BackStory; Grave Matters: A History of Death and Mourning

This is backstory with us, the American History Guys, I'm Peter Onof, 18th Century Guy. I'm Ed Ayers, 19th Century Guy, and I'm Brian Ballot, 20th Century History Guy. For most of the past seven years, an almost daily ritual has been taking place at an Air Force Base in Dover, Delaware, completely out of view of the public eye. Cargo Plains have been landing there, carrying the remains of military men and women killed in the line of duty. As anybody who lived through the Vietnam War will remember, images of flag drape coffins used to be a staple of wartime news, but in 1991, during the lead up to the first golf war, then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney banned the media from covering the return of fallen soldiers to Dover, and that ban stayed in place until February of last year when current Defense Secretary Robert Gates made this announcement. I have decided that the decision regarding media coverage of the dignified transfer process

at Dover should be made by those most directly affected on an individual basis by the families of the fallen. We ought not presume to make that decision in their place. Not all military families welcome the change. There were a number of them who felt it violated their privacy, but many did support the move. Among them, a woman out in Mountain View, California, named Karen Meredith. I'm the mother of First Lieutenant Ken Ballard, who was killed in Iraq, May 30th of 2004, which happened to be Memorial Day. Kind of put a different spin on the day for me and for all of Ken's friends and family. Karen had raised Ken as a single mom, and he enlisted in the Army right out of high school. In May of 2003, he left for Iraq the day after Mother's Day. That was my Mother's Day present that year, and he promised me he'd make it up when he got home, but he was killed in May of 2004. At the time, Karen already knew about the media ban at Dover, and so she asked for

internal Army photos of his arrival there. The response she got was a bit of a mind-bender. They told me no. They said it was against regulations, and it's for the privacy of the family. I said, well, I'm the mother, and I want the pictures, and it's against regulations. Over the next two years, Karen got involved in the anti-war movement, but along the way, she also lobbied for lifting the ban on media coverage at Dover. I asked her why she felt so strongly that not only the families of fallen soldiers, but also the public at large, be able to see those images. Because when Ken's unit left from Germany to go to Iraq, there was a big parade, and there was much jubilation that we were sending these young men and women off to war, and there was much patriotism. When he came home, there was nothing. I don't believe that we need to hide them when they come back. They're coming back to the country that they served,

and to bring them in with no recognition for their service is a disservice to them. In Canada, they have what's called the highway of heroes, and I believe it goes for 100 miles, but when a soldier lands at their mortuary and leaves to go home, citizens line the highway. You know, Karen, we're professional historians, Ed, Peter, and myself, and we're always thinking about where do things fit into the stream of history? Where do you think this incident of denying parents the photograph of their slain children? Where do you think that is going to fit into the larger story of American history, Karen? Well, as much as it's a black hole for all of us parents and family members, I've frequently said, where are the librarians? Where are the historians? Why is there no outcry from

them to say, we have no history of this war in regards to our young men and women coming home? People in 50 years will look back, and there will be no photographic documentation of this part of the war. In an age in which photographs are more ubiquitous than ever. Absolutely. You're right. This generation, there's millions of pictures, and there's no pictures of my child, and that will forever be something that I have to carry. And it hasn't been easy for me. People have questioned my motives, and until they walk in my shoes, I don't think that they can question my motives. Whether it was for political reasons or personal or both, I still wanted that picture. Ken loved being a soldier, and I should have been able to see it. That's Karen Meredith. Her son, first lieutenant Ken Ballard, was killed in Iraq six years ago on Memorial Day. He was 26 years old.

It's often been said that modern medicine, modern wars, really our whole modern way of life, have made death less and less visible, less a part of our daily lives. Now a lot of people will say that the invisibility of the war did in Iraq and Afghanistan is more of a political issue than a cultural one, and that may very well be the case. But even so, the result is the same. A world increasingly sanitized of death and dying. And so for the rest of the hour today on the show, this is what we're going to be looking at. How have we, over the course of American history, learned to live with the dead, the war dead, but also with those who die ordinary deaths here at home? Is it true that we've lost touch with death, or has our relationship with it simply changed? It's hard to think of a better place to ponder those sorts of questions than among the dead themselves. And so in a rainy afternoon, a few weeks ago, I headed up to a hillside overlooking the James River in the city I call home, Richmond, Virginia.

