I don’t really know a lot about Santa Muerte or Saint Death. After I read this article, I remembered seeing the various Santa Muerte statues in Mexican stores but never really thought twice about it.
This Washington Post piece (linked above) brings a whole new angle to worshiping (some use the word “cult”) Saint Death. The article also includes an amazing photo montage of the monthly Saint Death festivities in Mexico City.
And, as always, YouTube has something to contribute…
A few weeks ago, various news outlets reported the story of Spc. Chancellor Keesling, an American soldier in Iraq who committed suicide. While incidents of suicide among soldiers who are currently active and those returned home is certainly newsworthy, the focus of this particular story was quite different. Although Mr. Keesling received a proper military burial, his family did not receive the standard condolence letter sent by the president, as is customary for fallen soldiers.
This didn’t sit well with the family. Was he not a hero too? Did he not serve his country honorably? Mr. Keesling’s family then found out the reality: there would be no condolence letter — it was a matter of policy. Incensed, Mr. Keesling’s father, Gregg, wrote letters to President Obama and Army Chief of Staff Gen. George W. Casey Jr. asking them to reconsider the policy. You can read the letter here.
An Op-Ed piece in Friday’s New York Times also addresses the issue, which looks at the notion that recognition of soldier suicide valorizes or venerates death.
I have mixed feelings on this issue. I can certainly see how a grieving family would want to have their son or daughter’s military service recognized and respected and how a letter from the president would help ease that pain just a bit. However, I also don’t think killing oneself is the same as dying in combat, getting killed by friendly fire or any other way while serving. It is a different kind of death — or so we are to believe — one that does not jibe with the heroic propaganda and selfless ideology of the military.
This does not mean that Mr. Keesling did not serve his country honorably or that he doesn’t deserve recognition somehow. But ultimately, it is Mr. Keesling’s family that will live with the pain of his death for the rest of their lives, and no letter is going to change that. For President Obama and other military officials, a condolence letter is just part and parcel of the war machine, or S.O.P (standard operating procedure) in military terms. Although the Administration is looking into their current policies surrounding condolence letters, suicide, for now, is not considered “honorable.”
I believe that focusing on the root causes of depression and supporting mental health efforts for military personnel is the best strategy — and will hopefully help lessen the number of suicides in the first place — and the pain for those left behind.
This episode of This American Life re-aired yesterday, providing me a driveway moment (well… a snow-deranged street parking moment). If you missed it then or in 2007, have a listen online to these three stories exploring how the rest — the living left behind — find peace or stay in pieces.
Examining the emotional impact of the right to die, the last story is particularly striking. A growing old but generally healthy woman prepares herself and her family for her suicide because she fears suffering (and making her family suffer) the dementia that consumed her own mother. Her son is left in the horrible position of wanting to comfort his mother and respect her wishes while being sick with shock and grief about her oncoming death.
Caracas, Venezuela, has long had a bad reputation when it comes to crime: murder, robbery and kidnapping are commonplace ills, as well as crooked cops who cover things up. Criminals are increasingly targeting a new pool of victims — the dead — immune to murder but not kidnapping and assault.
Tombs are shattered and graves dug up not for treasures buried with the bodies or even for scrap metal, but for the bones themselves, which are used in rituals for Palo, a Cuban religion. The bones are said to have ancestral energy; the more important the deceased, the more powerful the bones and, presumably, the more effective the ceremony.
Skulls fetch $2000, while femurs get about $450. Meanwhile, police demand bribes from journalists wishing to cover the story and told a grieving man that it’s illegal to close his own parents’ grave (never mind opening it in the first place). Inside it, the man’s mother’s skull had been stolen; underneath her was his father, still intact and susceptible to ransack, which the man hoped to prevent by repairing the tomb.
Check out the Times video for more about Palo and the bone thievery. One palero, or Palo practitioner, claims they “do not get the bones the way people think” but gives no insight into how they do. The guy seems a bit shady, but I still gotta wonder — is Palo alone the reason for this black market of human bones? If not… what the heck is going on?
Just when you thought there were enough options for final disposition, a company in Melbourne, Australia, invents a trolley that will cart around a corpse then deposit it vertically with minimal blunder into a narrow hole. The new six feet under is ten feet deep and two feet wide; bodies are sheathed in biodegradable sacks. Not only does this make it “eco-friendly,” such Upright Burials (the name of the company) would take up less real estate in space-sore cemeteries. As it is, the burials will be performed in a designated field outside of Melbourne that, once full, will be converted back into pasture.
