Caitlin Doughty's Blog

Revisions to a cemetery expose, and even reshape, the relationships that living humans have with each other and with the dead. But nonhuman life is part of the process too. Chronicling the history of an African American cemetery in Oxford, Georgia, Mark Auslander writes:

In 1990, an unscrupulous, politically well-connected pulpwood merchant clear cut the oldest part of the black cemetery, taking out hundreds of pines and destroying scores of gravesites dating back to slavery times and Reconstruction. With the trees went much of the community’s capacity to locate and recall the resting places of the dead. The town matriarch, Miss Sarah, recalled a decade later, as she tried to find her way across the meadow, “I used to be going by the trees. I was going by the trees.”

The destruction of nonhuman life—of these trees—became its own violence against the living and the dead. Cutting trees was an unmapping, a book-burning.

Photograph by Sjhus

The English ivy, privet, wild grape vine, Japanese knotweed, greenbrier, wisteria, pokeweed, and other plants that grow over graves and cover cemeteries are key players in their daily drama. Weeds cover up histories and create obstacles for people wishing to locate and care for their dead. Initially, they seem to play an opposite role to that of the trees in Oxford. The main “work that plants do” in these cemeteries is the work of erasure and forgetting: an inexorable force, enveloping, destroying, and returning to wildness a site that people had intentionally carved out from nature to bury their dead.

But certain types of plants were also used by enslaved people and their descendants to mark burial sites. Periwinkle and yucca can be signs leading to hidden burials, hidden ancestors. The writer Alice Walker, reaching the end of a quest to find the grave of her literary hero, the novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, describes a feeling beyond “normal responses of grief, horror, and so on” when she sees “the field full of weeds where Zora is.” Yet even in this
anguished essay, Walker finds ambivalent beauty when she “plunge[s] into the weeds”: “Some of them are quite pretty, with tiny yellow flowers. They are thick and healthy, but dead weeds under them have formed a thick gray carpet on the ground,” she writes. It’s an image of life and flourishing creativity supported from underneath by the hidden dead: an echo of the connection linking Walker to her chosen ancestor Hurston.

For groups of cemetery citizens, plants have also been a call to action. When a neighboring property owner cut down a tree in Geer Cemetery, letting it slam down on top of graves, it was a desecration that also galvanized the resurgent Friends of Geer Cemetery organization. The Friends of East End logo, a stylized rendering of curling vines, elegantly speaks to the presence and importance of plants. Without weeds to clear from plots and grave markers, cemetery work would largely consist of more specialized and less accessible tasks.

Unless you know how to wash and clean a headstone properly, you risk damaging it. Research about the people buried in the cemeteries also requires specialized training, as well as access to the internet and relevant databases. By contrast, weeding and clearing brush are tasks that almost anyone can jump right into, on almost any day. They are the most immediate ways for new people to “physically feel themselves reclaiming,” as Friends of East End volunteer Melissa Pocock describes it.

Plant life, and the different procedures for removing or taming it, comes to seem like part of the identity of a cemetery. I associate Geer and East End with long, stringy vines of English ivy and the ever-present danger of poison ivy, which leaves itchy souvenirs of workdays on my body. When I went to work with the Lane Street Project in Wilson, North Carolina, I had to get used to the thick strands of wisteria growing like baskets around the graves, a “lattice” of coiled tension that Lisa Y. Henderson described vividly:

That wisteria, especially—I don’t think I’ve ever… I mean, I grew up sort of rambling through those woods and swinging on those vines, but I never particularly paid attention to the way that it grows, and just this lattice of runners underground. I was trying to describe to somebody: I’m like, it’s—it’s a thunnkk. I mean, the tension is so incredible in these vines, the release of energy when you cut this thing is pretty amazing.

The wisteria was far more daunting than the weeds I was used to pulling, but perhaps even more mesmerizing once I began to get into the flow. I could get my hands around the vines, making them into piles that helped me measure my progress.

Working in a cemetery also offers encounters with nonhuman animals. Sometimes these are planned: Brian and Erin’s dog, Teacake, goes to East End nearly every day, sometimes playing with Mark Schmieder’s dog, Willow. She circulates with her ball, looking for someone to toss it for her while making people laugh. Unbeknownst to her, she’s doing important work: for students and others visiting the cemetery for the first time, she breaks the ice, easing them into spending time in a place they may initially find sad or morbid.

FIGURE 5.2. Black-and-white sketch of a volunteer leaning back as they pull long vines from the ground at Geer Cemetery. They wear a bandanna, glasses, gardening gloves, and a plaid shirt. Drawing by the author, November 13, 2022.

Deer, insects, birds of prey—encounters with all of them are reminders that living and dead humans are not the only cemetery citizens, not the only beings with a stake in what happens in burial grounds. We must widen the circle of belonging in cemeteries to include the nonhuman.

