I have always enjoyed walking in cemeteries. They can be places of serenity where it is possible to escape the noise of everyday life. But when I strolled through Montparnasse Cemetery in 2019, it was not as refuge from the hectic pace of a trip to Paris. My visit was, instead, a kind of pilgrimage to the final resting place of many important writers, including Samuel Beckett, Charles Baudelaire, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre. In the year since my wife died, I had not written a word and was hoping that being in the “presence” of such important literary figures might inspire me to sit down at my desk again.
Walking down the narrow lanes of the cemetery, I stumbled upon the grave of Susan Sontag. Had I realized that Sontag was buried there, I certainly would have been looking for her grave, because I knew her work well. I had taught Illness as Metaphor and Regarding the Pain of Others, and had re-read her critique of conceptualizing cancer metaphorically during my wife’s ordeal with ovarian cancer.
I had turned back to Sontag during my wife’s illness because Sontag was a keen observer of the psychology associated with a cancer diagnosis. We had not experienced being shunned as Sontag describes, nor the dynamic of self-blame that she sought to combat. But we certainly did experience the well-intentioned but devastating suggestions of friends to try this diet or that alternative treatment, as if Lisa would get better if she only tried hard enough. And Lisa did adopt the military metaphors that Sontag cautioned readers to avoid.
I started to write again shortly after visiting Montparnasse, and the strange comfort I found at Sontag’s gravesite was certainly a contributing factor. Reviewing again the previous four years in relation to her work convinced me that it would be worthwhile to write about the experience of accompanying Lisa through her cancer ordeal. In some ways, Sontag had been with me on my journey with Lisa, and visiting Sontag’s grave was a reminder of how difficult the struggle to understand that journey was.
The striking contrast between being able to visit Sontag’s grave but not Lisa’s gave rise to this essay. Lisa wanted to be cremated and to have her ashes scattered. My children and I honored her wishes. But I now wonder if it was a mistake not to have her body (or cremated remains) buried. Did my family lose something valuable in forgoing a cemetery burial? Why have cemeteries been such an important part of the experience of caring for a loved one who has died? To try to answer these and similar questions, I turned to the work of David Charles Sloane.
In Is the Cemetery Dead?, Sloane wrestles with the cultural history of cemeteries in the United States and with how cemeteries facilitate grief and mourning as well as memory and memorialization. According to Sloane, it is possible to identify overlapping periods in which social views of mourning and memory gave rise to differing public expectations of cemetery interment. In the early- and mid-nineteenth century, people still often died at home and were buried in small cemeteries close to home or on family-owned property. After the Civil War, social expectations started changing. Social institutions, instead of families, came to oversee care of the dying and the dead. Expectations changed again in the 1960s, when the funeral industry came under attack, as did the tight control over death and dying often exercised by religious and medical institutions.
The diminished role of families in caring for the dead, combined with the decline in support for social institutions and the increased individualism of our society, partly explains the shift toward cremation and highly personalized and secularized forms of mourning. This shift has been dramatic. By 2015, three years before my wife died, more people were cremated than were buried in the United States.
I reached out to Sloane to ask whether his research indicated that the decline in cemetery burials had changed patterns of grieving. Did people mourn differently when there was no physical “resting place” to visit? Sloane told me that the shift toward cremation and the scattering of ashes has undoubtedly affected patterns of grieving, but he also noted that there are few long-term studies on whether the bereaved regret scattering the ashes of their loved ones or whether doing so has complicated the process of grief. The fact that some cemeteries now offer scattering gardens—with a wall for the names of those whose ashes are there—suggests that there is indeed some dissatisfaction with the practice of scattering ashes at places chosen by the deceased. As Sloane puts it, “Even when survivors choose grounds with no memorials save trees, they pick trees that have personal or symbolic meaning. And, more times, survivors choose natural burial grounds where they can erect some sort of physical memorial or add a name to a collective one. As my father said, [I want] ‘my name on something to show that I was here.’”
Sloane’s comment about his father led me to ask him about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. Maya Lin’s stunning memorial is obviously not a graveyard, but it partly functions as one. It is a site of grief and mourning, as well as of memory and memorialization. The way visitors search for a specific name testifies to the insight of Sloane’s father. But more than this, the Vietnam Memorial points to the importance of cultural, as well as individual, memory. War memorials have become contested sites for precisely that reason, and memorials of various sorts have begun to function like cemeteries as sites of memory and mourning. One particularly striking example is the Community Remembrance Project created by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI). Through this community-response project, EJI has constructed a memorial dedicated to documenting the lynching of Black Americans. Again, this memorial is not a cemetery, but the names of those lynched are memorialized together with soil gathered from the grounds where the lynchings took place.
