeCulture party was the loudest and biggest example of that. so far, bringing in $14,000 for the non profit, which is double the proceeds from last year’s Black & White ball.
When you think about your next Halloween party, think seriously about making it a #RIPrapeculture soirée where party goers howl in solidarity like the women of the horror films who howled against white supremacy, shape shifted out of conventional gendered norms, went raving mad at patriarchy, screamed at gendered racism, and appeared possessed when it fact autonomous and empowered.[3]
Ding Dong rape culture is dead!
Dr. Kami Fletcher is an Associate Professor of African American History at Delaware State University. Her research centers on African American burial grounds, late 19th/early 20th century Black male and female undertakers, and African American death ideology. She is the author of “Real Business: Maryland’s First Black Cemetery Journey’s into the Enterprise of Death, 1807-1920”. Look out for her forthcoming volumes: 1) the co-edited Till Death Do Us Part: American Ethnic Cemeteries as Borders Uncrossed which examines the internal and/or external drives among ethnic, religious, and racial groups to separate their dead, under contract with University of Mississippi Press; and 2) the co-edited Southern Cemeteries, Imprints of Southern Culture which demonstrates the interactions between southern culture and the dead – especially examining the fluid, ever changing demands the living placed on the dead with careful attention to the growing debate over whether Confederate monuments should remain in public cemeteries.
Author’s Note: This blog could not have been written without the full cooperation and consent of Ampersand . I would like to thank the Board of Directors, Executive Director M.E. Kobes, and the staff, specifically Director of Development & Marketing Heather Darby, and Development & Marketing Coordinator Kellie McClure Baldwin. Heather Darby and Kellie McClure Baldwin are the two-woman Development & Marketing Committee who came up with the ingenious idea of the #RIPrapeculture soiree. They graciously answered my email inquiries pertaining to the logistics, details and success of the party. I would also like to thank Sarah Caton of Space Place & Southern Grace for permission to reprint pictures and video taken at #RIPrapeCulture party.
[1] When Heather Darby, Director of Development & Marketing, was asked about the party’s Halloween theme and its perception and reception from attendees, she had this share: “This theme aligns closely with our mission, vision, and values. We [Ampersand] hope the folks attending our event will leave feeling like they have a hand in killing rape culture, and that they want to find ways in their everyday lives to participate in the death by a thousand cuts.
[2] When Darby was asked about the graveyard and headstones used in advertising and marketing the party, Darby responded, “When designing our materials, we wanted to send folks an invitation with a statement. We wanted to design something that our network of folks would want hanging on their walls, but that also portrayed the heart of our existence. The grave scene was the perfect marriage between our mission & the Halloween theme.”
[3] During conversation Kellie McClure Baldwin, the Development & Marketing Coordinator, informed me that yelling and howling in unison in honor of the voices of the #metoo movement was planned as part of the #RIPrapeculture party. For more on women and horror and activism, see feminist death worker Sarah Chavez and end-of-life doula Michelle Acciavatti
DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON PODCAST – Is That a…Foot?: SEASON 1: EPISODE 3
Each week, on Wednesday you’ll get a new episode of Death in the Afternoon; a podcast about all things mortal. You can listen (and subscribe!) on iTunes or Spotify.
What can I expect from Death in the Afternoon?
Our mission is to educate our audience about death in a unique, relatable, and entertaining way; to further open up conversations about death in a death phobic culture. And sometimes (ok, all the time) let things get delightfully bizarre.
From our podcast you can expect:
The surprisingly heartwarming tale of a woman who just couldn’t say goodbye to her dead family.
Baffling, chilling, and bizarre stories of when people die in a cult.
When embalming goes right, wrong, and WTF.
Plus many more stories plucked from current events, our favorite historical incidents, and death folklore. You can listen to our Season One trailer here.
For each episode of Death in the Afternoon we’ll publish a blog with images, additional reading, watching or listening, and behind the scenes notes about the making of each episode.
Welcome to our third episode, Is That a…Foot?
Episode description: Generally speaking, we like our limbs in context. “The foot bone’s connected to the ankle bone, the ankle bone’s connected to the leg bone.” But what about when we encounter limbs that aren’t connected to anybody? Just out there, free and unattached? This week we talk about rogue and extra limbs that have been found by the sea, in the smoker, and in the grave as we answer the question: is that a…foot?
Just in time for Halloween, here’s Louise with a spooky good story!:
In this week’s episode Caitlin mentioned that I was a little too excited to talk about disembodied floating limbs. Maybe I was, but hear me out, there’s more behind my fascination than just liking mysterious ocean-going feet.
OK, aside from the fact that I do find this occurrence fascinating – that the Pacific Northwest authorities have just come to accept it as a part of their eco-system – part of the reason I gravitated toward this news story in the first place has to do with a story my grandmother, my Mar Mar, told me as a child.
As some of you may know, Chinese folktales and “fairy stories” don’t usually veer away from death or even what a few might call “gore”. I remember my aunties telling me about a character named Ah-Woo Dook who would come and get naughty children who wouldn’t go to sleep at night. Ah-Woo would poke you with a long, razor-sharp finger, basically tenderizing you for consumption. Then Ah-Woo would eat you and spit out your bones as a warning to the other naughty children.
Point is, disembodied limbs were long ago woven into my imagination and interests.