In July 2022, Lisa Y. Henderson posted a new update to the Black Wide-Awake blog. The City of Wilson had agreed to sponsor the use of ground-penetrating radar to analyze Vick Cemetery, a public African American burial ground founded in 1913 and active until the 1960s. No existing records of the burials at Vick have survived. In 1995, a contractor for the city removed all the grave markers from the cemetery for a “cleanup.” City employees kept the
headstones in storage and subsequently destroyed them; they also lost the key to a map that had been made recording the information found on those headstones. It was now impossible to reestablish people’s burial locations; Vick became a field of erasure. “Five decades of people caring for the dead, leaving names and key details carved into headstones, eliminated,” is how Lisa described it.

As Lisa expected, ground-penetrating radar was revealing Vick to be an orderly and “well-populated” cemetery (countering a common misimpression that overgrown cemeteries were always unplanned and disordered spaces). But before the technical analysis was complete, the plants were already saying things. Lisa wrote that photographer George Edward Freeney Jr. had just flown a drone over Vick Cemetery to photograph it from above. Wilson County was in a drought, and Freeney’s aerial images revealed a formerly hidden green grid of places where the grass was still growing: “row after row” of nearly perfect rectangles.

Those little lozenges where the grass is growing greener and lusher? These are the ancestors revealed in plain sight. These are the graves of our people.

Last month, when I spoke at a Wilson City Council meeting to give thanks to all who made radar survey of Vick Cemetery possible, I stated as one reason the work is important is that the dead cannot speak.

I was wrong.

Row after row. Side by side. Despite decades in which its stewards allowed a forest to spring up over it, and tires to pile high in its weeds, and power poles to punch through its sacred soil, and its headstones to be ripped up and cast away, Vick Cemetery’s dead—my father’s baby brother, my cousins, your grandmothers and grandfathers, aunts and uncles—are speaking loudly and clearly: WE ARE NOT LOST. WE ARE HERE….

To Lisa, it seemed the ancestors were reasserting their presence, revealing their power to speak through patterns in the grass. In her description, she moves seamlessly from “my father’s baby brother, my cousins” to “your grandmothers and grandfathers, aunts and uncles.” Finally, at the end of her post, the “I” and the “you” blend into a “we”: “We rejoice, we give thanks, we renew our vows to restore recognition and dignity to our dead.” Our dead. A song of belonging, passing from the dead into the grass, then from Lisa to her city and her people.

 

 

 

Excerpted from Cemetery Citizens: Reclaiming the Past and Working for Justice in American Burial Grounds by Adam Rosenblatt, published by Stanford University Press, ©2024 by Adam Richard Rosenblatt. All Rights Reserved.

Image via the Broadly Gender Spectrum Collection

“These dead are hungry. Fuck, Dance, run, kiss, steal, eat decadently, sing, destroy, create. The energy of life, ecstatic life, draws them close, nourishes.”

The first line of Contagion Press’s First Protocols of Queer Goetia seems an unusual way to start a pamphlet dedicated to remembering and connecting with the dead. Most memorial bulletins feature vibrant pictures or quotes chosen to represent the lives of those who have died, distributed among a small or large group of mourners. But this is the anonymous author’s favorite line of the book they wrote “in spirit” to connect with the queer dead. While it has no names written in its pages or family members succeeding their death, it is a patient and often joyous connection point to the many LGBTQ+ individuals killed and buried anonymously, who have no one wandering this Earth to remember or celebrate who they were.

A brief history of Goetia

The line above is preceded by two footnotes, one of which explains the etymology of the word “queer” and the history of the term “Goetia.” The latter derives from the ancient Greek term “goeteia” and refers to a form of sorcery invoking the dead. In ancient Greece, the term “goes” referred to magicians, seers, and healers that stereotypically were associated with deceptive magic. “Grimoires” were their book of spells that contain instructions for conjuring’s and castings, along with summoning spirits, gods, and demons. These texts predate ancient Greece, tying back to ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt.

But these terms, all described in Greek, derive from the term “goao” which refers to a ritualized form of mourning through wailing. As the author explained to me, that embedded into this practice “is this idea that certain sounds or certain intensity of emotion when connected with sound or song is able to really open the gateway between the worlds.” The concept of ritualized mourning is common to many cultures, who both change dress, meals, house guests, and excursions outside for periods after the death of a loved one, or who in moments of grief, try to reach out to lost loved ones through systems of magic like those found in grimoires.

Photo courtesy of The Anarchist Library.

The first page of the First Protocols of Queer Goetia (2019).

Although traditionally today associated with paganism, grimoires were, according to British historian of witchcraft and magic Owen Davies, used by early Christian groups. In his book Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (2009), Davies explained that the concept of Enoch being connected to such books of magic continued through the Medieval Era. The most well-known connection to Christianity refers to the Testament of Solomon which would later contribute to The Goetia: The Lesser Key of Solomon the King, a collection of manuscripts and text fragments from the British Library published in 1650. In the Medieval Era, soccer came to be associated with Solomon and grimoires or books he was believed to have written.

