By Ann Neumann

The history of the work of the dead is a history of how they dwell in us—individually and communally. It is a history of how we imagine them to be, how they give meaning to our lives, how they structure public spaces, politics, and time. It is a history of the imagination, a history of how we invest the dead…with meaning. It is really the greatest possible history of the imagination. – Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead

Last fall, the body of The Washington Post’s legendary editor, Ben Bradlee, was reinterred in a new mausoleum that his wife, Sally Quinn, a longtime religion columnist for the paper, had purchased just inside the entrance to Washington, DC’s exclusive Oak Hill cemetery. But a legal dustup concerning the placement of the “neo-Classical style mausoleum, made of gray-white granite and wrought iron,” challenges the permanence of Bradlee’s final resting place. The 22-acre cemetery is practically full and strapped with costly upkeep—which is why, despite historical preservation status, Quinn was granted permission to purchase the plot, the first of several new special plots along the historical cemetery’s entrance. Their price has been reported as up to half a million dollars each.

But the Cultural Landscape Foundation, an advocacy group for historical preservation in DC, has challenged Oak Hill’s sale of new plots along the entranceway. At first, the city sided with petitioners; later it concluded that Bradlee’s mausoleum was a worthy exception. Then it all got ugly:

In one moment of bluster, at a hearing in late June, Matthew Green, a lawyer for the city, went as far as to suggest that Washington was dealing with “ghoulish moves by an officious intermeddler.” That led to accusations of ad hominem attacks and an assertion by a lawyer for the petitioners, which also include the D.C. Preservation League, that the city was misrepresenting their motives.

The case is expected to conclude this month, but observers note that it could continue into the fall, marking one year since Bradlee’s body was moved to the mausoleum.

In the context of Washington, DC, where the clash of privilege and preservation is frequent, the legal case is commonplace; but in the context of history, the placement of Bradlee’s body raises fascinating questions about the legal, medical, political religious and social importance of corpses. The dead are busy, as it turns out, in their service to the living.

In his new book, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains, Thomas Laqueur, a history professor at UC Berkeley, excavates these questions surrounding history and customs of the dead. We know—and have always known—that a corpse is no longer the person we once knew. It is refuse, vacant, and no matter what we do, it will ultimately rot way. And yet, as early as 10,000 BC, humans cared for bodies in some way. The dead are “mere matter, on the one hand,” Laqueur writes, “and beings who have a social existence, on the other.”

Laqueur took up the subject of the dead after decades of trying to find a way into the material. In the book’s introduction, he recounts the deaths in his own family and the “magic” of both knowing that a body has no value and yet that it is extremely important. He includes photos of his early ancestors’ graves, which he came across in Europe, and recounts the significance of their placement, proximity to particular other graves, and even his emotions upon locating them. The Work of the Dead comes from this long-fostered interest in what we do for the dead.

Diogenes (ca. 412-323 B.C.E.) gives the book its thread: the “Dog Philosopher” told his students that when he died he wanted his corpse to be tossed over the city wall to be eaten by dogs. The tension of The Work of the Dead is that we all understand that Diogenes was right—when a person is gone from their body, a corpse no longer matters—and yet, Laqueur writes, Diogenes was also “existentially wrong, wrong in a way that defies all cultural logic.” The book provides us with a special lens on culture-making, a new way to think about how the dead shape culture, how they animate our personal and social history, marking our world with sacral influence whether or not we believe in anything at all.

Refreshingly, Laqueur doesn’t try to tell us what human attitudes toward the dead have been—from what he calls “deep time” through to today—but he does fill The Work of the Dead with stories that show us how practices have changed; stories that show what purposes the dead serve in society. He reserves his primary focus for Western Europe in the 18th to 20th centuries.

Largely until Christendom, we buried our dead where we could, sometimes with markers (particularly the more wealthy) but more commonly without: on farms, hilltops, or amidst trees. But with the advent of the Catholic Church, proximity to holiness gathered the community of the dead into churchyards. Surrounding churches and consecrated by the parish priest, the churchyard was often without markers of any kind, the bodies of the dead placed coffin-less under dirt mounds. They faced east to catch the first glimpse of the morning sun but also the first glimpse of the Son of God when He would return to collect His followers at Resurrection.

Churchyards were lumpy with the decaying bodies of the dead, gravediggers often turning up bones when they dug, bodies in all states of decay giving way to new corpses over the centuries. But the churchyard was also a community; everyone in the parish had a family member there and knew a place was reserved for them inside its boundaries. If one was not buried in a churchyard—often the fate of suicides, for instance, who were relegated to burial at crossroads—one lost membership in the community, cast out, alone for eternity.

To walk by the churchyard on the way to service was to remember and acknowledge those who had died. The landed families were afforded family plots or markers. Important members were given burial places inside the church itself, the closer to the altar the closer to God. Or closer to the saints, who could intercede on behalf of the dead. All burials had a fee and these special placements cost more, but on the whole, the churchyard was a place where burial was egalitarian, a community of jumbled bones with its own values and characteristics, not the lone bodies of individuals. “The reality of the spirit world, including the ghostly dead, stood as a bulwark against atheism and materialism,” writes Laqueur.