Absent a coffin and the all fuss of a headstone (names are instead inscribed in a memorial wall), burial packages are about 60 percent cheaper than the average traditional burial. According to the Daily Mail Online article,
But Mr Dupleix [the company director] believes principle rather than price is the main reason for interest in vertical plots.
He said: “Most people are attracted by the simplicity of the project and the concept of being far more in touch with nature.”
You know… targeting poor people doesn’t automatically make you a jerk. And if that isn’t true, then it’s definitely true that greenwashing poverty (not to mention death) is a one-way ticket to more than 10 feet deep.
This article is a few weeks old so it isn’t breaking news. That said, I just noticed the video and watched it. The images of all the unclaimed bodies stacked up in the morgue freezer is a tragedy. I’ve been covering the unclaimed body situation in Detroit (as well as across America) in the Death + the Economy section of Death Ref since the summer of 2009.
It is a telling moment for any nation at a crossroads with itself when a charity is started not to help the living in need but the dead. Of course the living still need to bury the dead (so this isn’t clearly a life vs. death issue) but the formation of the May We Rest in Peace charity to help bury the unclaimed dead bodies in Detroit is a sign of what is to come.
Watch the video. We’re in the middle of a tragedy. Soon enough, it will become a farce.
There’s a shiny new final disposition in town, attempting to gain ground on the green burial bandwagon: Resomation, developed in Scotland in 2007, also known as bio-cremation.
According to the Reuters article, all that remains is “some bone residue and a syrupy brown liquid that is flushed down the drain. The bones can be crushed and returned to the family as with cremation.”
This last bit seems to be the only real relation to cremation: loved ones receive a packet of bone fragments which people may bury, memorialize on the mantle, put into tattoos, shoot into space, fire into diamonds, et cetera.
Wait, did that say the syrupy brown liquid of death is flushed down the drain? Indeed it does. Resomated bodies are as natural as any other human waste we routinely put through the pipes. Predictably, this makes some people uncomfortable, such as Catholics, who thwarted a move to introduce bio-cremation in New York a couple years ago, citing it “not a respectful way to dispose of human remains.”
Fair enough, though just as arguably, cremation or burial are not respectful ways of treating the earth. Given the significant energy savings and pollution avoidance, environmentalism may very well prevail — plus, you can retrieve and recycle metal parts, like hip and knee replacements. I just hope they can settle on a name that isn’t obtuse, misleading or trademarked.
With its excess of murders and dearth of death practitioner regulation, Guatemala is home to “mobile morticians,” chasing ambulances and staking out city morgues to be the first to pounce on mostly low-income, grieving relatives. They’ve even earned a deathly moniker: “calaqueros,” or skullmongers, as seen holding the umbrella below, patiently waiting for a wallet to arrive.
Not only will they track you down in disturbing, often offensive ways, including paying the police to tip them off, skullmongers set up shop wherever possible, including auto body shops: caskets sold up front, corpses disemboweled and embalmed in back among the engine blocks.
This seems to drive costs down (at least?)… but back-alley embalming can’t be far behind. See the AP story (linked at top) for a number of additional photos.
So yeah. There are a number of more important articles that I SHOULD be posting to Death Ref right now, but I couldn’t resist this one. Especially since Swedish officials are saying that Elk can become aggressive after eating fermented apples.
I like to think that this is a warning. Eventually the animals will all strike back against the humans for all the hunting, the terrible t-shirts that use their images without asking, and five pound bags of beef jerky. LOOK OUT Wisconsin!!!!
If the dogs in Japan lash out, it’s going to be really really bad…
Friend of Death Reference Desk, Collier White, has just published the second issue of his collaborative writing/arts/criticism blog, Quodlibetica. The theme? Death. Olly, you know how to get us.
The issue, or “Constellation”, as it’s called, describes the issue thusly:
Death is an ideal subject for art: marginalized, terrifying, and ultimate. In our second constellation, Quodlibetica looks at death in contemporary art and invites writers and artists to talk about death, art, and ethics: Jan Estep questions whether killing animals can ever be justifiable in the name of art, while Collier White visited with Pamela Valfer, an artist who draws and works with dead animals. Patricia Briggs explores death and violence, kept at a distance, in Roxanne Jackson’s work. In our portfolio, Ana Lois-Borzi explores death up close, in a grieving process mediated by art. Christina Schmid focuses on angels and road movies, staples of American folklore, in current and recent shows at Franklin Artworks and form + content, while Collier White’s reviews of Antichrist and The Box dive into pop culture’s lingering obsession with death.
Explore and engage with this well-written addition to the universe of arts criticism.