Currently, as North America experiences a revival of witchcraft and occult practice, Goetia is still part of many peoples’ practices, both in a secular way towards inner transformation and in a magical way towards greater inclusion in witchcraft communities.

As the author explained, many ancient cultures, including Ancient Greece and the wider Hellenistic culture, believe that the restless dead walk among the living; those who “are still roaming the earth are often those who died in violent ways or maybe never had children who could honor them as ancestors, and obviously for queer people, we had a type of kindship that exists outside of the framework of just heteronormative passing on and reproduction of genes and ancestry.” The First Protocols of the Queer Goetia refers to the next exploration in the history of grimoires, developing texts that connect with queer ancestors and physically reclaim the ways in which LGBTQ+ individuals have traditionally served as spiritual workers for centuries.

Written “in spirit”

The idea of this pamphlet came to the author while they and friends were visiting the San Francisco AIDS Memorial in San Francisco. While walking home, they felt overcome and rushed to a coffee shop where they began scribbling down the instructions on napkins. While they continued using these instructions in their own private practice, they didn’t approach Contagion Press to publish the text until they lost a friend in the Goshen Fire in California, with the goal of providing “something that could maybe bring some sense of peace or closure or power to people who were in my community mourning for their queer loved ones.”

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Inscription at the entrance to the National AIDS Memorial Grove in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, California. The inscription reads, “Circle of Friends Loves Touched by AIDS / Donors to the Grove / Those Who Have Died / Those Who Loved Them.” The name recalls the Circle Sanctuary, a church rooted in nature spirituality and animism, that was part of the 2023 Pride Interfaith Service.

It was a perfect match. Em Dash, a staff member at the Contagion Press explains that the organization is a project deeply rooted in connecting and conversing with the queer dead. The Press is specifically catering to self-described “weirder” facets of queer history, providing content for those working at the intersection of esoterica and the occult. For this reason, the press produces materials in extremely small batches that are highly targeted, choosing its own distributors and selling wholesale to bookstores.

In the past, the pamphlet appeared alongside zines like Queer Fire, exploring the George Jackson Brigade, a guerilla group of veteran activists of Black, Women’s and LGBTQ+ Rights Movements active in the 1970s. In line with this anarchist focus, the author chose to remain anonymous, believing that they were used as a vessel to write and share this text with others.

Although this text was written according to the author “in spirit,” the author did acknowledge that they follow in the footsteps of queer magician Jake Stratton-Kent who wrote the Encyclopedia Goetia. In his first volume The True Grimoire published in 2010, Stratton-Kent explores the chthonic (referring to another or underworld) roots of goetic ritual and upends the European tradition that goetic magic is associated with Solomon (as explained above). In fact, he argues that modern grimoires are actually the living linear descendants of ancient Greek “goes” who also had a rich queer history and culture that elevated individuals who today might identify as trans, nonbinary, intersex, and queer as living between two worlds and two identities.

As the author shared with me:

“In a lot of traditional communities found all over the world what you see is a tendency for queer people or third gendered people or people who are in some way different to actually have a very special ritualized spiritual role in their community and it’s kind of understood that people who are able to stand in different worlds, in different identities, are actually liminal people, who are connected to spirits. I think a lot of the queer people I know have a lot of very innate or natural connection to the other world, to spirits. … I think that our exclusion, our demonization from within like Christian faiths, I think it actually is really sinister because it disconnects us from what makes us powerful and what makes us special and unique. I think that queer people come to understand that we actually also have our own lineage of ancestors, and we also are tapped into these fairly ancient practices and roles, I think a powerful part of our continued survival.”

Thus, this text and others published by the Contagion Press that are catered to people exploring the intersections of queerness, the occult, and anarchy have been surprisingly popular–meeting a need for ways to connect with queer ancestors. Some people the author spoke with have used the Goetia in a more modern way, opening the text and choosing a line at random or cutting the text apart and picking a line from a jar as an intention for the day as a form of internal transformation and secular betterment. And this focus on ritualizing the remembering of the queer dead also bleeds into the academic world, seen in Fintan Walsh’s Performing the Queer Past: Public Possessions book published this past year.

Image via the Broadly Gender Spectrum Collection

A Modern Revival

Walsh, himself a gay man, shared that in the post marriage equality moment, he was surrounded by progress and positivity seeing the LGBTQ+ Rights Movement as over and thus modern LGBTQ+ communities as disconnected from their predecessors. He pushed back on this idea, acknowledging that many queer people have a persistent sense of the past, that things and people seen frozen in the past and issues remain unresolved as witnessed by increasing anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in the United States. Today more than ever, LGBTQ+ lives are at risk, from access to gender affirming care to representation in schoolteachers, books, and programming to the right to express and claim our identities and protect our bodies.