It's the side of Hollywood Cemetery, open back in 1849, and made famous a decade later, when the remains of former President James Monroe were dug up in New York, shipped down to Richmond, and re-barried there. A few years later, of course, the Civil War came. And with that war, Hollywood Cemetery became a busy place indeed. Many thousands of soldiers were brought from across the battlefield to the south to be buried there, along with 28 Confederate generals, and later Jefferson Davis himself. By tour guide for the afternoon was local historian Hunter McGuire, Jr. We started at President Circle, the spot where Monroe and his fellow Virginia-born President John Tyler are both buried. So this is a pretty imminent spot here, and what would make this such prime real estate that two United States presidents would want to be buried here? To the extent that anybody wants to be buried? The geography is what makes it outstanding. Let me say a word about the Garden Rural Cemetery tradition. It began in Paris in a site of a monastery that parallels shares in cities,

Cemetery, which are getting overcrowded, so they decided to make a cemetery in suburbs of Paris. And when was that? That was in 1804, and to attract people, they went off to get celebrities. And the first dug up mullier and moved him there, and then Abelard and Eloise, they dug them up and brought them there, and with that everybody was rushed in. People of Paris loved coming out and walking through these beautiful grounds. So people in Boston copied that with Mount Almond Cemetery, which is another rural pastoral cemetery, beautiful one that overlooking the city of Boston. That was, in fact, copied by Frederick Law Olmsted when he developed Central Park, because they then discovered that people in cities needed public walking spaces. But the idea of a park in a city began with a cemetery there. It began with a cemetery. Wow, okay.

And then up and down the East Coast, New York developed Woodland Cemetery in Philadelphia, Laurel Hill Cemetery, and the architect of Laurel Hill came to Richmond and designed this cemetery. And perhaps our listeners would be interested in just hearing that this is written on a tombstone, that little more explication than we're used to today, endowed with extraordinary intellectual powers. He touched life at widely varying points, scholars, soldier orator, a commanding figure in industrial affairs, from prime of youth to the kindly winter of old age, he kept in violet, the chastity of a pure and stainless life, peace well earned. Wonderful. And that's one of the beauties of a garden pastoral cemetery of this era. In the Victorian times, people wrote beautiful appetites all over the place. Most of the beautiful. Sometimes they were a little bit snippy about their formal labs. But on the most part, they're wonderfully romantic Victorian things. Are there black people buried in Hollywood Cemetery?

Very few. I know a few clergy and a few servants, but cemetery tend to be segregated. The natural reason that people want to be buried with their families. And once the family traditions start, people flock to be there. So was this cemetery for the well to do? No, I think they were happy to sell lots to anyone who could play for them. And that was not easy at first. And what really sort of turned it on was, well, President Monroe helped, but then when the Civil War came... By dying. By dying. Yeah. But when the Civil War came, and this flood of casualties started coming in, then Hollywood really became popular. And there were people flooding in and out for the funeral of all the time. Lots of flowers and lots of flags. Well, I think in fact, I'd like to go over to the Confederate part of the cemetery. If we couldn't talk about that, we're going to.

These suns kind of coming out, man. So we're standing in front of really important monuments that signals, in some ways, the beginning of the Memorial Day movement after the American Civil War. If you can imagine, at Pyramid, 90 feet tall, 45 feet wide, made of really rough, huge granite from down along the James, brought here, stacked without mortar, 1869. All around this statue, this giant Pyramid, are buried 18,000 Confederate veterans. That's because many of them died in Richmond because we were at giant hospital base here. And so others were shipped by railroad from the battlefields all across the state, where we saw about half the battles of the Civil War within a hundred miles or so of here. So this was the best monument that they could think of to make with materials at hand in the immediate wake of the war when the city had been burned to the ground.

