Death as the great equalizer needs no better example than the two men brought in to Westwind: a twenty-one-year-old homeless man and a forty-five-year-old aerospace engineering executive. Where the bodies of Golden Gate jumpers

Dr. Thomas Holmes, still regarded by many in the funeral industry as the patron saint of embalming, maintained that during the Civil War he personally embalmed more than 4,000 dead soldiers in this fashion, at the cost of $100 a body.

The Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne wrote in his conveniently titled On Cannibals that “each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice.” We certainly would call cannibalism barbaric, and it is not our practice, thank you very much.

glasses, I went from thinking it was strange that we don’t see dead bodies anymore to believing their absence was a root cause of major problems in the modern world. Corpses keep the living tethered to reality.

But what we needed wasn’t more additions to the endless list of merchandise options. Not when we were missing rituals of true significance, rituals involving the body, the family, emotions. Rituals that couldn’t be replaced with purchasing power.

Close the morgues if you will, but another attraction will always arise to fill a void. The runaway popularity of Body Worlds, Gunther von Hagens’s traveling exhibit of plastinated human bodies, shows us that the human urge to file past corpses on display is indeed as strong as ever. In spite of the ongoing controversy that von Hagens obtained some

embalming were something a tradesman like Bruce would never perform on his own mother, I wondered why we were performing it on anyone at all.

A culture that denies death is a barrier to achieving a good death. Overcoming our fears and wild misconceptions about death will be no small task, but we shouldn’t forget how quickly other cultural prejudices—racism, sexism, homophobia—have begun to topple in the recent past. It is high time death had its own moment of truth.

Buddhists say that thoughts are like drops of water on the brain; when you reinforce the same thought, it will etch a new stream into your consciousness, like water eroding the side of a mountain. Scientists confirm this bit of folk wisdom: our neurons break connections and form new pathways all the time. Even if you’ve been programmed to fear deat