His work focuses on using theater to embrace and explore queer pasts with his students who he was shocked to learn were not even aware of the HIV/AIDS crisis. He is committed to “that kind of obsessive, repetitive work in inquiry. It’s not just kind of dusty, misdirected, historic work, but it’s also the work of culture making,” he explained, “And that the past isn’t always a repository of the dead or embracing the negative, but it can also be a source of rejuvenation and richness and redirection.”

Thus, for many others, The First Protocols of the Queer Goetia is not just a text about self-discovery and intentionality but an instruction manual for seeking out queer ancestors who may be trapped in the past, who may be wandering the Earth just like the Ancient Greeks believed. Sitting alongside Becoming Dangerous: Witchy Femmes, Queer Conjurers, and Magical Rebels released the same year, this text has gained a following among trans, nonbinary, and queer communities who are seeking out magical representation. It reflects a growing interest in queer folk magic and ancestor worship in the LGBTQ+ community, seeking out queer spirits and deities in ancient traditions and recognizing and celebrating the power of recently gone activists.

The best example of this is the Trickster’s Apothecary (@tricksterapoth). This small online apothecary, founded by Filipino trans man Loki and his transmac nonbinary husband Robin in 2021, aims to give LGBTQ+ individuals the spiritual tools they need to connect with queer elders and the queer deities that they may have worshipped, with custom prayer cards, rosaries, pocket altars, and this upcoming Pride month, prayer candles of figures like Marsha P. Johnson.

With this goal, the pamphlet calls out to the queer ancestors who were killed, maimed, crucified, and destroyed because of who they were for which we do not have their names carved in stone like those at the AIDS Memorial in San Francisco, who persist without descendants to name and remember them. It connects these ancestors who fought to the ones who fight today, to a community hungry for elders through which to image queer futures for themselves. See the last line of the first page:

“These spirits, in life, feared dying alone. Assure against their isolation in death./
They died in prisons and camps and pysch wards, at the hands of inquisitors and gaybashers and cops./
Vengeance is sweet even to them./
The great vengeance is to live joyously on their behalf.”

As the author explained, this book meets a specific need–pioneering a way to honor, venerate, and celebrate the queer dead, outside of queerphobic religious institutions that cast out the queer dead, seen at Cecilia Gentili’s funeral service two weeks ago which was condemned by the diocese. While LGBTQ+ communities are often stereotypically seen as dichotomous with religious and spiritual practice, the First Protocols of the Queer Goetia holds a space for LGBTQ+ individuals of various traditions to seek out and connect with queer ancestors and thus for many queer people who feel disconnected from lineages, to find mentors to guide them.

Via Institute for Justice

The seeds were planted a decade ago; Peter Quakenbush, who owns Michigan Burial with his wife Annica, read Life Everlasting: The Animal Way of Death by Bernd Heinrich. “It is a fantastic book about animal undertakers and the animal way of death. At the end, Heinrich considers his own death and describes wishes for a green burial on his land in Maine,” he tells the Order. A few years later, he read The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World by Peter Wohlleben, a forester in Germany; among the forests he manages is an ancient Beech forest. In the book, he writes about how the forest would be more valuable if it was left standing and used as a burial ground, than if it was leveled for timber.

“This is only a small part of the book, but it really grabbed my interest, he says. “I remember thinking about it all day while I hiked up and down a mountain that I climbed weekly at the time. I love how it is a way for an existing ecosystem to generate an income and pay for its own protection and restoration.

It is a perfect win-win.”

Today, that spark of inspiration is a 20 acre piece of land in Newaygo, Michigan; an aspirational burial ground currently the center of a legal battle between town officials and the Quakenbushes.

Via Institute for Justice

Their vision for the land is simple and revolutionary at the same time; to provide the state with its first conservation burial ground, which is a type of cemetery where the land is preserved in its natural state. “The forest floor is covered in a blanket of bright green sedges and fallen logs covered in lush moss,” says Annica. “Blue-green lichen is on the trees, mushrooms peek out of the ground, native wildflowers cover the ground in spring, and you can always hear a chorus of birds chirping. It is a really special forest, and we have loved it since the moment we saw it.”

Green burials are not new; far from it. In the United States, embalming the dead became common practice during the Civil War, when soldiers who died away from home needed their bodies to be preserved on the journey back. Enter: embalming. But prior to the war, most American funerals involved a green burial, and the practice remains a mainstay in many cultures and religions to this day. Misinformation, fear, and stigma abound in the deathcare world and the concept of a green burial can feel obtuse to a society that is accustomed to  practices like embalming and silk lined caskets – but what defines a green burial is actually very simple. It involves burying the dead directly into the earth in an organic material; this can be anything from a linen shroud to a more elaborate wicker coffin.