It was devastated. It's kind of a haunting place. I thought early Memorial Day, and for many Memorial Days after that, really up until the World War, one Memorial Day would bring 5,000 people from Richmond out with their picnic lunches to listen to the bands play, to the territory of Confederate veterans, some with empty sleeves and peg legs, but they all came out to celebrate. Some of them felt like it was the last cause, and they wanted people not to remember what that sacrificed. And others felt like what they contributed to along within all the brethren was the birth of a new nation that could ruin World War I and II in those other things. Memorial Days are great of that whichever way you look at it. That was Hunter McGuire, Jr., a former board member at Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia. He also happens to be the great, great, grand son of the surgeon who amputated the arm of General Stonewall Jackson. We're going to take a short break now. When we get back, historian Drew

Gilpin Faust, we'll explain how widespread death in the Civil War altered Americans' attitudes about life, and we'll hear from some of you listeners. More backstory coming up in a minute. This is backstory, the show that looks to the past to explain the America of Today.

I'm your 18th century host, Peter Onof. I'm your 19th century host, Ed Ayers, and I'm your 20th century host, Brian Ballot. We're talking today about how political, social, and technological changes over the course of our history have shaped the way we remember the dead. Here on Memorial Day, you think of places you go to celebrate Memorial Day. If you think about it, there's really quite an array of different ways that we memorialize those who've given their lives for this country. Peter, I wouldn't know, frankly, where to go if I wanted to memorialize the dead of the American revolution? It's a great question. You wouldn't go to battlefields. You'd actually go to church yards all over the country, particularly to colonial cities that have survived in the heart of the great modern American metropolises and old Trinity Church

in New York and churches in Boston and Charleston. In a way, those places would be, I think, where we would evoke the memory of the revolution. I think that's the way they function on American culture. So when did one place that symbolized one war? When did that start? It must have been the 19th century. I think it's Gettysburg, and what we sometimes forget is the Gettysburg address was given at the inauguration of a national cemetery at Gettysburg, which was literally created in the immediate wake of the war. So what Lincoln was doing, think about this, the Gettysburg battles in July. He's given us talk in November. When he came to Gettysburg, there were coffins stacked up at the train station. So I think that's the beginning of that. It was building on the older ideas of park-like cemeteries, but here they're making one on purpose instantaneously for massive numbers of bodies. I think that lays the foundation for Arlington.

And the irony is that from that point on, up till today, our soldiers die elsewhere. So we almost have to have centralized places to commemorate this from then on, because our soldiers are dying in foreign lands. Here's a quiz. Where do you guys think this first emerges? Where do we start seeing the first centralized monuments to sacrifice for the nation? Civil war. Nope. Even if you go to Gettysburg now, all the statues and monuments are state-based. Is that right? No, yeah. And they kind of vibe with each other, you know, who has the bigger state monument. I never would have thought about this. Yeah, I don't know. War was Spain in 1898. Perfect. Right? Because there's a couple of things. One, the North and South are so happy to be fighting on the same side, right? That you can start having these monuments. But also in the meantime, you've had Franco-Pression War and the emergence of these big nation states in Europe. And all the guys are putting up big monuments to the nations. Plus, we kicked butt.

Exactly. And it was our time. So if you would look at the sort of proportion of the monuments to the actual war, Spanish-American is the biggest. And it turns out to be sort of a rehearsal, unfortunately, for the Great War this to fall on. Do we have a monument for our invasion of Grenada? Because that would be the ultimate test. A gigantic, the largest monument for our smallest war. That's an action item for our listeners. Brian, it's interesting if you think about the array of war memorials in Washington, DC, that if you think about when they were built, you have to sort of a strange thing of the Vietnam War Memorial being built first, and then Korea, and then only most recently, World War II. How do you explain that? Well, I think this proves Ed that they don't teach enough history in high school. That's my first point. It's postmodern chronology matters. But chronology. Chronology is a more serious answer, I think, is memorials represent what's going on at the time that these memorials are planned. And it often takes some decades to actually build and complete them.

So I'm guessing that if the World War II memorial was opened in 2004, I'm guessing it started maybe 20 years earlier. And I associate that period in American history with a remilitarization of society with Ronald Reagan, increasing defense budgets, but more importantly, appealing to Americans patriotic sense, a sense of self-sacrifice. And surely this is when the all-volunteer army was really beginning to take off in the United States. I also would add that how could we possibly have a memorial to one of the nation's most unpopular wars, Vietnam? And not have one for perhaps the nation's most popular war, at least in retrospect World War II. And the great leveling thing about Vietnam, though, in the sense of making it a kind of good war in the sense that the people who gave their lives deserve to be memorialized and that we should never forget