So this is the story Mar Mar told me. A good story for the spooky fall time season and a good folk story about missing limbs:
There was a man who worked on a small farm in a small village far away from his family.
Every month, on his one day off, he would gather up the money he earned and run all night to bring it to his wife and children in a distant village. Then he would run all day to get back to the farm where he worked. It was a hard life, but it meant food in his children’s bellies, clothes to keep them warm, and a roof over their head. Such was the life of many men in China a long time ago (as Mar Mar said).
One day, while the man was at work, he was in a horrible accident. While chopping down a tree another man swung his blade and cut the man’s legs off at the knees. The poor man fell in the field and bled to death, calling for his family.
The smell of blood filled the air and a giant wild dog raced into the field and stole one leg. A great bird with pointy talons swooped down and flew off with the other leg.
Not knowing what to do and afraid their boss would punish them, the man’s friends buried him in the field that night and divvied up his money amongst them.
When the night was at its darkest, and the clouds hid the stars, the sleeping men were awoken by a scratching sound.
Sssss-craaaaaatch.
Scraaaaaaatch.
Scratccccchhhhhhh.
It sounded like nails on the walls of their hut, nails at their door, nails under their floor.
Then a garbled voice, as if uttered from a mouth full of dirt demanded:
“Give me my money…Give me my legs…I must run…I must run…”
The men were convinced they were dreaming, that somehow the horror of the day’s events had bestowed upon them one collective nightmare.
But the next night, again when the night was at its darkest and the clouds hid the stars, the scratching sound returned. Louder, stronger.
Sssss-craaaaaatch.
Scraaaaaaatch.
Scratccccchhhhhhh.
The garbled voice was louder too, more insistent, angry.
“ Give me my money! Give me my legs! I must run…I must run!”
The men were scared now, but didn’t know what to do so they just closed their eyes tighter and prayed for dawn.
The scratching and the voice came back every night for five days. Every night it was louder, every night it was angrier, every night the men feared that it would finally get into their hut and take their legs.
Finally one night the scratching was so loud it shook the hut and the voice was so angry it made the men quake in fear.
“Give me my money!! Give me my legs!! I MUST RUN! I MUST RUN!”
Afraid more of the dead man than they were of any bird or dog, the men ran into the night in search of the creatures who had stolen the man’s legs. They found a dark cave in the forest where a pack of wild dogs lived. Charging in with torches they found the man’s leg, stripped of flesh with teeth marks all over it. The dogs bit and tore at the men, but they were able to flee with the leg.
The men also found a tree with an enormous nest in it. Climbing the tree they found the nest filled with bones – both human and animal. Finding the man’s leg – all bone, no flesh – they were climbing down the tree with it when the gigantic bird attacked them. One man was carried off by the bird, another man was pecked bloody, but they were able to escape with the dead man’s leg.
Just before dawn they buried the man’s legs with the rest of his corpse, along with a bag full of the money they had taken from him.
Hoping to get a little bit of rest the men dragged themselves back to their hut and fell into their beds. Their eyes were barely closed when they heard the sound of footsteps, running footsteps, approaching their hut. Louder and louder they got, thundering straight for them. But just as they braced themselves for someone to run through their wall, the running footsteps turned and faded away. Off they ran into the night.
From then on, the men were granted peaceful nights. No more scratching at their wall, no more voice asking for money or legs. For good measure and to make sure they would never be bothered again, the men collected money for the dead man’s family every month and made sure it was sent to them.
And just as a reminder to keep up their charity, once a month when the night was at its
darkest and the clouds hid the stars, the men would hear the sound of the dead man running from his grave to his family, checking to make sure they were taken care of.
Additional Reading:
A 14th human foot — this one in a hiking boot — washes ashore in Canada
Human Feet Still Washing Up In Pacific Northwest, But Don’t Panic
In Canada, Theories Swirl With the Tide as 14th Human Foot Washes Ashore
New York’s Grim Sign of Spring: Floating Corpses
When the Waters Yield Macabre Secrets
Hi Deathlings, Sarah here. When Louise, Caitlin and I were in the writer’s room working on this story, and by “writer’s room” I mean a pizza joint off the 99 highway near an outlet mall, I intended on writing about something entirely different, but then I remembered seeing this documentary, Finder’s Keepers a couple years ago and here we are. If you haven’t seen it, stop whatever you’re doing and watch the trailer posted above.
In this episode I also talk about Kristi Loyall who lost her foot to cancer. She asked to keep it, which by the way, is completely legal, although doctors and medical staff will often claim it’s a biohazard or illegal, but neither of these is true. Order member and human remains law expert Tanya Marsh states “When they don’t want to do something, they’ll tell people it’s illegal. That doesn’t mean it’s illegal.”
Skulls Unlimited took care of defleshing Kristi’s foot with the help of flesh-eating dermestid beetles. You can follow Kristi, and her foot on Instagram.
And finally, because I’m sure you’re wondering what Leo’s leg lamp looked like, here you go:
Additional Reading
This Guy Has Turned His Amputated Leg Into A Lamp
Finders Keepers’ looks at the legal dispute over a severed leg
Finally, here’s a deep dive for true death nerds; an episode of podcast Death, et seq. on what happens to human remains in the U.S. “Death transforms a living human being, a person with rights and autonomy, into … something else. Tissue and bone, once animated by life, converted into an object of fear, a focus for grief, and a medical and scientific resource.”