“The forest floor is covered in a blanket of bright green sedges and fallen logs covered in lush moss,” says Annica. “Blue-green lichen is on the trees, mushrooms peek out of the ground, native wildflowers cover the ground in spring, and you can always hear a chorus of birds chirping.”

Peter, who is preparing to defend his dissertation in Biology, used his clinical knowledge of the subject and his passion for plants and the earth to ensure their conservation burial ground found a perfect home – the property sits at a high elevation with a dry climate, and has been covered in native forestry for over 100 years. Once they found and purchased the land, they undertook every logistical, scientific, and ethical precaution to bring their vision to life; more than that, the town was excited – reception for a new and eco-friendly way to bury their dead was largely positive.

But the Township Board had other plans. To halt the Quakenbushes from proceeding with the development of the Michigan Green Cemetery, the board passed an ordinance banning not only conservation burial grounds, but the development of all new cemeteries in the township.

Via Institute for Justice

This is unconstitutional, says the Institute for Justice, who are representing the Quakenbushes in their case.

“Put simply, the Quakenbushes own their own land and should be able to use it to operate a conservation burial ground that meets (and even exceeds) health and safety standards,” says Katrin Marquez; attorney at the Institute for Justice, one of the attorneys representing Peter and Annica and their business in Quakenbush et al. v. Brooks Township et al. “There is no legitimate legal basis for the ban,” says Marquez. “Peter and Annica have done everything right and the Township’s ban violates the Quakenbushes’ rights. Peter and Annica’s property rights and economic liberty rights—the right of individuals to earn an honest living free from unreasonable government interference—are at stake in this case. Put simply, the government can’t use targeted zoning to ban Peter and Annica—or anyone else—from engaging in a safe, productive, and otherwise appropriate occupation. And that’s exactly what Brooks Township is doing here.”

This case, she says, implicates a number of fundamental constitutional protections. The current lawsuit focuses primarily on property rights and economic liberty; Peter and Annica have a right to use their property as they see fit, and operate an occupation that is not harmful to the public. Furthermore, the Michigan Constitution doesn’t even allow a municipality to ban safe land use simply because it’s misunderstood, which is exactly what’s happening here.

Beyond that, the way we care for and bury our dead has deep personal, cultural, and religious ties that implicate even more constitutional protections. “The equivalent of green burials, for example, is required by some religions—including Judaism and Islam,” says Marquez. This case even touches First Amendment protections on freedom of speech, and Marquez says the Institute for Justice is seeing increased litigation surrounding end of life doulas. “Governments are trying to silence end-of-life doulas, in violation of their free speech rights, in order to create more business for funeral directors,” she says. “In various states we’ve seen governments require people that just want to encourage others to engage in uncomfortable but important conversations about death to get funeral director licenses. But these requirements make no sense. They’d force someone to do things like attend mortuary school to study embalming, anatomy, and chemistry; embalm dozens of remains; work as an intern at a funeral home for a year; and build or purchase a full-service funeral—all just to talk about death.”

The way we bury our dead is already, not without legal protections – though they’re perhaps not commonly known or understood, thanks to widespread stigma that shrouds conversations about death and funerary care. “For example, most places allow backyard burials for family,” says Marquez. “And practices like home funerals—where a family hosts a funeral in a private home with the deceased loved one lying in honor—are resurging in popularity. Another example is that no state requires a casket for burial. That said, facilities like cemeteries or crematoriums are subject to local zoning and state regulations.”

At the heart of the Township’s opposition to the burial ground is, without equivocation: misinformation. “It has largely been fear and misunderstanding that have informed opposition to our plan,” says Annica. “There has been unfounded fear about water contamination, toxic human remains, murderers dumping bodies in the woods, animals digging up graves, cemetery neglect leading to bodies falling out of a mausoleum, lots of cars driving around in the woods…we’ve heard it all.”

Via Institute for Justice

The Quakenbushes have gone above and beyond to ensure their the plans for their conservation burial grounds exceed all the requisite public health and safety regulations Marquez says; they’ve received approval from the local health department and have even taken the additional step of studying the Green Burial Council’s publications, taken GBC’s courses and reached out to them to verify their requirements for certification once the burial ground is open.

For their part, in a statement, the Green Burial Council agrees that what the Quakenbushes are trying to do should not only be perfectly legal, but is in line with how we have been caring for our dead for centuries – and how people increasingly want to engage with deathcare.

“Natural burial has been a part of the human experience for thousands of years,” says Rachel Essig the Green Burial Council, Board Treasurer who has been a cemeterian for 16 years, “and green or natural burials are what people want.”

“I believe, unfortunately, that many people are so turned off by the natural cycle of life in death that they lose sight of thinking holistically, critically and scientifically about natural burial practices.”

Increasingly, she has seen an interest in green burial options over the last five years and more and more death care providers are offering alternatives, many within a religious framework. That hasn’t stopped pushback from local and state governments who she says often have a “knee jerk” reaction to the proposition of green burial.

