cRam Session: The New Good Death

We've started changing the way we think about death and dying these days, particularly our burial practices - from blasting cremated ashes into space to using them to build artificial reefs, from human composting to turning cremains into diamonds for jewelry.

Rituals are a culture's magic, and it's important to culture that we have rituals in common. We once had a common ritual called The Good Death, a 15th-century Catholic ritual that was later adapted by Anglican cleric Jeremy Taylor. By the Victorian era, Taylor's "The Rule and Exercise of Holy Dying" was on nearly everyone's parlor side table in the U.S., giving people a how-to on dying well. According to this ritual, if a dying person went through all the steps - such as being told they're dying, dying at home, remaining stoic and calm, and professing their sins - then they were guaranteed heaven.

The Good Death started to die out, so to speak, after the Civil War, because hundreds of thousands of men died without the ritual. That kind of an existential "quake" forced a huge question: Were those soldiers who hadn't had the ritual damned forever, or was there another way to salvation? This question sparked the Mortality Revolution in the early 20th century.

There are still holdovers of The Good Death practices - for example, we still lay out our dead in the carefully constructed domestic environment of the funeral "home." But I think the new practices people are coming up with are a sign of a second Mortality Revolution. Full-body burial and embalming are very hard on the environment and can be very expensive, and perhaps starting to rethink the meaning of our commemorative practices is a good thing.

What is your favorite assignment you have students do?

I'm teaching this course as a QEP Fellow in the VCU RAMPS initiative, which focuses on real-world applications. So I'm having students work in groups to create a death education event for other VCU students, which puts a project-based learning experience at the heart of the course. One element is using an "elder interview" to explore what the elders in their lives have learned about what it means to live a good life. Students will use these responses to create material for our event.

We're living in an age when generational memory is rapidly being lost, so having a project where the students are tasked with interviewing people close to them will help fill these gaps in memory.

How does an element of this subject intersect intriguingly with a different field?

We take the photograph for granted, especially the way it has hugely disrupted linear time and reality. It's hard to imagine that 200 years ago, it wasn't even possible to have a photographic image of someone after death - that once someone had died, there would be no ghostly image of them floating around in frames on mantels for us to revisit.

I don't think it's a coincidence that our death practices started to subtly shift as the photograph took hold of culture in the early to mid-1800s. Postmortem photography, "sleeping angel" photography of dead infants and children, and the battlefield photographs from the Civil War and later are testaments to how much power the photograph has had as a way to place a physical barrier between us and the finality of death.

cRam Session is a VCU News feature that highlights the breadth of offerings in the VCU Bulletin course catalog and the wide-ranging expertise of the instructors. Assistant professor and thanatologist Amy Tudor, Ph.D., teaches in the Department of Focused Inquiry and is a certified death doula.

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