Mourner for Hire

In this episode we’ll look at how, as the bereaved, we find solace in ritual – everything from providing comfort food to hiring professional mourners.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
From how Stuff Works dot com. This is the Stuff
of Life. Welcome to the Stuff of Life. I'm your host,
Julie Douglas, and today we have a companion to the
previous episode Life at the Death Cafe and our discussion
about what makes a good death and what we can

(00:20):
learn from a study on end of life dreams and visions.
And this companion episode will look at how as the
bereaved we find solace in ritual death can feel monumental,
and the ceremonies around it are an attempt to acknowledge
this immensity, particularly when the person is a beloved public figure.

(00:44):
From his beloved second home at Warm Springs, Georgia, the
body of Franklin Delano Roosevelt moves on the first stages
of a journey to his final resting place. Scores of
sufferers from infantil paralysis sorrowfully bid farewell to their great
friend and the factor. Not all funeral rights need to
be grand. There's comfort in small gestures, and some of

(01:07):
these rituals seem kind of commonplace to us. One thing
I really like about American mortuary rituals or practices is
this idea that somebody dies, people bring them food, it's
a very American thing, and I think that sometimes it
becomes this like really weird thing where people are like
expanded with so much food that they don't know what

(01:28):
to do with it. But it's the gesture of like
performing solidarity and support for somebody who is in distress.
Other rituals to a Westerner may seem exotic. When we're
looking at something like China or Taiwan, we have a
rise of professional mourners that are for higher often actors

(01:51):
or Chinese opera performers. That's Dr liv Nielsen Studs of
Emory University, a bioarchaeologist and archaeologist special rising in funerary
practices and burials. We talked to her about the idea
that rituals are critical in both their ability to allow
for the expression of chaos and death and to regain

(02:12):
our footing and life. All along the seven mile route,
people gather to honor President Roosevelt and his ideals. One
hallmark of death rituals is the public display of brievement.
And whether these displays or food offerings, crying or dancing,
there's a performance aspect to them. Like the New Orleans

(02:35):
Jazz funeral, it's a great example of of marking this
time especial and kind of like creating uh a form
of celebration around this transition. The jazz funeral is based

(02:59):
on the European fraternal society model, benevolent societies formed to
take care of the sick and bury the dead. Members
of these clubs parading down the street are participating in
a rite of passage, lamenting mourners who walk with the
casket accompanied by a sad tune, only to return from
the cemetery dancing in a celebratory song. This may be

(03:30):
because in that first hurdle of overcoming death, the body
has been dealt with, at least symbolically. Across from the
White House in Lafayette Park, the men, women, and children
whom Franklin Roosevelt served so well watch in tearful silence.

(03:54):
After all, the body is the physical representation of the
person to whom we still have ten drills of connection to,
and the cadaver is a stark reminder of the loss
we feel. It's chemical breakdown signals an emotional breakdown that
we're teetering on the precipice. There is an anthropologis Mary Douglas,
who who talks about anything that is that when she

(04:17):
defines the dirt, it's matter out of place, things that
are not in their place. So, for example, a hair
on the head is perfectly fine, but a hair in
your soup, it's really disgusting because it's not in this
right place. Doctor cites French psychoanalysts. Surely a Kristava's concept
of abject a thing or an idea that sits on

(04:39):
the boundary of society as a threat to its structure.
The cadaver, then is the ultimate abject. It's that matter
out of place. So we need to take care of
this body in one way or another. And the very
very great majority of mortar practices and different culture as

(05:00):
there is a crucial component of the mortar ritual that
has to do with handling the body. And it's this
handling of the body that gives us the idea that
we can reclaim it from uncertainty and disorder. The way
in which we then handle the body has to reston
it in some ways, with our ideas about what death is,

(05:24):
what life is, how to treat a human body, and
by doing that we don't only kind of transition this
individual into another existence, but we also make ourselves believe
that we can control uncontrollable death. To this end, we

(05:47):
go to great pains to arrange the body. We like
to see our loved ones. In our culture, we like
to see them the last time. We like to see
them at peace, clothed in some kind of like sleeping arrangement.
They're usually contained in a coffin. All these things that
are may seem as really banal, are like perhaps the
most important to us. So the way that we produce

(06:09):
a good death says a lot about what we believe
death should be right. It should be peaceful, should be
without pain, it should be an eternal rest. It's often
a more or less explicitly articulated idea that there's something
that comes after death. This preoccupation with order is perhaps
the reason why funeral homes thrive in the United States.

