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Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban,alt.fan.cecil-adams
From: het3@crash.cts.com (Harry MF Teasley)
Subject: Re: Cremation and interment
Date: Wed, 16 Aug 1995 04:35:08 GMT

Failing to not be successful in not being unclear, Kim Dyer said:

>Actually, open caskets where the family sits around and mourns is
>very common among eastern European catholics as well. Often there
>are photographs taken of people sitting with the deceased, and these
>photographs are displayed homes along with more standard photographs
>of living loved ones (and older photographs of the deceased). The
>house I grew up in had several of these, and it was common among
>the family's "old country" friends.

A few months ago, my fiancee and I were walking through a junk^Wantique store and came across a photo of a child apparently sleeping on a staircase, in a sitting position but with her head drooping forward. I thought it was a pretty nice photo (the back of it said 1923; it was pretty old, in any case), and Yatsze said that the kid might very well be dead. I scoffed and she said no, it was a very real possibility, that photos of that sort were once quite common in the US. I failed to believe her fully.

For my birthday she got me an incredible book, "Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America," a retrospective of photos of dead people, essentially. (Sorry, no ISBN; I'm at the office. ISBN on request later.) There are photos of parents holding their dead children, both dressed in their Sunday best. There are photos of corpses posed to look as if alive, with eyelids opened and the corpses propped upright. THey are really eerie.

There are photos of children made to look as if asleep or drowsing, which are really creepy, given the condition of some of the kids. Also depicted are women in mourning attire, and dead folks layed out in traditional mortuary settings, with open caskets and flowers and everything.

I getthe impression that folks then dealt with death a bit better than we as Americans do now. They really confronted it, acknowledged it, and made dealing with it more a part of life. Perhaps I'm worng, but it just seems to me that today we try to hide from death, and keep the whole dead person thing very antiseptic and sterile, in an emotional sense. Hide the body, let morticians do mysterious things with the body and our money, things we generally don't investigate, and we just try to put the whole thing out of sight, out of mind. I could be talking out my ass, I dunno; I've only been to a couple of funerals of folks close to me.

But the book is pretty interesting, if you want to check it out. My favorite photo is one of a couple holding their dead two-year-old girl, both parents in poses of grief, with a table with medicine bottles to one side, thus setting up a little plot to the picture, suggesting that medicine and science was tried in an effort to save the girl but that it failed. Really sad scene.

Harry "Such is life" Teasley