Death’s Changing Landscape
An overview of shifting practices surrounding death and burial should prompt Christians to reflect on why we care for the dead the way we do.
Review by Cort Gatliff
What do you want done with your body when you die?
How we answer this question is telling. What we as a society consider acceptable ways to handle mortal remains hints at our core values and beliefs. It communicates—far more than we realize—our assumptions about personhood, what matters most in life, and what happens to us after we cross that great divide. Care for the dead is never a neutral activity.
It’s significant, then, that the way Americans are choosing to dispose of dead bodies is undergoing a major shift. While practices and rituals around death have never been static, the last few decades have seen what author Shannon Lee Dawdy calls a “quiet revolution.” As one funeral director told her, “There have been more changes in the funeral business in the last ten years than in the last hundred.”
In American Afterlives: Reinventing Death in the 21st Century, Dawdy sets out on a roving journey across the United States to understand the reasons for those changes, and to see firsthand what care for the dead looks like in modern America. As an anthropologist and archaeologist, Dawdy is a fitting guide for this trip inside our nation’s funeral homes, embalming rooms, crematoriums, and cemeteries. Her line of work has trained her to “read” death practices to gain a deeper understanding of past societies, and now she’s using those same skills to help us understand how our current cultural moment is leading us to reimagine death.
We tend to contemplate death in the abstract, but our encounters with death are always unique and intensely personal. Dawdy, for instance, became interested in the changing face of death when she lost four loved ones over five years. She began asking larger questions about what happens after we die, both spiritually and physically. The result is an insightful, and at times quite moving, cultural snapshot of the unique and personal ways people are trying to make sense of loss, grief, and their own mortality.
Dawdy’s book highlights the fact that, like nearly all aspects of American life, the most formative forces shaping death care today are individualism and capitalism. Traditional religious commitments, along with their prescribed death practices and rites, are declining. “Americans now define their beliefs about the human spirit in a highly individualized way, independent of organized religion,” Dawdy writes. But the hunger for practices that bring meaning and order to the reality of death is still alive and well. Rather than seeking out a pastor who can preside over a burial, people are inventing bespoke rituals that allow “everyday citizens to become their own shamans and mediums.”
While death care was once conducted according to a community’s established practices and beliefs, Dawdy found that the modern American view says “the death ritual is best controlled not by a group but by the individual.” Death is the final chapter of one’s life story, and we want control over how our story is told. We want to assert our individual preferences and personality traits, even in death. Dawdy tells the story of one woman who underwent a type of embalming that allowed her body to be arranged sitting at her kitchen table smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer, all while wearing her favorite team’s jersey. A less extreme version of this can be found in the average funeral home, where it is commonplace to find customizable caskets and urns designed to reflect the personality of the deceased.
Our hope is not in living on as a tree, nor asserting our individualism till the bitter end—or even being remembered at all.
The rise of cremation has been by far the most drastic change in how we care for the dead. In 2015, cremation overtook burial as the country’s top choice for dealing with mortal remains, and the latest report from the National Funeral Directors Association predicts the cremation rate in the United States will reach 78 percent by 2040. Cremation’s surge in popularity, Dawdy writes, has led Americans to “bumbl[e] around trying to come up with rituals, etiquette, and rationales for a material practice that was decided upon with little thought for the aftermath.”
There’s no shortage of entrepreneurs who have recognized this reality and stepped in to fill this ritualistic void. Since there are relatively few laws about what can and cannot be done with cremains (cremated remains), the dying and the grieving have nearly endless options, ranging from the standard to the truly bizarre. Most people tend to keep ashes tucked away in an urn or spread them in a place important to the deceased. But for the right price, you can now have your loved one’s ashes forged into jewelry, painted into a portrait, infused into tattoo ink, mixed with gun powder for a shotgun shell, or even launched into space. When it comes to death care in America, the sky’s the limit—literally.
In Dawdy’s survey of the modern American way of death, she explores another movement that seeks to recover a simpler, more ancient way of caring for the dead: green burials. The goal of green burials is to leave as small of an ecological footprint as possible. This means, among other things, no embalming, only biodegradable materials, and hand-dug graves if possible. Many green burial advocates forgo the funeral industry altogether by having friends and family wash and prepare their body. This is, of course, how most humans throughout history have been buried. As always, though, there’s an underlying ethical and anthropological framework shaping this movement. The people Dawdy encounters describe green burial as an opportunity to become part of a tree or to return to nature so their spirit can live on in new ways. Christians would do well to consider how we should incorporate many aspects of the green burial movement into our own care of the dead, while also being aware of the pagan-adjacent beliefs held by many of the movement’s practitioners.
As I was reading American Afterlives, I couldn’t help but wonder what a similar book would be like even just five years from now. Changes in death care often follow major societal events. The Civil War is a preeminent example; one of the main reasons embalming became a widespread practice in the United States is because suddenly there was a significant number of decaying bodies that needed to be transported home from battle.
We’re now almost two years into the coronavirus pandemic, and we’ve seen things that were once unthinkable. People saying goodbye to family over Facetime while dying alone in a hospital room. Refrigerated vans storing bodies in the streets of New York City. Funerals have been delayed, cancelled, or completely reimagined. Most significantly, it’s become common for funerals to be livestreamed. Perhaps this is the next stage in the evolving practices of how Americans face death. But is that necessarily a good thing that we should embrace?
For followers of Jesus, this book is an opportunity to examine the ways in which we have wholly adopted certain cultural practices often with little or no theological reflection. We are called to live so that, as the Apostle Paul writes, “Christ will be highly honored in my body, whether by life or by death” (Phil. 1:20). Our hope is not in living on as a tree, nor asserting our individualism till the bitter end—or even being remembered at all. Our hope is in the reality that we have died with Christ and therefore we also will live with him. The way we care for our dead should prioritize the proclamation of this story, and this story alone.
Cort Gatliff is the Assistant Minister for Discipleship at South Highland Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
American Afterlives: Reinventing Death in the 21st Century was published by Princeton University Press on October 19, 2021. Fare Forward thanks them for a provision of an advanced copy to our reviewer. You can purchase your own copy on their website here.