that that really abstracts sacrifice from particular contexts. And that's really a transcendent notion beyond time, beyond the occasion of war, beyond what the war was about. No doubt. For us to take a moment and reflect on society. And did that happen in the Civil War? I mean, that abstraction isn't that one of the things that helped bring together North and South eventually? Yeah, in the early 20th century. Yeah, no, I know it took a lot of time. And I think it's parallel to Vietnam in that there's a sense that why don't we memorialize World War II? We memorialize it every day. Because there was a good war. Exactly. And nobody questioned that. And so the Vietnam War Memorial comes along. It seems almost like an oxymoron at the time. You know, to memorialize something that a lot of people wanted to forget. And I think that the Vietnam Memorial came not only are we not going to forget it, but here are the individual young people who got these individuals. Which is why they're listed. Exactly. Whereas you guys know we've talked to World War II veterans.

Their first reaction when you thank them for their service is, in essence, to say, gosh, I never even thought about it. Right. We were all sacrificed. We were all sacrificed. Whereas in Vietnam, by then Americans were thinking very carefully about whether to make that sacrifice or not. Robert Lewis Gardner. Walter R. McCarthy Jr. William Fruit Train III. Don Joseph York. Joseph A. Goldberg. Harold Lee Guthrie. That's tape from the reading of the name's ceremony at the 20th anniversary of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in November 2002. If hindsight is 2020, then foresight can often be flat out blind. Such was the case in the years, months, and weeks leading up to the American Civil War. One South Carolina senator was so confident that war would not break out,

that he promised to drink all the blood that might be shed as a result of secession. Four years and more than 600,000 deaths later, that war finally came to an end. More Americans had been killed and died in all the nation's wars combined from the revolution to the early years of Vietnam. The dead amounted to 2% of the nation's population, the equivalent of 6 million people today. A couple of years ago, historian Drew Guilpin Faust published a devastating book about the consequences of all that dying, called this Republic of Suffering, Death in the American Civil War. She begins her book with that vignette about the South Carolina senator and goes on to talk about how death on that scale not only created many of our modern funeral practices, but also altered fundamental notions about group and national identity. I recently had a chance to speak with her about her book. Drew, welcome to backstory. Thank you Ed for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here. Now you talk about the idea of the good death, which is the way that people in mid-19th century

America imagined the way the things were supposed to be. Could you tell us about that a little bit? The idea of the good death was not a new one in the 19th century. There were books as early as the 1500s about good dying, holy dying, the good death. How to learn to die was something that you can find advice books about. By the 19th century, by the time of the early days of the war, this had evolved into a widely shared set of cultural assumptions that I found very similar north and south across different religious denominations and really across the United States as a whole. And what it consisted of by the mid-19th century was a set of precepts about what it took to die well. One precept was you needed to be ready to die and willing to die because how you acted in your last moments would in many ways reflect what your afterlife might be like. And you prepared for that moment for your whole existence. Another aspect of the good

death is that your good death was a witness death. It was a death among loved ones. It was a death at home. I think the Victorian domesticity of the 19th century had invaded this notion of the good death. And I'm sure you've seen many portraits or drawings of someone dying with all kinds of people standing around them. And that was so that your loved ones could be certain that you had died a good death and therefore they would know they would be reunited with you in heaven. But also you could give them important last words, important messages as you parted from them. It sounds like the Civil War is bound to challenge all those things where people died so often alone, so often instantly, so often without time for preparation. So I can see why the war would be a crisis in that notion of the good death. That's absolutely right. Could you have a good death on the battlefield? I found many instances of soldiers trying to have good deaths on the battlefield, trying to replicate some of the precepts of the good death.

One of the most striking and poignant was soldiers who surrounded themselves with photographs of their family as they were dying. That to me represented an effort to replicate the death bed at home with the loved ones standing around. Soldiers also talked about anticipating death the night before battles. They would write into their diaries or in letters to loved ones that they were ready, that they were prepared. And I also found many instances of military hospitals where soldiers turned to nurses or doctors to try to set up a version of the good death at home. And nurses and doctors were often willing participants, even to the point of in the case of a delirious soldier, for example, letting him think that a nurse was his sister or his mother. Because they too shared this common attitude about the importance of the good death and what a good death could surprise. Now of course only a very small portion of soldiers bodies would have been shipped back home.