Sites like EJI’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Vietnam War Memorial show how naming the dead and creating a kind of sacred space in which to remember and grieve is important. And cemeteries, of course, have long served this function. But we should not assume that creating such spaces is only important in relation to profound communal tragedy. Cemeteries also capture the smaller-scale stories of individuals. While walking in Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland, I once stumbled across the grave of Raymond Chapman, whose gravesite was covered with baseball memorabilia. Chapman was a shortstop for the Cleveland Indians and is the only major-league baseball player to die from an injury sustained during a game. On August 16, 1920, Chapman was hit in the head by a pitch and died twelve hours later. He left behind a pregnant wife and brokenhearted teammates, who wore black armbands the remainder of the season and went on to win the World Series. (The pitch was thrown by Carl Mays, a New York Yankee, and many attribute the origin of Cleveland’s intense dislike of the Yankees to this incident.)
I can’t say that I mourned Chapman’s death, but his story remains compelling and his grave serves as a kind of monument to that story. It is also a reminder of baseball’s notable place in American history and is thus a site of cultural history. Had Chapman’s body been cremated, and his ashes scattered at some location significant only to himself, something meaningful would have been lost. As Sloane said to me, as important as everyday memorialization can be, there is a danger that when cemeteries are abandoned, culture literally loses its place.
Because these examples so obviously demonstrate the importance of funeral rites and cemetery burials, I wondered how the recent shift away from them and toward virtual memorials has affected mourning and memory. I posed this question to Candi Cann, an associate professor at Baylor University who has written extensively on this topic. She answered by noting that this shift reflects what she describes as the disappearance of the body.
She is ambivalent about the change. On the one hand, it reflects the fact that social institutions such as the funeral industry or religious communities don’t control the process as they once did. When those institutions did shape the care of the dead, the body of the deceased was often prominently displayed. A move away from an encounter with a dead body, whether during calling hours or at the interment of a body in the ground, opened a space for personalization of the care of the dead. In many ways, Cann believes, this was a good thing. On the other hand, as she notes in her book Virtual Afterlives, death rituals traditionally emphasized the dead body as central to the ritual itself, requiring the bereaved to confront death. As memorial services have taken the place of traditional funerals, bodies have disappeared from the places where people gather to mourn or remember. What has replaced actual bodies are virtual bodies. As Cann puts it: “The virtual realm returns us to our mourning through memorialization: through image and memory, without the messiness of the corpse.”
I asked Cann if she includes cremation and the scattering of ashes as part of this trend away from the body and toward virtual memorialization. She said that she does: cremation obliterates the body. When I pressed her on this, she said she didn’t mean to suggest that cremated remains were not bodily remains. Rather, her point was that cremating a body allowed the bereaved to avoid thinking about the body as dead and decaying. The upshot is that the body, even in the form of its cremated remains, is often not present when the deceased is mourned or memorialized. This move to bodiless memorialization has in fact changed the landscape of grief. Cann notes the rise of memorial tattoos or car decals, virtual cemeteries, and Facebook memorial sites as evidence of a significant shift.
What struck me as I talked with Cann is how little my wife and I discussed burial options before deciding on cremation and the scattering of ashes. Like many, we assumed that cremation is more environmentally responsible than a traditional burial. But this is not the case. Nor did we really consider alternatives to traditional burial or cremation. We did not know about natural organic reduction, in which a body is covered in biodegradable materials that speed decomposition. We did not explore alternative forms of cremation, such as resomation, also known as natural-water cremation. This technique reduces the body to ashes using a water and alkali solution and is more environmentally friendly than traditional cremation. We did not know about the green burial movement or artificial coral reef memorials that mix sand, crushed seashells, cement, and ashes from cremation to create simulacra of reefs, which are buried on the ocean floor. There are even more exotic options, like space burial or turning cremated remains into diamonds.
