Halloween decorations have been going up in our neighborhood since early September. Several yards I've seen feature fake gravestones, often with comic names for the bodies supposedly in the graves. Here and elsewhere they seem to vary from impish death references (Seymour Wurms, Ima K. Daver) to memento mori puns (Noah Scape, Saul Overnow, U.R. Next) and the maybe too apt (a grave marked simply My Sanity, a little on the nose for 2025.)
One irony may be that while the fake gravestones are increasing, the real ones are not, at least in direct proportion to the number of people dying. The first change is the growing popularity of cremation over burial. According to the National Funeral Directors Association, death is followed by cremation over 63% of the time in the US this year, with casket burials at under 32%. The association expects cremation to be 80% of the total in another 20 years.
Moreover, cremation increasingly does not end in burial. The association's figures on this are a little suspect, since they add up to far more than 100%, but it looks like more than a third of people surveyed intend to have their "cremains" interred in cemeteries, with the rest being divided among family or spread in a "special place," etc.
In my own limited experience, not only burial is becoming a thing of the past, but so are traditional funerals. In my parents' generation and before, the process was always the same: a "viewing" at the funeral home one or two evenings in the week after death, and a funeral a few days after that. For Catholics, that meant a funeral Mass, followed by a procession of cars with their lights on, to the cemetery where a ceremony at the gravesite would follow. The coffin would be lowered into the grave, though the actual burial would usually occur after the mourners were gone. (The Catholic Church has gradually loosened its attitude towards cremation--in my youth it was a mortal sin--but it still insists on some sort of ceremony and interment.)
But in recent years the standard for people of the boomer generation and younger has been a private cremation followed days or weeks or even months later by a celebration of that person's life.
There was always a bit of circus even in the traditional way. Family lined up to chat with people they hadn't seen in years with an embalmed body lying in an open casket behind them always struck me as more than a little grotesque. And having been a pall bearer, trying to maneuver a heavy steel casket with five others had its tense and sometimes comic moments.
The circus aspect is one thing that hasn't changed. Some "cremains" are made into jewelry, bullets or fireworks. The most popular place to spread them has been Disney World, though such a practice is officially banned there.
There are a few things that apparently have changed, dramatically. The absence of ceremony is the most obvious. Humans have actually or symbolically buried their dead with ceremony for at least 100,000 years, from even before our species. Though humans wantonly slaughter each other in war, there is at least the tradition ( in military circles for instance) of caring for remains with respect and ceremony. Identifying remains is considered important, even if many years have elapsed. Some Native peoples go to great lengths to repatriate the remains of ancestors and bury them with ceremony on home ground. The funeral procession--especially when it was on foot--had great power and symbolism in many very different cultures.
Funerals for the well-known became historic occasions, and some state funerals--like those for Abraham Lincoln, FDR and John F. Kennedy--were important in beginning to heal a shaken nation.
But many if not most people in Europe and Asia and the Americas who were not wealthy could expect to be treated with a version of the respect for royalty maybe twice in their lives if they married, but certainly once: after their death. Family and friends would gather in their finest mourning clothes for a ceremony that was entirely about the deceased, first in a place of worship with clergy, with ceremony that they probably shared with their ancestors, and then again in a green place where some of their family and their ancestors may also be buried.
Their bodies were buried beneath a tombstone inscribed with their names, the years of their birth and death to tell the future that they had lived, and when. Their survivors and their descendants, friends and their descendants as well as curious strangers could read those names and dates, generations later.
This was considered the respect due everyone in a civilized society (even though it didn't work out that way for everyone.) The scandalous thing was an "unmarked" grave.
I understand that a large factor is the high cost of burial, but it seems cremation is not a lot less expensive, and I'm not sure how cost necessarily accounts for the drop in ceremony, or even a marker. But it also seems that things are more complicated as people and communities shy away from organized religion, or don't share the same one.
Perhaps the community does not need to grieve together because often there is no community anymore, except maybe a diffused ad hoc one. (That's certainly true in my case. My funeral would be among the worst attended in history. Nor can I conceive of an appropriate place where my marker would not be as obscure as if it didn't exist.) I understand that people increasingly prefer to not have funerals or a marker, and wish to become immediate dust in the wind.
But I do wonder: does any or all of this express that we've lost respect for the dead, and therefore for the living? Or for ourselves? Or have we just given up on any idea of permanence, even relatively speaking.
I don't know. But I can't help wondering if these comic tombstones represent something more than the typically mixed and complicated feelings towards death that Halloween expresses.