So whose job was it to bury the civil war soldiers on the battlefield? One of the most extraordinary things I discovered and maybe other people took it for granted, but I did not until I started this project was that there was no formal identification procedure for soldiers. They didn't wear dog tags and there was no formal notification of next of kin when soldiers were killed or wounded. This all happened more or less informally through your comrades writing to your wife or mother to say, I stood by so and so as he died and this is how it happened. And often trying to communicate to the mother or the wife or the sister, whoever you were writing to, that this soldier had indeed died a good death, trying to put the circumstances of the soldier's death into the framework of the ideas of the good death. And so that was an important part of the whole communication system, this series of condolence letters that were really letters informing

as much as consoling families. Well there must have been enormous numbers then of men who were just lost that no one ever really knew when and where they died. Probably about half of the Civil War dead about half remained unidentified. So how do the people back home live with that lack of knowledge? I find that stunning. I've never been able since I began doing the research on this book to think about the late 19th century in the same way because if you do think about it in the context of this information, it means that the United States was a nation of mourners. It was a nation of people who were left with these incomplete stories about the lives of people who mattered enormously to them. And we've seen in our own lifetimes the strength of the MIA movement after Vietnam and the inability of individuals to grapple with not knowing, of not being able to find out information and even recover the bodies of their loved ones. But hundreds of thousands of

families were in that situation after the Civil War. Did that device means to live with that lack of knowledge? There were a number of ways that people tried to cope. One was religion and the consolation that eventually you would know what had happened to this person because you would be reunited with him in heaven. Another dimension of coping with this very difficult situation was the growth and interest in spiritualism, which said you didn't have to wait until an afterlife. Indeed, you could, under certain circumstances, actually communicate with the dead loved person and he was not gone. He was just around a corner or behind a veil. So I think belief was a very important way of coping. I think another way of coping was memorials and those memorials were often tangible physical embodiments of memory that in many cases took the place of an actual body that you might be able to bury. Instead, you could erect a monument or in some other way have a

physical remembrance of the person whose body you were unable to reclaim and enter. It strikes me that maybe by the 1880s and 1890s, people seemed to have been forgetting how terrible the Civil War was. That the memorialization seems to take on more of an abstract quality as people passed on. Did it seem to you the American sort of wanted to forget about the suffering of the war? I think that was probably true. When I started my project, one of the questions that was foremost in my mind was how is it that we have seen World War I as the turning point in the introduction of the real horror of modern warfare and mass loss into human existence? And yet if you go back and look at the Civil War for the south, certainly where the loss was enormous because of the smaller scale of the southern population and because so much of the war took place on southern soil. And arguably for the United States as a whole, the Civil War should

have been that moment of the horror of mass killing and the horror of such a level of loss. And so I've been puzzled by how in many ways this experience of war was something we shied away from, that we didn't entirely metabolize into our understanding of what it means to be human, of what what it means to be able to kill others with the instruments of technology on a mass scale. And so questions, issues were raised by the Civil War, but they weren't fully engaged, I think, until we had another mass killing in the early years of the 20th century. Well, thank you so much Drew for joining us and helping us understand this really intractable and yet enduring problem in human life. So thank you so very much. Thanks, Ed. Drew Gopin-Faus is the author of this Republic of Suffering, death in the American Civil War.

She's a professor of history and in her spare time, also the president of Harvard University. We'll post an extended version of our interview at our website, backstoryradio.org. I got to tell you guys that that interview has changed the way I think about what we've been saying about death. You know, a lot of what we've had to say is Americans deny it. We ignore it, we hide it. But half the people not identified in all those family members for a lifetime, living with that unresolved issue, that means they're living with death just about every day. And that really changes my conception of the 30 years after the Civil War. But Brian, I suggest that the notion of the good death that Drew introduced early on is very important. And there's an element of denial in that notion of the good death. And I think it culminates in reunion and reconciliation in the years after the war between Northerners and

Southerners. And it does involve, I think, extraordinary denial, because what you're bringing to the fore is not the senseless slaughter, but rather the heroic lives of the brothers who destroyed each other and ravaged the land. And, in a way, that's not the same thing as modern mass war. Yeah. Nor is building these stone monuments, the same thing, as standing around your relatives. Yeah. Yeah. And I wouldn't want to say that things abstracted is somehow wrong. I don't know people can live with the way of dealing. Yeah. Yeah. You know, the same way that individuals try to live with loss by letting it slowly fade away, I guess, so do cultures. And ours is no exception. Well, there's nothing abstract about my producer telling me we have to take another break. But don't go away. When we get back, we'll be hearing from some of you listeners. If you'd like to be a caller on a future episode of backstory, have a look at our website to see the topics we're working on. We're at backstoryradio.org. We'll be back in a minute.