“I believe, unfortunately, that many people are so turned off by the natural cycle of life in death that they lose sight of thinking holistically, critically and scientifically about natural burial practices,” she says.

Green cemeteries are not new or even uncommon – not even in Michigan. But neither is pushback to the practice; just last year Minnesota placed a ban on new green burials. What is especially startling about the Quakenbushes’ case is the scope of the ban. It would impact all prospective cemeteries in the area, illustrating how far removed from reality these lawmakers are from the reality of deathcare. “Look at your community, imagine all your neighbors: will they fit in the existing cemetery? Will their children, their children’s children fit in your local cemetery? Are there enough grave spaces? Are your local jurisdictions working to ensure the ratio of residents to final disposition options are proportionate?” says Essig. “This is a public health question. A green cemetery is not only a public health answer but it’s also an environmental solution – anywhere in the US.”

“[Green burial] helps us face the reality of our mortality and invites meaningful participation in the burial process. It helps us see how we fit into the bigger picture, one where life goes on and we play our part. It creates sacred spaces in nature, where humans are a part of nature, not apart from nature.”

It’s certainly a complexity that Peter and Annica have appreciated in their thoughtful and careful planning of this. “Death is a touchy subject that can easily become emotionally charged,” says Peter. “There is an established industry used to doing things a certain way and used to making a living a certain way. Change is hard and the uncertainty is scary.”

They also see the Michigan Green Cemetery as part of a larger, greener future in death care; for the Quakenbushes, that means the hope of more people being able to access at home death care – more autonomy in how loved ones care for their dead so their practices are in alignment with their wishes and beliefs. “Of course we think conservation burial should play a big role in this vision. It celebrates life, even protects it,” says Peter. “It helps us face the reality of our mortality and invites meaningful participation in the burial process. It helps us see how we fit into the bigger picture, one where life goes on and we play our part. It creates sacred spaces in nature, where humans are a part of nature, not apart from nature.

It is a beautiful picture of harmony, balance, belonging, and long-term thinking.”

Good Death Fellow Olivia Matthews

Miscarriages of justice, like we saw with George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Trayvon Martin and countless others, unfortunately make this play relevant. In a better world, and in a more perfect union, this play wouldn’t exist, but as someone who has always strived to use my art and my platform to speak out against injustice and cruelty, it must exist.

In my play, Here Lies Vivienne Greene, the title character is called to smuggle a young Black boy out of her hometown after he is threatened by an angry white mob. Set in 1956, soon after the murder of Emmitt Till, she grapples with risking her life and the family business while her own personal grief hangs in the air. Throughout the play, we are transported back in time, to a not-so-distant past in Nashville: to smoky somber jazz clubs; raucous Sunday dinners with new friends; a quiet, quaint bedroom in the middle of the night with Hugo, a lost love of Vivienne’s. Through her memories we learn while why she struggles, but why she must act- and fast.

from the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture

Emmitt Till and Mamie Till Mobley

Inspiration and Background

Here Lies Vivienne Greene was originally developed at Ohio University during my second year of graduate school. During this time I was inspired by the story of Henrietta Bowers Duterte, a Black woman who, after her husband’s death, took over his funeral home. It later became a stop on the Underground Railroad where she would hide runaway enslaved people as mourners in funeral processions or inside of caskets. This latter image struck me and became an essential metaphor within my play. While caskets usually suggest a finality to life, Duterte’s and then Vivienne’s use of it allows for a rebirth into freedom. However, as we know from history, that freedom for Black Americans is strained, with economic inequalities and systemic violence both physical and psychological.

As someone invested in Death Positivity, my goal with this play was to speak to this movement and the Movement for Black lives. To have a good death, one that is informed and has access to options, one that allows for a smooth transition, and possibly, as is part of Black culture, a homegoing, there must be a certain quality of life. Often, under such violent conditions, this is not the case for Black people and many disenfranchised citizens. How can one celebrate, how can one have a good death, when life seems so stifled?

Illustration via Damn Joan

“…how can one have a good death, when life seems so stifled?”

The Process

Throughout the course of the Fellowship much of the play has remained the same thematically and structurally. However, with some exploration into what it means to have a homegoing service or a celebration of life, I really got to expand on one of the most important characters of the play, Abigail. While Vivienne seems very stern, Abigail is full of love and life. She mourns the death of her late husband she knows that he should be celebrated like a prince. This conflicts with Vivienne’s frugality around funerals (inspired by The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford) and her reserved demeanor, but also her grief. How can Abigail grieve and celebrate out loud? What will being vulnerable do to Vivienne?

Outside of writing, the bulk of this process has been organizing and recruiting collaborators for the project. My dramaturg is Janai Lashon, a theater artist and activist who read for Vivienne during my time in graduate school. Her insight and ability to speak to theater, race and gender has always been invaluable to my growth as a writer. As part of our website, she will be creating a resource page.