The euthanasia of unwanted cats and dogs is a regular occurrence the world over. However, in Japan, it takes on epic proportions. The voracious appetite of the Japanese for all things cute, fluffy and designer has spawned one of the worst adoption/destruction ratios anywhere. Whereas, in the United States about half of the animals in shelters are euthanized; in Japan, that number climbs to a staggering 90%.
The preferred method in Japan is to euthanize the animals by dumping them in an airtight metal box—as many as eight at a time—and pumping in carbon monoxide. This CNN video features one Japanese shelter on a typical day as they round up the animals for disposition. The reporter introduces the story by warning that some viewers may find the content “objectionable.” Yes, but not in the assumed way—not for having to see dogs and cats on “death row” (a misnomer of course since they did nothing wrong to land there, other than to be born). No, it’s objectionable because of the callous disregard for life that put them there in the first place.
This Asahi Shimbun newspaper article describes the ways in which workers at an animal protection center in one Japanese prefecture are doing outreach to school children to sensitize them and teach them about animal cruelty. “Now you understand that dogs and cats also have feelings, don’t you?” a worker at the Mie animal protection center asked students at Ominato Elementary School in Ise, Mie Prefecture, in early September.
The way in which we treat animals is reflective upon how we, as a society, understand life and death. The attendant value we assign to different living things is a sad commentary on the priorities of consumer-driven cultures (USA included) willing to sacrifice innocent life forms in the name of feeding faddish, acquisitive tendencies.
While specific rites and rituals vary across cultures and time, anyone who has been to a few memorial services or even seen them on TV understands funerals. We may not know how to feel about death or the deceased, but we do know how we’re supposed to act.
A funeral, after all, is a performance — and I don’t mean that snidely. There are common and expected settings, props and costumes, with overlapping scenes but well-defined acts. We have roles to play and lines to say and even when we screw up (can’t stop crying! ack, can’t start!), we don’t. Funerals are flexible. Flubs are forgiven. Things mean Stuff, and if all goes as planned, including the unplanned, people walk away changed.
Because we all “get” funerals and know what we’re supposed to get out of them, it’s no small wonder the funeral performance has been subverted and co-opted as a means of social commentary and to express and influence public opinion. Mock funerals have been used throughout history as vehicles for satire, issue awareness, protest and social change.
On November 14, the citizens of Venice held a mock funeral for their city and its dying population, currently below 60,000. The 1993 total was a healthier 74,000; in 1971, the city topped 108,300. The mock funeral on Saturday was an effort to promote awareness of the problem and invigorate Venetian pride.
Take it away, Al Jazeera!
The day before, copping the same culturally understood form, students at Florida State University held a funeral for gay rights and marriage equality complete with a eulogy, funeral procession and mock burial with opening and closing remarks. The demonstration was in reaction to the recent overturn of gay marriage rights in Maine.
Lastly, just before Halloween, a sports bar in Green Bay, Wisconsin, working with a radio station, erected a coffin containing a Brett Favre effigy, encapsulating the “he’s dead to us” emotion Packer fans have felt after quarterback Favre temporarily quit the NFL then signed on with the neighboring arch nemesis, the Vikings. The initial spectacle attracted 500 mourners for the procession, including hearses and pall-bearers, while others came to view the “corpse” over the next couple of days, on display in the corner of the bar.
Mean spirited? Um… yes? The radio station allegedly received death threats for the incident. But satire-too-far aside, as well as the abiding silliness of the whole thing, devoted Packer fans have felt genuine sadness, loss and betrayal about Favre’s defection. Some mourners brought pictures, football cards, and other mementos to place inside the coffin. It’s all part of the gag, but it’s also a familiar way to deal with grief and work through the frustration and pain of someone who is dead — or someone who you wished was, or who feels dead to you anyway.
These three examples are just within the last few weeks; numerous other instances exist, such as mock funerals for the First Amendment or symbolic funerals for aborted fetuses (this latter being slightly different in tone, though still enacted as a form of protest and demonstration). Though varying in intention, mock funerals invariably capture attention, sometimes shockingly. Death as metaphor is one thing; to see it enacted and performed can be moving, disturbing or even infuriating — and because of our cultural familiarity, it works. It’s easy to know what’s going on and how we’re supposed to feel about it — even if we disagree with the issue of contention.
I hoped to do more research on this, to get some historical context and cultural studies input. I found next to nothing on this topic, which surprises me. “Mock funeral” doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia page (gasp!). Please comment if you know of any books or articles about this — or give me a grant or book advance and I’ll get right on it.
So yeah. There are a number of more important articles that I SHOULD be posting to Death Ref right now, but I couldn’t resist this one. Especially since Swedish officials are saying that Elk can become aggressive after eating fermented apples. 