This is backstory. The show that takes the topic from the here and now, and puts it in historical context. I'm Peter Ronaf, 18th century history guy.

Um, Ed Ayers, 19th century history guy. And I'm Brian Ballot, 20th century history guy. Today on the show, memorialization. How do we Americans live with our dead? And how has that changed over time? So far, we've been focusing mostly on war dead. But we're going to open up the discussion now to include ordinary non-war death as well. As we do with all of our shows, we've been soliciting your ideas about today's topic on our website, backstoryradio.org. And our producers have invited a few of you to join us on the phone. Hey guys, we have a call from the great state of Vermont in Burlington. We have Josh on the line. Josh, welcome to backstory. Good morning. Hey, death, the cheery subject. What's on your mind? Well, I work for a consumer education organization called funeral consumers alliance. And what we do is try to help people understand what their legal rights and options are. And it's always

interested me when I talk to people what they consider to be what they call funeral traditions. And a lot of what people consider to be traditional, they seem rarely to be purely organic. But we often say that what the contemporary funeral industry calls a traditional funeral is largely a commercially created tradition. And I'd love to hear what you guys think about that. Josh wants to know if funerals are simply another product that high capitalism has produced with a veneer of tradition. What a cynic you are, Josh. I'm a realist. Yeah. Well, let me give you an example of something I just recently discovered. The United States is unique in the ritual of dressing up the dead person with makeup and all. You betcha. You bet it, Annie. Which suggests to me that that's hardly a tradition if we're the only people who do it because the whole idea is that we're doing this in some universal

human trait. But that's not the case at all. Where did that come from? Do you know? Well, yes. I mean, the short history of what I call a modern American funeral after the Civil War really came about because chemical embalming was invented during the Civil War and prove very useful for getting soldiers home from the battlefield. And it was in the last quarter of the 19th century that it was the first time there was a professional industrial class of undertakers that began to be called funeral directors. And as I understand it before that time, funerals were a much more family-centered event in so far as the person would be cared for, washed, dressed, and laid out at home, often by women in the family. And the family would take a more direct role. Well, honestly, I'm not usually much one for technological determinism, but here's a case where the embalming process made possible and even suggested it would be appropriate to string out the funeral process. But you could actually have the viewing and all that. I mean, not to be more of the clock is ticking otherwise without that process.

Yeah, and Josh and Ed, I think embalming is very important, but also the rise of the modern hospital and places where more and more people die is a factor too. And to just cut against the grain a little bit, Josh, I mean, that's not just trying to make a buck. That's more and more people are not dying in the home in the nearby century. And so that we need to do a bit of reinventing or recreating the notion that the family is there, and they have been surrounded by loved ones when they die, even though that's not the case. Are you find that there's a kind of a swelling wave of resentment against these things or people coming to you, Josh, with increasing regularity? Oh, well, we have always, the organization had a huge number of inquiries from the public, but interestingly, in this economic downturn, something is happening, I think, culturally, that our organization has been trying to get people to think about, but the economy is doing

a better job made than we have, which is people are not only finding ways to save money on the funeral, it's an opportunity to rethink the values that we associate with funerals. People are rediscovering that old traditions can be reinterpreted in ways that don't cost them a mortgage payment. But to be fair about old traditions, Josh, we go back to the colonial period, my time, at funerals that would be required to give out gloves, and it's a form of what anthropologist called potlatch gift giving in order to establish and reaffirm social status. So funerals were very, very expensive in the colonial period, and this conspicuous display, and one of the austerity measures that revolutionaries and patriots promoted was to chill it on the big death deal. Interesting. It just cut across socio-economic levels. Well, no, because only the rich could do this, and it would be an opportunity to reaffirm it.