Headshot of actress Caisey Cole who has been cast to play the tile role of Vivienne Greene

Challenges and Barriers

When I initially applied for the Fellowship, I was planning to develop the play in Atlanta and work specifically with local actors and present it live with a talkback. However, circumstances occurred where it made more sense to do the play online, particularly as an audio play. This unexpected challenge turned out to be a blessing. I can now work with actors I normally wouldn’t have access to, and being available online the play will be able to reach a much wider audience.

That said, something I’ve struggled with in this process has been nailing down a time to work with everyone. With people being in different time zones and having different work schedules, there’s always been some kind of snafu with getting everyone to meet. While this has delayed the project a few times I’m happy to say that we are in the final stages of casting and will be scheduling a start date for rehearsals in August.

The Future of Here Lies Vivienne Greene

We will be rehearsing and recording the play in late summer/early fall of 2023. Once the dining process is completed we will be making Here Lies Vivienne Greene available to the public via Spotify and possibly other audio platforms. I am also speaking with other panelists to create companion content to help promote the play and explore its rich history and themes. For updates follow along on Instagram @hereliesviviennegreene where we’ll be highlighting our actors and panelists, and sharing behind the scenes details.

Epilogue

I’m always concerned with “relevancy” or “timeliness” with my work. What in our culture is it speaking to? As I mentioned this play, unfortunately, is ever-relevant, ever-timely. Back in May, I had a conversation with my dramaturg Janai, and we noted that a few weeks prior to us speaking, Carolyn Bryant had passed, which of course brought up conversations of Emmitt Till. Through the play his memory and his mother’s legacy are forever present with us, almost 70 years later.

APPLICATIONS FOR OUR GOOD DEATH FELLOWSHIP WILL OPEN AGAIN LATE SUMMER 2023.

Fellowships are open to thought leaders and community organizers within the death positive community that have a project intended to make death a more meaningful, sustainable, and equitable experience for all, including but not limited to education, community care, art, events, technology, and/or advocacy.

This grant provides funding to selected Fellows to launch or advance their existing work on a specific project in their area of expertise. In addition to funding our Fellows receive expert support, access to resources, and connection to a community with a passion for changing the future of death care.

Visit our Good Death Fellowship page to learn more. Meet all of our 2022 Good Death Fellows. 

Photo courtesy of Wake

The Order’s 2022 Good Death Fellow, Wake, is a nonprofit based in New Orleans that offers their local community information and resources for meaningful, affordable, and environmentally friendly deathcare. We talk to Liz Dunnebacke, Executive Director of Wake, to learn more about their work, the value and challenges of creating a community deathcare organization, and their Fellowship project, the Death Concierge program.

How was Wake founded and could you share a bit about its history?

I started Wake in 2020 after many years of interest in end-of-life issues. In 2012, I was working as a freelance producer of reality TV when my mother was diagnosed with late-stage terminal cancer. In the almost two years it took for her to die I was so overwhelmed with the process that it threatened to derail my life. Over the course of the next several years three other close family members died, and my experience with all of death’s attendant issues grew. These issues ranged from the most profound (how to memorialize your mother? What to do with her body?) to the most mundane (why is it so difficult to close down someone else’s cell phone account? Netflix? Credit card?) And the financial pressures were extremely difficult to navigate, even as a middle-class family. How would we pay the mortgage as we tried to clear out the grandparents’ home and sell it, all while living 2,000 miles away, and navigating a large, blended family with lots of competing interests?

During this time I constantly felt as though I were inventing a wheel that had likely already been invented. I knew that losing a loved one would be sad, but how could it also be so logistically challenging, if everyone has to deal with it? I wanted to create a resource to help people navigating these issues. I had worked extensively in nonprofit administration and I knew that I could create a small, grassroots nonprofit in my community that could provide direct service to families in need. We launched in June of 2020 in the middle of the pandemic, at which point my Dad suddenly fell ill and died that July. I was definitely walking the walk.

How does Wake put its mission into practice?

Wake has a number of programs that are meant to help connect folks to deathcare resources. These include our Death Concierge Program, Death Cafes and legal clinics, and ongoing education and outreach initiatives.

What are some of the barriers people in New Orleans are experiencing with end-of-life and funeral care?

By far the greatest barrier to meaningful deathcare across this country is financial, and New Orleans is no exception. The majority of our clients cannot afford the deathcare they are seeking. In-ground burial, which is a common choice of disposition in this predominantly Catholic and Baptist community, is becoming increasingly expensive in American cities, where land prices continue to increase dramatically.