You can get even more behind the scenes goodness from Death in the Afternoon over on Twitter and Instagram. Follow us – let’s be friends…’til death.
Death in the Afternoon is a podcast written, researched, and developed by Caitlin Doughty, Sarah Chavez, and Louise Hung of The Order of the Good Death.
Caitlin Doughty is a mortician and funeral home owner in Los Angeles, CA. Along with Sarah and Louise she runs The Order of the Good Death and the Good Death Foundation, orgs that spread the death positive gospel around the world through video series like Ask a Mortician, blogs, bestselling books, and now, a gosh darn podcast!
Sarah Chavez is the executive director of The Order of the Good Death. As the child of parents in the entertainment industry, she was raised witnessing choreographed Hollywood deaths on soundstages. Her work has been influenced by her unique life and weaves together the relationship between death and food, feminism, Mexican-American death rituals, and the strange and wondrous history surrounding the culture of death itself.
Louise Hung is a writer, researcher, and community manager for The Order of the Good Death. While she can usually be found hunched over her computer working on video scripts for Ask a Mortician, Louise has also been known to tap out a few words about death in folklore, history, pop culture, and Asian or Asian American communities.
Editor and composer: Dory Bavarsky
Engineering: Paul Tavener
DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON PODCAST – Is That a…Foot?: SEASON 1: EPISODE 3
October 26, 2018
October 24, 2018
DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON PODCAST – Crematory Whoopsies: SEASON 1: EPISODE 2
Each week, for the next seven Wednesdays you’ll get a new episode of Death in the Afternoon; a podcast about all things mortal. You can listen (and subscribe!) on iTunes or Spotify.
What can I expect from Death in the Afternoon?
Our mission is to educate our audience about death in a unique, relatable, and entertaining way; to further open up conversations about death in a death phobic culture. And sometimes (ok, all the time) let things get delightfully bizarre.
From our podcast you can expect:
The surprisingly heartwarming tale of a woman who just couldn’t say goodbye to her dead family.
Baffling, chilling, and bizarre stories of when people die in a cult.
When embalming goes right, wrong, and WTF.
Plus many more stories plucked from current events, our favorite historical incidents, and death folklore. You can listen to our Season One trailer here.
For each episode of Death in the Afternoon we’ll publish a blog with images, additional reading, watching or listening, and behind the scenes notes about the making of each episode.
Welcome to our second episode, Crematory Whoopsies
Episode description: Mistakes happen. Cremations happen. But few things capture our morbid imagination like cremation mistakes happening. Whether it’s the horror of cremating your coworker, a misplaced corpse on the way to America’s first modern cremation, or plumes of “human remains particulate” interrupting your Best Buy shopping experience, nothing fans the flames of our phobias like a cremation blunder. This week we talk about things that can go right, wrong, and sideways when you’re in the business of cremating corpses.
I know people were worried, and no crematory emergency is a good crematory emergency. It’s not funny. But that headline…is it the word “shoots”?
Several times a year we receive dozens of emails per day about a shocking deathy story making headlines. This month for example, we’ve been inundated with questions and press requests about both the kids baking grandma’s ashes into cookies, and the discovery of the remains of infants in an abandoned funeral home . But the story we’ve gotten the most questions about is one we’ve seen more than once. In this episode we get to the bottom of the story’s most recent incarnation, and end up falling down a rabbit hole, that leads us to a disturbing and unexpected revelation.
In this episode it is also revealed that Louise once went to school next to a crematory. Here’s Louise to tell us more about that:
I mention in the podcast that I went to school next to a crematory for years and had no idea. My mom knew, but it was no big deal to her, she actually liked it.
Death positive before there was death positive, my mom thought it was a great part of the neighborhood – you had your local coffee shop, your local bakery, and your local crematory. I remember her finally telling me about it on the way to school one day, after I’d been attending that school for four years. I was around 10 or 11.
“You know, that building is a crematorium.”
What’s that?
“It’s where dead people go to be burned to ash if they don’t want to be buried. You don’t rot in the earth. I want to be cremated.”
Burned up?
“Yes. I want to be ashes and I want to be scattered! I want to be in the wind!”
She was so excited about it, and I wasn’t scared or grossed out. I remember my mom’s enthusiasm. She seemed so happy.
But when I told my friends about the crematorium, I remember the “Ew gross!” comments or the looks of fear. My friend Marisa thought it was cool though – shout out to Marisa!
I do remember my mom talking to one of the other moms, a woman decked out in blue spandex and matching blue eyeshadow (it was the ’80s y’all), and that mom saying in a hushed tone, “Is this something we should we be, I mean…WORRIED about? I mean…should we talk to someone about…you know…SAFETY?”
I think my mom laughed at her. Such is her way.
Anyway, my mom’s reaction to the friendly neighborhood crematory is probably one of the reasons I am the way I am. It wasn’t scary, it was just another service the community provided. And my mom was all for it.
Additional reading:
Neighbors fighting Garden Grove funeral home’s crematorium plans
San Diego County crematorium accident sends cloud of human remains into air
Crematorium mishap shoots plume of human ashes into air, San Diego officials say
DR. LeMoyne’s Crematory in Pennsylvania. .Photo by Lee Paxton/CC BY-SA 4.0DR.