(06:31):
We want a sense of preservation, of stopping death in
its tracks. The rights of the funeral home as a
kind of home away from home, where you're no longer
having people die at home and then the wake, but
rather a place of transition. If I compare to European
morture practices that are in some other ways similar to Americans,

(06:52):
I think the embalming makes the funeral home necessary. I
think that has something to do with the rise of
this profession of like treating corpse is in in surgical
ways that requires a lot of professional know how that
the rest of us can't do. And and that and
that is a really I think it's a very very

(07:13):
interesting phenomenon because it's it seems for an outsider, so
profoundly unnecessary. Now home again to the garden of his
family home in Hyde Park, New York, comes President Roosevelt.
Here in the old and lovely Hudson River estate which
several years ago he bequeathed to the people of the
United States. The mortal remains of a man whose career

(07:36):
has known no parallel in our time will rest forever.
The work that some of these professional undertakers are doing
in communities and with bereaved people, and the way in
which they are kind of like clergy um helping people

(08:01):
through this process. I must say that that is also
something that is profoundly important. I mean, we have no
problem hiring doctors or to to care for our our
loved ones. And I think that there is still some
a lot of discomfort with undertakers in our society and

(08:24):
they do such an important work. So yes, it is
definitely possible to do that critique of like how we
have distanced ourselves from from death, but when it's our
own parents that dies, I think that we that we
still feel that in a way that's very intimate, and yes,
we hire services to help us through this, but ritual

(08:47):
specialists have existed since at least the Bronze Age. So
I have a lot of sympathy and love for what
people need at this time, and I think that good
undertakers do amazing work in helping people through something that
we need help through. So much of what we do
is held up to ridicule, but it's just how you

(09:08):
blur your eyes, whether you want to see the silliness
of what we humans do when someone dies, or if
you look at it carefully and seeing it something deeply
supply that's undertaker and poet Thomas Lynch from The Undertaking,
a documentary that dr shows her students to illustrate the

(09:30):
importance of funeral directors in their role as guides through ritual.
These rituals help individuals in societies transition from one state
to another by putting a kind of fence post around
the experience of death, and for a moment in time,
we suspend normalcy, and during that period in time, things

(09:52):
can be different, and often are explicitly different. If you
doubt the power of ritual is a transformative thing, giving
us permission to go a little crazy. Consider this example
becoming a member of a fraternity on a campus or
a sorority. So when you rush, or when you manifest
your interest in becoming a member, you get selected, and

(10:14):
at that point you are no longer just any student,
but you're not yet a brother or a sister of
the fraternity. You are between and betwixt categories. And during
that period that you are kind of trying out and
like being initiated into, you're going to do stuff and

(10:34):
experience things that are not really part of your daily
life and often explicitly break the rules of society. So
it could be things like, well, we know about all
of these kinds of hasting rituals that include like alcohol
or sex or violence, and a lot of traditional societies

(10:55):
do this as well. You kind of go through this
period that often is where you're no longer not yet classified,
you're kind of outside of social order. It makes you
both very vulnerable, to being humiliated, to being tested. But
it's also period during which you learn about what the
expectations are going to be, and it builds community among
everybody else who goes through this bad time with you.

(11:17):
It's called communityAs so you build that in this anti structure,
and then when you come back into society, when you
are kind of initiated into becoming uh brother of that
fraternity you aren't, you kind of shed that ambiguous status
and become a real member of that society. In the

(11:40):
same way death, the ultimate initiation to life, allows us
to upend expectations. We often see that, for example, a
very hierarchical society can during this period of transition flip
the hierarchy or allow things that wouldn't otherwise be allowed,
because when you do that, you can create a chaos,

(12:02):
or you can create a difference that marks this period
as having a beginning and an end, and in an
interesting way, that kind of like confines its un controls
it even with chaos. So you can have these piers
that are marked, for example by like carnivalesque behaviors, whether

(12:23):
it's sex or alcohol or other vices, kind of like
playing that up and then bracketing it off as special
time allows the social structure to be reinforced. Actually, at
the end of it, it's a push and pull between
anti structure, the chaos of death, and structure the desire
to control death, and different cultures deal with the back