Interesting, because another thing that a lot of us frequently toss around is the poor pay more, and what we mean by that is we find that people who are middle-class and with higher incomes, more college education, tend statistically to be the ones who go for the simple career. And it's working class people who often will try to spend more on the funeral. Is this a modern phenomenon? Well, I think there's a long history to it, and you might say it's sort of dying up opportunity. When you die, you show respect, and the respect that this person is as good as anybody, don't think that because we're poor, that we don't die well. This is a moment in which we're going to assert, you could say, that in death all men are created equal. And of course, people who are the favored and the privileged and the very wealthy, they don't need to make this clear and quite that. They don't need to show it all. Interesting. Josh, thanks so much for

calling. Oh, thank you guys. You're fine. Appreciate it. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. If you're just tuning in, this is backstory. And we're marking Memorial Day with a show about the history of death and dying. We have a call from Sherry and Marion Virginia. Sherry, welcome to backstory. Thank you. And we're talking about death, and we're trying to keep up a lively conversation. What's on your mind? I have two interrelated questions that I'd like to ask them. How has the replacement of the once common practice of dying at home with a modern hospital experience affected how we view death and life? And what has our fear and avoidance of the process of dying cost us in terms of how we understand the world in which we live? Well, I think this is one of these back to front questions where we start with the 20th century. Yeah, I think that's fair enough. And I remember reading some study about the average number of deaths you see in the average Hollywood film. People are getting blown away in very graphic form.

And I think that one of the reasons that we have so much mediated violence, violence that is not real that comes through the media, is we are not exposed to real death and to the real pain and tailed in all of that. As people, I think, in its century and Peter's century were. And that's my clever way of handing your tough question over to the other two guys. Well, I'm going to be contrarian here. There's no doubt that what Brian just said is the case. But I guess I would suggest that every indication is that people want it to be out of the house and mediated. Oh, yeah. You know, people were glad to have embombing. It spread quite rapidly in the second half of the 19th century, which says two things. One, that people didn't really want the corporeal experience of death, which is just profoundly unsettling and unpleasant and dangerous. On the other hand, what embombing did is allow people to prolong the act of departure

long enough that you could come and pay honor to the lost one, to be able to feel some kind of closure. It's still dying takes place in the home, of course, unless it's an accident. I mean, part of our story is when do hospitals clean up their acts sufficiently so that that that is the indicated place for people in critical medical condition at end of life to be there, because even now, of course, hospitals are places where you get a lot of infections. It's the big scandal of modern hospitals. It's a great place to go and die. And there's no question that technology is advanced and it became starting in the 20th century, but especially after World War II, a lot safer to go to hospitals. But I think we've got to talk about cost here, because even though hospitals became safer, the combination of studies that showed rates of infection with trying to cut costs have led to a movement of getting people

out of hospitals as quickly as possible. It's also the hospice movement. And that's really taken off in the last two decades, I would say. And it's in part been a very, I think, important need to treat people in a humane fashion, to not have them die as vegetables with tubes coming out of them, combined with a great interest on the part of insurance companies to cut down on costs. All right, Peter, you've played out the string. We are going back to the 18th century. Whether Sherry wants to go there or not. Sherry, you can hang up anytime. No, listen, back in the 18th century and people really died back then. They just died and I think it's true. It's not as extraordinary as it seems to us in individual's death. The thing is that people die all the time in the home. And it's a fact of life where I should say a fact of death. It's right there

in your face, you might say. It happens so often. And the idea of death, it's in the context of the family and family's replaced dead people. Now, that sounds pretty brutal. But if you lose a child, often that name would be used for another child. That is, there's a kind of an interchangeability because what comes first is the family, not the individual. Of course, individuals die. It's a traumatic thing in any time in history. But we've made it our very special kind of drama and trauma. And we have therefore paradoxically insulated ourselves from what we take to be the most devastating and hurtful aspects of it because we've made it into a kind of a secularized religious experience whether or not we're very religious people. Sherry, I want to ask you what prompts your question? What prompted my question? Yes. I grew up in a nursing home in the mountains of Virginia. And we lived downstairs and the patients lived upstairs anywhere from 8 to 10 patients.