In Sarah’s segment this week we learned the road to getting cremation legalized and accepted as a form of disposition wasn’t easy. Here’s Sarah to talk a bit more about cremation, and the pioneering women behind it:
It isn’t often that someone can come up with a piece of death history or trivia that Caitlin “Granger” Doughty isn’t familiar with, but I’m proud to say I’ve been able to do it a few times in the past several years, including that thing about the healing properties of decomposing whales, the tradition of telling the bees when someone dies, and the saga of cremation pioneer Henry Steele Olcott, featured in this weeks episode.
As you’ll hear in the podcast, when the idea of cremation was first introduced it was viewed as “unchristian” and “undignified.” It’s interesting to note that today, we’re seeing an eerily similar reaction from “powerful groups” that are fighting to oppose “water cremation” or aquamation, a more eco-friendly form of disposition. “Powerful groups” meaning male politicians and the church two entities who have a long history of policing women’s bodies, even when they’re dead. Body positivity and the fight for rights to make decisions about our own bodies and how we identify does not stop at death. MY CORPSE. MY CHOICE.
Women would play an influential role in paving the way for cremations in the U.S. (much like the women/femmes of the death positive movement today!), as many viewed their advocacy for cremation as their moral duty to uphold public health and safety, especially considering care for the sick and dying typically fell to women.
Here are a few notable cremation activists:
One of the ways in which American women advocated for cremation was to be among the first to sign their future corpses up for the process (can we repeat history with aquamation, home funerals, or recomposition? Si, se puede!). Often, the first bodies cremated in crematoriums throughout the country belonged to women, and in several instances their bodies were held in storage until a crematory had finished construction. Some of these first crematories still stand today, and even honor these pioneering women, like, Barbara Schorr, whose portrait hangs in the chapel at Woodmere Cemetery in Detroit.
Here in Los Angeles, at Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery, (which, by the way, was the first cemetery here that allowed burials of all races and religions), the first crematory in the west was built, (it was the second in the U.S.), and, you guessed it, the first person cremated there in 1886, was a woman named Olive A. Bird.
California’s first licensed female architect, Julia Morgan is most well known for her work on Hearst Castle, but throughout her career she would design hundreds of structures all over California, including Oakland’s first crematory. It was here that many women were employed to support and advise families, as well as to help create meaningful rituals and memorial practices around cremation.
Perhaps the most well known cremation activist was feminist and suffragette, Frances Willard, a fascinating figure who stated that “Politics is the place for women.” According to the Cremation Association of North America, the following words from Willard, can frequently be found on plaques hanging in crematoriums across the U.S.:
I have the purpose to help forward progressive movements even in my latest hours, and hence hereby decree that the earthly mantle which I shall drop ere long – shall be swiftly enfolded in flames and rendered powerless to harmfully effect the health of the living.
Death in the Afternoon is a podcast written, researched, and developed by Caitlin Doughty, Sarah Chavez, and Louise Hung of The Order of the Good Death.
Caitlin Doughty is a mortician and funeral home owner in Los Angeles, CA. Along with Sarah and Louise she runs The Order of the Good Death and the Good Death Foundation, orgs that spread the death positive gospel around the world through video series like Ask a Mortician, blogs, bestselling books, and now, a gosh darn podcast!
Sarah Chavez is the executive director of The Order of the Good Death. As the child of parents in the entertainment industry, she was raised witnessing choreographed Hollywood deaths on soundstages. Her work has been influenced by her unique life and weaves together the relationship between death and food, feminism, Mexican-American death rituals, and the strange and wondrous history surrounding the culture of death itself.
Louise Hung is a writer, researcher, and community manager for The Order of the Good Death. While she can usually be found hunched over her computer working on video scripts for Ask a Mortician, Louise has also been known to tap out a few words about death in folklore, history, pop culture, and Asian or Asian American communities.
Editor and composer: Dory Bavarsky
Engineering: Paul Tavener
DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON PODCAST – Crematory Whoopsies: SEASON 1: EPISODE 2
October 22, 2018
The Death Positive Roots of Halloween
Americans have a strange relationship with death. We love our death wrapped up and packaged for us in the guise of entertainment – dedicating hours of our lives to killing others and subsequently dying ourselves in video games, our film and television choices feature death as a constant theme in popular shows like The Walking Dead, American Horror Story and Game of Thrones. Even our most celebrated universal cultural observance, Halloween, is one that delights in death. We create cemeteries on our lawns, hang skeletons around the house, and snack on cookies made to look like severed fingers.
In spite of this, to speak of death and dying outside of these safe boundaries we’ve created, typically elicits a negative reaction. We surround ourselves with death and yet, we are painfully uncomfortable actually talking about it. Perhaps this is precisely why we love Halloween so much, as it allows for an acceptable place and time to explore and sate some of our curiosity and fear, surrounding the subject.
There was once a time when this uniquely American holiday was intricately tied to a day when we actively engaged with death; and facing our own mortality was at the heart of the celebration.
Many different cultures, religious beliefs, marketing and even historical events throughout the centuries have contributed to the traditions of Halloween. Most notable among them are the Roman festival of Pomona, and the church appointed observances of All Saints’ and All Souls’ Day, but none more than the Celtic festival of Samhain.
Bill Viola’s “Fire Woman.”