(12:46):
and forth in different ways. At an Irish wake, there
could be an outpouring of emotion, anger or confusion, joy,
and a good amount of alcohol to go along with it.
But in China or Taiwan, family may outsource the expression
of grief to a professional mourner, often actors or Chinese

(13:12):
opera performers that are have realized that this is a
much more lucrative and and easy way to support yourself,
and when that kind of performer shows up, they can
be they can show up to create that kind of
like huge moment of display of mourning and lass. And

(13:44):
if I understand it right, it's also intimately connected to
kind of like a piece the spirits, because usually during
these kinds of liminal times are also bracketed off in
the sense that this is the time when the spirits
are either susceptible for contact or sometimes they are kind
of like more present. They're making their way into the afterlife,

(14:04):
so they're going to need all sorts of things um
and so by showing giving a good show, you kind
of like show the afterlife administration that these people are important.
And in a society where people are migrating a lot
and working a lot of really long hours and are

(14:25):
not able sometimes to travel back to their village where
they might have lost somebody, they can also actually supplement
their own presence by hiring somebody to be there in
their stead. So it's it's both kind of like it's
an interesting combination of actually how this ritual has kind
of like molded itself onto new needs because of a

(14:46):
changed sort of social economic reality. There are also professional
mourners for hire in Essex, England, who, for seventy dollars
an hour, can help bolster a thin turnout and converse
knowledgeably about the dearly departed. Elsewhere in the world like
western Kenya, populating your funeral with a stranger who will
cry on demand, well, that's just tradition. And just like

(15:08):
traditions can morph to suit the changing needs of a society,
so too can the job of a professional mourner. You
also have these Taiwanese funeral strippers that start to manifest themselves,
I think in the nineteen eighties. Uh and at the
time also when uh decency laws were kind of cracking

(15:29):
down on nudity. Uh. This becomes like a new arena
for strippers to come and distract and celebrate the spirits
and bring a lot of people to the funeral because
it's really again, it's really really important. You know, the

(15:50):
more people show up to during this period of transition,
you send this message onto the next ext like to
the next world, that this is somebody who's really important.
And and this is also the moment when you kind
of like transfer spirit money and all these kinds of
things that the that the that the soul of the
dead will need to basically pay their way in the

(16:13):
next life. So the more people that show up and
the more of a big deal it is, the more important, UM,
this deceased is considered to be. So you kind of
give them a boost into the into the next life.
And so if you bring in strippers, you will bring
in a lot of people. But you're also going to
add to this kind of like sense of anti structure.

(16:38):
M Here we see flashes of skin gyrating bodies and
we hear the thumping of music, all while revelers celebrate
the transition of the body, the betwixt in the between
of the person who was their friend, their family member,
or their spouse. In this ritual, there's a nod to

(17:02):
the madness of death, the sense of being hurled out
of time and place. It's the anti structure, the permission
to explore the boundaries between life and death. Knowing that
these times of exploration are limited, order will come rushing
back in. Matter will be put back into place. On

(17:27):
the afternoon of April twelve, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was signing
papers at his home in Warm Springs, Georgia, when he
suddenly complained of a headache and slumped forward, losing consciousness.
The nation was stunned. For twelve years, f DR had
served as the Chief Executive. He was an emblem of stability, steadfastness,

(17:48):
and the only way to bridge what felt like the
treachery of death was through ritual. A good funeral is
one that gets the dead where they need to go
and the living where they need to be. FDR's body
was carried back by train to Washington, d C. Where

(18:09):
full military honors were rendered in a procession to the
White House, the public mourned, The casket was returned to
the President's Hyde Park home, where it was buried in
the rose Garden. His family mourned, and in the end,
the dead and the living all took the journey to
where they needed to go and where they needed to be.

(18:49):
Thank you to Dr Live Nielsen Studs for guiding us
through the fascinating world of funerary rituals. You can find
out more about Dr Studs at Emory University. The Stuff
of Life is written and co produced by me Julie Douglas.
Original music and sound design is by co producer Mill Brown.
Editorial oversight is provided by Head of production Jerry Rowland.

(19:11):
If you have thoughts on rituals, you can email us
at The Stuff of Life, how stuff works dot com,
and you can find us on Facebook and Twitter.