I can’t say whether my wife and I would have done anything differently had we known about these and other alternatives to traditional burial and cremation, but I suspect we would have. For one thing, I see the bodiless nature of so many emerging traditions of memorialization as problematic. In this regard, one thing Cann said to me really struck home. Her work on virtual afterlives began as a study of martyrs and the cult of the saints. She noted how the physical presence of the body, or part of the body, of someone who had led a saintly life conferred a kind of sacrality on the place of rest, as if there was a sacred presence even in death. This was the closest I had come to a confirmation of my sense that what was missing in cremation and the scattering of ashes was a recognition of a physical space as a site of personal presence. My family and I certainly mourned my wife’s death, and we have developed rituals for memorializing her life. But these traditions of mourning and memory have lacked a physical dimension.
The contrast with a traditional burial in a cemetery was brought home to me when I had the privilege of accompanying a friend’s stepmom, “Sarah,” in her discovery of a family gravesite that she had not visited since childhood. This discovery was particularly striking because Sarah suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. She had grown up in Cleveland and had moved back to the area to be with family who could assist with her care. Although her dementia was pronounced, she always recognized her family, even when her short-term memory was particularly fragile. Like so many in her situation, her long-term memories were often vivid and intact. One day she described a cemetery in which quite a few of her relatives were buried. Piecing together some of the fragments of Sarah’s memory, her husband and stepdaughter determined the likely location, and I was invited to join them as they set out to find the graveyard.
We drove to the town where Sarah’s family was from and quickly located the cemetery. We fanned out looking for graves with Sarah’s family name. When we found the first grave of an ancestor, Sarah was ecstatic. She began to tell stories about each of the relatives whose graves we found. And then something remarkable happened: she got down on her hands and knees and began to carefully and lovingly pull the weeds around the graves and to clean the headstones. Sarah, who required care from others to meet her daily needs, was caring for her deceased relatives, and she wouldn’t quit until she had tended all their graves.
I have thought of that afternoon often in recent months as my daughter has been pregnant with a baby girl who will never meet her grandmother. Had we buried Lisa in Lake View Cemetery, I could one day take my granddaughter to visit Lisa’s grave and tell her stories about her Nonna. We could bring flowers to her gravesite and tend the plot. Such scenarios never occurred to me when Lisa and I talked about cremation.
In retrospect, I can’t help wondering whether I was blinded by a kind of intellectual disdain for such practices, too confident that my memory of Lisa was enough. C. S. Lewis admitted as much about himself in A Grief Observed when he recalled being “horrified” at encountering a “burly, cheerful labouring man, carrying a hoe and a watering pot” on his way to tidy up his “Mum’s” grave. Lewis’s language here—“horrified,” “hateful,” “inconceivable”—suggests some regret on his part. He continues: “I am beginning to wonder whether, if one could take that man’s line (I can’t), there isn’t a good deal to be said for it. A six-by-three-foot flower-bed had become Mum. That was his symbol for her, his link with her. Caring for it was visiting her. May this not be in one way better than preserving and caressing an image in one’s own memory?”
In one of the most perceptive observations about grief in a book full of them, Lewis makes clear that the “one way” the grave is better than the image or memory of the beloved is that it maintains the objective reality of the deceased. Memory, he writes, “will do whatever you want [with the beloved]. It will smile or frown, be tender, gay, ribald, or argumentative just as your mood demands. It is a puppet of which you hold the strings.” He contrasts the “fatal obedience of the image” with the gravesite of the cheerful man’s mother, which “is an obstinate, resistant, often intractable bit of reality, just as Mum in her lifetime doubtless was.”
Although my life has changed in many ways since my wife’s death, I still think of her quite often. Now, however, Lewis’s words haunt these memories, because the memories so often appear to provide whatever my mood demands. Would it be otherwise if Lisa’s body were buried, or if her ashes had been interred in a cemetery rather than scattered in multiple places that she loved? There is really no way to answer that question. But perhaps my visit to Montparnasse provides a clue.
I went to Montparnasse in part to be in the “presence” of writers whose work might inspire me to write again. Yet, the inspiration that came was not from some memory of having read, for example, Susan Sontag’s writing, but from the actual words she wrote and to which a visit to her gravesite sent me back. Among the words were those from Regarding the Pain of Others that reminded me that, no matter how closely I accompanied Lisa through her illness, I will never know what it was like for her to endure and finally succumb to cancer.
In the end, it seems that mourning and memorialization may best be served by memories that are anchored in both time and place. If that’s the case, then one may reasonably ask how secure memories are when they are tethered only to the shifting grains of scattered ashes.