Samhain, which began at sundown on October 31st, was considered “summer’s end.” It was a time that marked the end of the harvest season, the coming of winter, increasing darkness, and the end of the year. The harsh conditions of impending winter brought with them the very real concerns of survival, death, and the necessity of facing one’s own mortality, as many would not survive the season.
Too little is known about the Celts who did not keep written records of their traditions or lore. What we do know is that Samhain was a combination of harvest celebration, a New Year’s Eve party, and a time to wrap up end-of the-year business that may have lasted over a period of three days.
During the daylight hours it was a time to pay off debts, complete harvesting tasks, slaughter any animals that were not going to be kept for the winter, and a time for legal trials to be held. It is believed that those convicted of particularly abhorrent crimes were sacrificed at this time.
One of the most important rituals that took place was the extinguishing of fires on Samhain Eve. Druids, designated priest figures among the Celts, would create a communal fire, known as a “needfire” by means of friction. Once the fire was blessed by the Druids, a fee was collected and embers would be distributed to relight their home’s hearth for the next year. Bonfires later carried over to All Souls’ observances, serving as a guiding light for souls in Purgatory who were believed to return to their ancestral homes for the night. In Scotland bonfires called samhnag were abundant, beautifully dotting the hillsides with light in the darkness. According to Ronald Hutton, author of Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain, in Lancashire people took part in a tradition called Teen’lay. Here, families would gather at midnight, one of them holding a pitchfork with a bit of burning hay on it, while the others knelt around it to pray for the souls of deceased relatives and friends until the fire burned out.
Festivities on Samhain commenced at sundown, and much like our modern festivals, it held the common elements of gathering as a community, feasting, and drinking. Another key element may also have been storytelling. There are numerous folk tales believed to be from this period that take place on Samhain. In them are lively corpses, giants demanding gifts of crops and children, and sinister sidhe or fairies.
This is also where the tradition of the Jack O’ Lantern originated, with the Irish folktale of Stingy Jack who is able to trick the devil in a series of bad bargains. In the end however, it is Jack who is tricked and forced to roam the earth carrying a piece of coal from the fires of Hell nestled within a carved out turnip to light his way.
Nuts and nut trees such as hazel and walnut played an important role in Celtic mythology and may have been incorporated into Samhain. This link was also evident throughout Scotland and Ireland where nuts and seedpods were used for divination and also found in burial mounds. As spirits of the dead were nearby during this period, it was an ideal time to call on them for help in answering questions about the future. In result, later incarnations of Samhain and early Halloween were primarily a time for fortunetelling games intended to predict one’s marital status or partner, career, fortune, and death. In them, nuts were often utilized by being tossed into a fire. The subsequent “behavior” of the nut – igniting quickly, exploding, or remaining unaffected – foretold anything from the temperament of a future spouse, to who was going to die within the year. Apples, mirrors and cabbages were all employed in these games of prognostication, and were the main attraction at early American Halloween parties.
Other hallmarks of our modern Halloween are costumes and trick or treating, a form of ritual begging that resembles many European traditions which involve mumming or masking, also practiced in the U.S. during other holidays such as Thanksgiving or Belsnicking at Christmas. Although it is widely believed that the Celts donned masks or costumes to trick or drive away evil spirits, most historians refute this claim.
The Celts believed that the veil that separated the world of the living and the dead disappeared on Samhain, providing not only a way into our world for spirits of the dead but also for sidhe. Of these, it was the sidhe that were to be feared most. According to legends they could be expected to steal children or play rather cruel tricks on humans and animals alike. They were particularly fond of adults they deemed attractive, luring them into fairy realms where they would be trapped, or tricking them into marriage.
According to Ruth Edna Kelley, a librarian whose 1919 book, The Book of Halloween remained the only serious tome on the history of the holiday for some thirty years, states that on Samhain “The lord of death gathered together the souls of all those who had died in the passing year and had been condemned to live in the bodies of animals, to decree what forms they should inhabit for the next twelve months.” This likely contributed to the idea that spirits or witches would take the form of an animal, particularly that of a cat or a horse. This lent an extra element of spookiness to the horse races which were also part of Samhain festivities – for an evil spirit in the guise of a horse could be hiding among the race contenders.
Traditions that likely originated among the Celts influenced the regions they once inhabited, the majority of them centering on death.
Visions and premonitions were common during Samhain. Apparitions seen of persons still living, were expected to die within the year. Romantically unattached individuals hoped to conjure visions of their future beau, but there was always the risk of seeing their own corpse moving slowly past them instead – a portent of their impending death. Individuals would often place stones in a fire, collecting them once it finally burned out. If one did not find their stone it was believed they would soon die.
Food would be left out for the dead, or libations poured over their graves. In later years, particularly as part of All Souls’ Day, small cakes called soul cakes, were given to the poor who would take one in exchange for praying for the dead.
Fishing was a particularly risky endeavor during this time as it was believed that the corpses of those who died at sea would come back to life and climb aboard fishing boats, hoping to be taken back to land for a proper burial.
In Brittany, France where death was once incorporated into most aspects of life and their cemeteries served as the center of the community, people believed that corpses rose from their graves during Samhain night, their skeletons filling the pews to listen to Death deliver a sermon.
Through efforts of the church to eradicate “pagan practices” not only throughout Europe but in other colonized nations, and the passing of time, most of these extraordinary traditions passed over into the realm of legend.