The Reformation brought new attention to the “idolatry” of the dead, the needy saints and their holy promises, but practices remained largely unchanged throughout religious upheavals. Martin Luther and his followers challenged indulgences, payments to the church for lesser penance or time in hell, but also the worship of the special dead, the saints. Between the Reformation (which began in the early 1500s) and the 1880s, such idolatry and payments may have ceased, but burial, the closer to the church altar the better, was still coveted.

Slowly, however, as parish bishops challenged the burial of Nonconformists, as science pressured prior understanding of health and the natural world, and as the Enlightenment established leading thinkers who were less beholden to the church, the old regime of the churchyard began to change. The late 1700s signaled “the end of an old regime of the dead and birth of a new one in which history came to challenge, if not replace, metaphysics in creating ‘a living solidarity with what is gone,’” writes Laqueur, citing the French thinker (and Jesuit) Michel de Certeau (1925-1986).

Laqueur recounts the details of two Enlightenment figures whose deaths helped end the old churchyard regime and begin the one of the cemetery. The deaths and burials of Voltaire in 1778 and David Hume in 1776 formed a turning point in the history of the dead, disrupting the “long tradition of judging the meaning of life by its end,” by last words, expressions of pain, and the rites and place of burial. Complicated negotiations with churchmen surrounded the deaths of both men, each (or their family members; Voltaire’s nephew was an abbe) giving up just enough conciliation to allow their bodies to be buried with honor, in the churchyard. The church still determined who was worthy of memory and who was not.

 

Voltaire and Hume had seemingly good deaths, despite their renowned antagonism of the church, a fact that consternated the public. Opponents claimed they were wicked men and impervious to the holy; the general public took their good deaths as a sign that the churchyard was no longer bounded by the old order. To most, here was proof that the churchyard–and indeed, any kind of good death at all–was not reserved only for those with standing in their bishop’s eyes. Or any bishop’s eyes. One could challenge the church and still get into the dirt (and presumably whatever afterlife one imagine) with honor. The tyranny of the bishops over burial had come to an end.

The new order was also ushered in with the help of those who campaigned for more hygienic cities at the turn of the 19th century. The smell of decaying bodies, they claimed, was a health hazard: a cause of illness and disease. Ideas of modernity beckoned and removal of the unsightly and unseemly was limiting social advancement. Bones poking up through churchyard soil, rotting bodies tumbled under the stones of church ails became unacceptable for progress.

It’s a concern that is still with us today, the health hazards of dead bodies, despite the fact that science has again and again proven the safety of corpses. But the new regime, the cemetery, promised vast landscaped acres filled with fresh air, monuments, mausoleums and views. The wealthy began constructing gardens that incorporated nostalgic effects of classical landscapes: streams were dammed, mausoleums to great ancient philosophers were built. Now the dead could keep eternal company with the world’s great dead, not just their neighbors.

New cemeteries, established as businesses, claimed the attention of families who wanted to be buried together, and of a public in thrall with the ability to buy honor and, perhaps, a higher class status with permanent plots for beloved and celebrated individuals. New saints were found: a community of respectable dead whose wealth or status was proclaimed by location, towering obelisk, or granite mausoleum. Race, origin, and religious creed were irrelevant if the money for a plot and a marker could be handed over.

The poor were also welcomed into these new places of the dead, their stacking in single plots subsidizing the expansive plots of the more wealthy. The cemetery was outside of congested cities, peaceful as a park, a place for quiet repose and contemplation. Today a variety of burial methods are available, if indeed a person chooses burial at all—and not cremation or to have their body donated to science or shot into space.

The Work of the Dead also examines our contemporary use of memorials and naming of the dead as a means of keeping the dead close, of making and remaking meaning from historical tragedies, of creating heroes out of those who have died. The power that the dead have over us today is very different from the power of the old churchyard regime. And yet it still shapes our understanding of events and enchants the world with the magic of memory. Diogenes is still right, but after so many centuries, our dead remain sacred members of society long after their bones have gone to dust.

Laqueur writes, “…what is modern about the work of the dead in our era is this: a protean magic that we believe despite ourselves. I think that death is not and never has been a mystery; the mystery is our capacity as a species, as collectivities and as individuals, to make so very much of absence and specifically of the poor, naked, inert dead body.” Cemeteries with names like Forest Lawn in Los Angeles or Green-wood in Brooklyn are the sprawling, modern—yet sacred—burial places of today.

Or, like Oak Hill in Washington, DC, where the widow of a famous newspaper editor has bought, with a vast amount of money, her husband’s place in a sacred pantheon of Washington’s who’s who, a mausoleum fitting for his outsized personality, accomplishments and scandals, an eternity in the company of others who can afford half million dollar plots. Location, as with all real estate purchases, also matters for burial. As in the old days of crypts beneath the church altar, Ben Bradlee will be close to what is most holy in Washington, DC, the forever community of his dead, but venerated and still commanding, peers.

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Past “The Patient Body” columns can be found here.

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Ann Neumann is a contributing editor at The Revealer and Guernica magazine and a visiting scholar at The Center for Religion and Media, NYU. Neumann is the author of The Good Death: An Exploration of Dying in America (Beacon Press, 2016).

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.