So my formative years were spent with old people. And it was a very rich and wonderful experience that I really cherish. And what was your reaction to the inevitable likelihood that they died all the time? Well, the first person I saw die, I was eight years old. He was a retired meal operator. He adopted my sister and I as his children. And so when he actually died, I was devastated. And I witnessed other deaths as well in this nursing home. These were people with whom we were intimately connected. This was not an institutionalized home. I understand. But these experiences shaped my worldview. Unnew early that we lead this world. And they're without romanticizing death because there is nothing romantic about the process of dying. There is mystery to it. There is a moment of peace after the process of death

that is sacred ground, whether you're religious or not. And so how it shaped my worldview and my value system is that for one thing, I never really cared about material things because I knew how empty the pursuit of a false material world was early on. Let me ask you, Sherry. Your story is remarkably idiosyncratic in our age. Do you have any suggestions for ways in which larger numbers of people might experience that mystery, those mysterious moments that you grew up with on a regular basis or that Peter's folks back and Ed's folks for that matter experienced on a regular basis? Well, probably to not be afraid of death for the person who's dying to help them make the transition from death to the next world if that's

what you believe or to the end of this life and some sort of peace. Because people who are dying need to talk about what they are going through. And they're prohibited from doing that because people who are still here are afraid. Yeah, that's a great point. Sherry, I think we should just devote the show to you to be perfectly honest. Well, thank you for calling Sherry. Great call. Thank you so much. Thank you, Sherry. Have a good day. Bye-bye. Well, we're just about out of time. But before we go, Brian and Peter, I want to play for you guys one more piece of tape

from my visit to Hollywood Cemetery. Remember, I was sharing that earlier with you in the show, Dr. Hunter McGuire. This one I say for last because, well, let's just say it evokes a certain sense of closure. All I say in the way of setup is that for many years Hollywood has been reserving space and a special section of the cemetery for those who serve as president of the University of Richmond. And as you guys know, just last year, I took up that job myself. Well, I'm having the unusual sensation of standing at a place that's been reserved for my burial site. I'm at the University of Richmond section of Hollywood Cemetery. I'm proud and somewhat relieved to see that we're on a beautiful knoll that lets us look off an enormous distances in every direction. And what I look around seeing are remarkable sculptures of everything from a Celtic cross there that could have been a thousand years old to lilies of the field, to Egyptian obelisks. It sort of reminds you that like American history that I've spent my

life studying, these things last, that there are marks on the land. And who knows, maybe one day I'll be a mark here for me in some way. I remember how to get here. So it's actually pretty close to the entrance. Well Ed, I want to ask you, since Peter and I don't have burial plots reserve for us at the University of Virginia. But we're looking. Yeah, we're looking. Tell me, what did that feel like looking at your own grave site? Well, it was a little spooky to think about it. You know, and look around you see, if you're going to have some words attached to you forever, what would they be? Maybe he was one of the history guys. One of the history guys. That's very beautiful. Okay, well guys, it's time to enter the show. It's always one hour was barely enough to scratch the surface of things. And we'll be waiting for you online to continue the

discussion. You can find us at backstoryredo.org. All of our past shows are archived there, and you can sign up for our free podcast and newsletter as well. You'll also find a special bonus feature along with this week's show post. It's an audio slideshow featuring Michael Lese, author of the unusual book of photographs called Wisconsin Death Trip. Again, that's backstory radio.org. Don't be a stranger. Today's episode of backstory was produced by Tony Field, Rachel Quimby, and Catherine Moore, with help from Lidia Wilson. Jamal Milner mastered the show, and Gabby Alter wrote our theme, backstory's executive producer is Andrew Wyndham. Major production support for backstory is provided by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, committed to the idea that the future may learn from the past. Major support also comes from the University of Richmond, offering a combination of the liberal arts with law, business, leadership studies, and continuing education. More information is available at www.richman.edu.

Support also comes from the David A. Harrison Fund for the President's Initiatives at the University of Virginia, UDA's Miller Center of Public Affairs, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Terry Brown Epstein, and the WL Lions Brown Junior Charitable Foundation, James Madison's Montpelier, Marcus and Carol Weinstein, Trish and David Crow, J.M. Weinberg, and an anonymous donor. Peter Onop is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Brian Ballot is a professor of history at the University of Virginia and UDA's Miller Center of Public Affairs. Ed Ayers is president and professor of history at the University of Richmond. Backstory was created by Andrew Wyndham for VFA Tradeo at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. It kind of prison is not a pro-90 at all.