So, how did America come to adopt so many of the traditions of Samhain? The answer lies with a single influential figure who also is responsible for popularizing our Christmas traditions, mourning fashion and etiquette, and even wedding customs – Queen Victoria. Author and Halloween historian, Lisa Morton states, “In America, the influx of Scotch-Irish immigrants coincided with the rise of the middle class, who were anxious to imitate their British cousins. Victoria herself spent Halloween at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, and her experience there was widely reported.”
Samhain continues to be acknowledged and celebrated today by neo-pagans. Some observances include bonfires, elements of fortunetelling and rituals that involve honoring the dead. One of these is a dumb supper– a feast held in silence that allows for communing with and honoring the dead.
As with other cultural practices that honored death and the dead, (such as Mexico’s Dia de Muertos or Hanal Pixan in the Yucatan Penninsula, which the church also tried to erase), it is evident that the Celts’ relationship with their own mortality and their dead was of immense importance to them. During Samhain, let us not only reclaim this practice of honoring our ancestors but ourselves – by facing our fear of death so that we may truly live – “In the same state as those who are dead, are those who have not lived.” – Ruth Edna Kelley
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Author’s note: this piece was in large part informed by the excellent research done by Lisa Morton, author of Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween. Other references and further reading is linked within the article.
Sarah Chavez is the executive director of The Order of the Good Death, co-host of the new podcast Death in the Afternoon, and co-founder of the feminist death site Death & the Maiden. In addition to working as a museum curator she writes and speaks about a variety of subjects including the relationship between food and death, Mexican-American death history, and decolonizing death rituals. You can follow her on Twitter .
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, and funding more frequent content. We’d love to keep pushing the funerary envelope in 2018. Visit our Support Us page, for a variety of easy ways to contribute.
October 19, 2018
October 15, 2018
Death in the Afternoon Podcast – My Roommate, a Corpse: Season 1: Episode 1
Each week, for the next seven Wednesdays you’ll get a new episode of Death in the Afternoon; a podcast about all things mortal. You can listen (and subscribe!) on iTunes or Spotify.
What can I expect from Death in the Afternoon?
Our mission is to educate our audience about death in a unique, relatable, and entertaining way; to further open up conversations about death in a death phobic culture. And sometimes (ok, all the time) let things get delightfully bizarre.
From our podcast you can expect:
The surprisingly heartwarming tale of a woman who just couldn’t say goodbye to her dead family.
Baffling, chilling, and bizarre stories of when people die in a cult.
When embalming goes right, wrong, and WTF.
Plus many more stories plucked from current events, our favorite historical incidents, and death folklore. You can listen to our Season One trailer here.
For each episode of Death in the Afternoon we’ll publish a blog with images, additional reading, watching or listening, and behind the scenes notes about the making of each episode.
Welcome to our first episode, My Roommate, a Corpse!
Episode description: In our first episode we take you on a magical (ok, not always so magical) journey of living with the dead. From an adorable 91 year old lady with a dark secret, to a rhinestone studded cult with resurrection ambitions, to a Japanese mummy collecting government assistance. Buckle up, and welcome to Death in the Afternoon!
When we were developing the podcast an episode about living with the dead was a priority. Although we rearranged the release order for most episodes several times, My Roommate, a Corpse! remained our pick for the first episode.
In the first act, you’ll meet Jean Stevens, who could not bear to part with her husband and twin sister when they died.
Jean Stevens holds a photograph from the 1940s of herself and her late husband, James, outside her home in Wyalusing, Pa. (Rubinkam/AP)
91 Year Old’s Pennsylvania Corpse Abuse Case is Complicated
Update on 91 Year Old Pennsylvania Woman Keeping Corpses in House
From SPLC, Tony and Susan Alamo.
In Sarah’s segment we hear the bizarre and unsettling tale of Tony and Susan Alamo. One of Sarah and Caitlin’s favorite pieces here on the Order blog was written by Order member and Alamo expert, Greta P. Allendorf, whose piece about the Alamos was the basis for the segment. Unfortunately, we had to remove the piece, but since then we’ve been looking for another way to share the story.
The area in the Alamo compound where Susan’s corpse was displayed for months.
nwaonline.com
The mausoleum Susan was interred in, before her corpse was removed and went on the lam with Tony and other cult members.
A genuine, “groovy,” Tony Alamo of Nashville jacket. You can read more about How Brutal Cult Leader Tony Alamo Amassed A Fortune With Bedazzled Denim Jackets in this piece from Refinery29.
The mummified corpse of Sogen Kato.
For the final segment of our first episode, co-host Louise Hung shares her thoughts about lonely deaths, the aging population in Japan, and Kato Sogen. Here’s Louise:
Whenever I’ve researched the senior citizen population in Japan and lonely deaths, I’ve found the experience to be both fascinating and heartbreaking. Contemplating an entire generation, potentially several generations, that must confront the reality of dying a lonely death is sobering. While I am not Japanese, I only lived there for a few years, thinking about lonely deaths or even hidden corpses in Japan always makes me think of an apartment building on the outskirts of the rural town I lived in for a time.
