Sublime

A girl always remembers the first corpse she shaves. It is the only event in her life more awkward than her first kiss or the loss of her virginity. The hands of time will never move quite so slowly as when you are standing over the dead body of an elderly man with a pink plastic razor in your hand.

In her report on Torajan death practices, National Geographic author Amanda Bennett writes, “[T]he death of the body isn’t the abrupt, final severing event of the West. Instead, death is just one step in a long, gradually unfolding process.”

The idea that a nine-year-old girl can magically transform into a neat, tidy box of remains is ignorant and shameful for our culture. It is the equivalent of grown adults thinking that babies come from storks. But Joe, Westwind’s owner, thought Bayside Cremation was the future of low-cost death care. It wouldn’t be the first time California had

Today things look very different, and the undertaker can draw on a lexicon as softly focused as any estate agent’s. As one wryly told me: ‘We deodorize death to within an inch of its life.’ No longer does someone die and be laid out in a coffin, or taken to a cemetery and cremated: instead they pass away or depart, are placed in a burial container,

and choose an inexpensive cremation instead. It is safe to say that 1963 was cremation’s year. The American Way of Death came out in 1963, as did Pope Paul VI’s overturning of the Catholic Church’s ban on cremation. These two factors turned the death trends of the entire country toward cremation. When The American Way of Death came out, the vast

I wouldn’t be like Yvette Vickers, the B-movie actress and star of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, who was found completely mummified in her Los Angeles home more than a year after her death. She had been a recluse while alive; no one had bothered to check on her. Instead of worrying that my own cat would end up eating my dead body to survive, I

A modern, professional cremation will reduce an adult male to about seven or eight litres of ashes and bone material, and slightly less for an adult female. The Viking-Age cremations rarely contain more than a litre of remains. Nobody knows what this means. Did the funeral involve a partition of the ashes—some to the family or onlookers and