Far from the train tracks and main road, tucked against the wooded mountainside, there was a graying building that rose taller than the rest. I often rode my bicycle by the building in the afternoon when I had to get away from my computer. Its size was daunting, but it also seemed to shrink back. Really, I didn’t like to look at it but I couldn’t look away. I wonder if the whole town felt that way. Though there was a playground nearby, I never saw children play there. The seesaws were brightly colored but the mouldering building seemed to cast a pall on it. I only saw old women come and go from the building.
Hunched, tiny women walked the overgrown concrete path from the road to one of the many of dim hallways that lead to concrete inner staircases. Some had cramped ground floor flats with sliding glass doors that occasionally revealed crowded homes with tatami mats, mounds of papers, and plants. Often a small, old TV.
The building always looked gray and old. Like its inhabitants? I rode by that building several times a week and never saw any people who you wouldn’t feel obliged to carry groceries for or give a seat up to on the train. When I think of lonely deaths, an aging population with nobody but themselves, their mortality, and the other solo individuals around them, I think of that building. I wonder how many Kato Sogens or “missing centenarians” have dwelled there in life and in death.
Additional resources:
Checking on Japan’s aging population
A Generation in Japan Faces a Lonely Death
Sogen Kato and Deceased Payee Fraud
Death in the Afternoon is a podcast written, researched, and developed by Caitlin Doughty, Sarah Chavez, and Louise Hung of The Order of the Good Death.
Caitlin Doughty is a mortician and funeral home owner in Los Angeles, CA. Along with Sarah and Louise she runs The Order of the Good Death and the Good Death Foundation, orgs that spread the death positive gospel around the world through video series like Ask a Mortician, blogs, bestselling books, and now, a gosh darn podcast!
Sarah Chavez is the executive director of The Order of the Good Death. As the child of parents in the entertainment industry, she was raised witnessing choreographed Hollywood deaths on soundstages. Her work has been influenced by her unique life and weaves together the relationship between death and food, feminism, Mexican-American death rituals, and the strange and wondrous history surrounding the culture of death itself.
Louise Hung is a writer, researcher, and community manager for The Order of the Good Death. While she can usually be found hunched over her computer working on video scripts for Ask a Mortician, Louise has also been known to tap out a few words about death in folklore, history, pop culture, and Asian or Asian American communities.
Editor and composer: Dory Bavarsky
Engineering: Paul Tavener
Special thanks to Alamo cult expert, Greta P. Allendorf who lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas with her daughter, Maude. She is a home funeral guide and serves on the board of the National Home Funeral Alliance. In her spare time, she sells dead people’s clothing at her vintage store, Cheap Thrills, and obsesses over cults.
Death in the Afternoon Podcast – My Roommate, a Corpse: Season 1: Episode 1
October 13, 2018
BURYING THE ENEMY: THE NAZI GRAVES OF PORTUGAL
Despite its status as a far-right dictatorship in the 1940s, Portugal never really entered the conflict in World War II. Prime Minister António de Oliveria Salazar led the country through a balancing routine as hypocritical as it was successful: for the most part, the Portuguese were spared any contact with the war. There was, however, a notable exception.
The German aviators, at an undetermined time before the crash in Aljezur. Two of the men pictured did not take part in the mission. (Photo courtesy of Eberhard Axel Wilhelm, via ADPHA)
The day was July 9th, 1943. A convoy of Allied ships traveled south along the Portuguese coast, headed for the Mediterranean, where the Allies intended to begin an attack on Sicily. An escort of two British fighters ensured the safety of the mission, until a group of four German bombers flew in from Nazi-occupied France to intercept, and hopefully sink, the supply ships. The aerial battle lasted a little over an hour, after which the German bombers were forced to retreat—all but one, that is, which had been shot down in the cliffs near Aljezur.
Aljezur, at the time, was a town of a little over 5.000 people whose only contact with the war came in the form of radio waves. Luís Proença, who was six years old at the time, remembers spending evenings in the community center huddled around the radio, following the news of the war on BBC. The reports, Proença said, overwhelmingly favored the Allies. “We saw the Germans as enemies […] so it was almost like a victory [when the plane crashed]. It was the enemy who had fallen.”
The people of Aljezur inspect the wreck of the German plane. (Photo courtesy of ADPHA)
Enemy or not, the townspeople sprung to action. “[My grandfather] handled everything, ” Ernesto Silva said of Vitorino Cuco, the leader of the coast guard who first reached the wreck. “First, because it was his professional duty; second, because he was a good person.”
Cuco had hoped for a rescue, but the wrecked plane burned so fiercely it couldn’t be approached. Later, when the time came to remove the bodies, Cuco led a small team through the motions. When a transport truck couldn’t make it up the cliffs, they used an ox cart. When they couldn’t reach one of the bodies, they tied ropes into a lasso and improvised. Despite the hellish scene, they never wavered. They had decided to move the bodies into the local church, and they would succeed no matter the cost.
The seven German aviators lie in repose at the church of Aljezur. (Photo courtesy of ADPHA)
In a society that’s come to conflate funerals with celebratory ceremonies, these burned soldiers must have created an agonizing dilemma. Emotionally, instinctually, we want nothing more than to lash out, shun the dead men. Rationally, however, we perceive ourselves as guardians of an elusive moral high ground, a position that forbids us from flinging these bodies into a ditch and calling it a day.
By the time the Portuguese capital was telegraphed about the situation, a full 10 hours after the crash, the seven Nazi aviators were already safely enshrouded in the church, just waiting for seven caskets to arrive to carry them underground. They wouldn’t be accurately identified until later that day, when the first German representative arrived from the Lisbon embassy. Many would follow over the next two days. The people of Aljezur, who had never seen a Nazi in the flesh, were suddenly bumping shoulders with German ambassadors, representatives for the Nazi party and the Hitler Youth, official photographers, and at least one Protestant pastor.
The funeral, at the cemetery of Aljezur, is attended by locals and members of a German entourage. (Photo courtesy of Eberhard Axel Wilhelm, via ADPHA)
The funeral took place on the 11th. The seven bodies, in seven mismatched caskets (mahogany, lined with lead) brought in from a nearby town, were buried in the local cemetery, the graves identified with a simple wooden cross. There were military honors and Nazi salutes, after which the German entourage drove back to the embassy, satisfied that their brothers-in-arms had been respectfully buried.
Yet Nazi Germany wasn’t done with Aljezur.
Five months after the funeral, the mayor received a notification: the Führer himself wished to award him, and three other men, the Order of the German Eagle, a diplomatic award usually given to foreign diplomats for their sympathy for the Nazi cause. Francisco Albano de Oliveira, town mayor, Amândio da Luz Paulino, deputy mayor, José Viriato França, leader of the local cell of the Portuguese Legion, and Vitorino Cuco, leader of the local coast guard, would go on to receive their decorations, composed of an insignia and a diploma signed by none other than Adolf Hitler, in late December.
It was one thing to bury a dead body; and another, completely different, to have Hitler sign a glorified thank-you note. Ernesto Silva, grandson of coast guard Vitorino Cuco, said his grandfather was downright embarrassed by the decoration. “My grandfather never liked this,” he said in an interview, “and he always said there was no honor in being decorated by an evil man.” All he’d done was handle the bodies of his fellow men with dignity and respect—he’d never meant to go down in history as a friend to the Nazi regime.
The funeral, at the cemetery of Aljezur, is attended by locals and members of a German entourage. (Photo courtesy of Eberhard Axel Wilhelm, via ADPHA)
At best, we could call this episode a miscommunication; at worst, a deliberate attempt to politicize the altruism of unwilling participants. When the people of Aljezur stepped up to the task of burying seven young men who’d fallen out of sky, they were simply upholding a millenia-old form of basic human decency. They wished to honor the men; it was the Germans who used the opportunity to honor the regime.
Such is the risk associated with the choice to handle the controversial dead, and it may very well be the reason behind our widespread hesitation to bury, and therefore memorialize, individuals whose actions we deem atrocious. It would bruise us, terribly, to have our kindness misconstrued. It would enrage us, perhaps most of all, to be thought of as allies to violent regimes and ideologies.
The cliff where the German plane crashed in 1943. (Photo by Rui Gaudêncio for Público)
In a video entitled Caring for the Bodies of Terrorists, our mortician Caitlin Doughty explored the postmortem political crises brought about by the deaths of Osama bin Laden, a founder of al-Qaeda, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the two men responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings. In the case of bin Laden, a perceived shortage of countries willing to receive the body led to the controversial decision to bury it at sea; in the case of Tsarnaev, it was protesters and local cemeteries actively (and sometimes violently) rejecting the body that caused it to be sent out of state, for burial in a private cemetery.
As a result, those who do take the risk of burying these unpopular dead have come to lean on the power of disclaimers. A representative from Islamic Funeral Services of Virginia, the organization that provided the plot for Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s burial, said, “we strongly disagree with his violent actions, but that does not release us from our obligation to return his body to the earth.” Peter Stefan, the funeral director who handled the matter, echoed the thought: “the fact that I’m burying him doesn’t mean that I’m condoning anything. I’m just burying a dead, human body. If you take an oath to bury the dead, you do it.”
There’s no guarantee that the world at large will respect the sentiment behind these disclaimers—no guarantee that ultraviolent souls won’t flock to these grave sites in search of validation, or that heartbroken members of the public won’t descend upon them in righteous anger. There’s no ensuring that these gravesites will ever blend into the communities that harbor them.
The seven graves remain undisturbed at the cemetery of Aljezur. (Photo by Rui Gaudêncio for Público)
The town of Aljezur was lucky. Today, seven headstones mark the spot where seven wooden crosses used to be. The aviators remain undisturbed, but the space they occupy in the local cemetery has acquired a new meaning, one that far transcends their individual names. It is on their resting place that locals gather, once a year, to mourn the lives lost in the World Wars. They are Portuguese, German, and British, and somewhere in the commonalities between their mother tongues they’ve agreed to reject the Nazi version of the story. Fascists are not welcome. Those willing to learn from history, however, are.
In the end, perhaps this is all we can hope for: a future where we can reconcile the human need for a respectful burial with the very real pain caused by some of the dead we choose to welcome back into our communities. The learning process is bound to be steep, and painful, and contradictory at times.So we might as well start now.
Rafaela Ferraz is a writer of short stories, essays, and a variety of articles on strange, slightly macabre, and often overlooked chapters of Portuguese history. She blogs at rafaelaferraz.com, conducts research on the collection and display of human remains on Patreon, and tweets @RafaelaWrites
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, and funding more frequent content. We’d love to keep pushing the funerary envelope in 2018. Visit our Support Us page, for a variety of easy ways to contribute.
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