Direct cremation has become the most prevalent method of disposition as it is the most affordable. But even this choice, with a price tag of well over $1,000, can be prohibitively expensive for families, and many clients are forced to surrender their loved one to the state’s indigent burial program, which takes over disposition in a potter’s field that is not open to the public. Indigent death is handled differently in each state, and even from region to region, across the U.S. Many coroner’s offices will return cremated remains to a family; not in New Orleans.

For those who are able to make arrangements it can take days or even weeks to crowdfund the money to pay for these, often leaving a loved one’s body long enough that the funeral home will require that any visitation, even just an identification, will require costly embalming.

Furthermore, New Orleans has a high rate of death as a result of gun violence; in 2022 it was the highest in the U.S. And deaths from overdose are also among the highest in the nation. Many families are losing loved ones in tragic circumstances, which further complicates an already difficult process. These deaths almost always result in an autopsy being indicated, which causes delays and makes visitation more expensive for families.

Photograph courtesy of Wake

A traditional Muslim burial

How does Wake work with their local community?

The Death Concierge Program is how we respond to community deathcare needs. Folks call Wake and let us know what they need, and we respond by providing direct services (often logistical/administrative) or connecting the family with relevant resources in the community, or both.

Because the vast majority of community needs tend to be financial, it is crucial that we be able to provide this service free of charge. People need to be able to pick up the phone and call us to get their questions answered. We operate a virtual hotline, where folks can call or email with questions or needs, and one of the staff or volunteers helps to connect each client with the resources they’re looking for.

During our first couple of years, the majority of the calls came from people who had just experienced a loved one’s death; mothers who had lost their sons, daughters who had lost their fathers, sisters, cousins, and sometimes neighbors or friends. All were reeling from the loss and overwhelmed with the tasks before them. There were living arrangements to see to, custody arrangements to contend with, but first, always, a body that needed respectful disposition.

Increasingly we are receiving calls from folks who are preparing for death. A client might have just received a scary diagnosis, or decided it was time to get their ducks in a row. Sometimes we’re doing basic Advance Planning paperwork, and sometimes we’re figuring out how to provide more comprehensive support (like giving rides and helping with tasks around the house) when someone is no longer ambulatory.

Our model is to have one full-time, paid, staff member who is the main point of contact for all clients, while services and support are delivered by a group of volunteers. We are working to formalize this group and standardize the services we offer, and we are pursuing options that will allow us to reimburse our deathcare providers for some portion of their labor, without having to pass that cost on to our clients.

Could you tell us about your Death Concierge program, and how it benefited from the Good Death Fellowship?

The Death Concierge Program is how we meet the community where they’re at in terms of need. From Day One we’ve operated a VOIP phone line that takes calls from anyone who is needing help. We listen to what those needs are and do our best to meet them.

We also listen to the needs and passions of deathcare workers in our community, and have established an ongoing, monthly Community Deathcare meeting at which we network and share information with local and regional providers about important resources at end of life. We work to develop and maintain relationships with social workers, grief counselors, and death doulas in our community, as well as with local funeral homes and hospice agencies. We are continually looking for gaps to fill, and for opportunities to partner with like-minded organizations and individuals to enhance the benefit for all involved.

Over time, we’ve developed some parameters around what we can and can’t provide, but we still get calls from some of our first clients when they’re struggling to connect with a service we don’t offer, and we do our best to help them.

We help families navigate purchasing funeral services, ensuring they can easily compare prices and put together the package they want and that they can afford. Some families want help setting up a crowdfunding website, or negotiating with the funeral home, the hospital morgue, or the Coroner’s office, for more time to come up with funds. We support families’ memorialization of a loved one by helping draft obituaries or creating a funeral program as a keepsake. When we can’t cobble together the hefty fee for any method of disposition, we encourage families to still memorialize somehow, gathering in a home or a park, to share stories and distribute keepsakes.

The Good Death Fellowship provided critical funding to ramp up the Death Concierge Program during Wake’s second year of operation. Funding helped Wake to stabilize the program, define a scope of services, and create a workflow, including an intake process.

It was hugely legitimizing to receive this support from such a beloved and trusted institution. In addition to the funding’s critical role in sustaining our program, we also benefited from the recognition of being profiled as a Good Death Fellow. The Order of the Good Death also published a call for volunteers on Wake’s behalf, which has been significantly and positively impactful for our small organization.

What are the challenges you encounter running a community death care organization?

Funding is the greatest challenge to running a community deathcare organization, which is no surprise as it’s also the main barrier to accessing quality deathcare.

Furthermore, if a deathcare provider (a doula or any person providing non-medical support in dying) wants to earn a living wage providing this important care, then the burden falls to the dying person or their community to be able to pay for the care. This means that often only affluent families can afford to hire deathcare providers outside of whatever is available via their insurance benefits (hospice, palliative care, home health, etc.). An individual can choose to offer this care on a volunteer basis, but doing so can be unsustainable, financially and/or emotionally.

As a result, most families end up just muddling through their deathcare needs, cobbling together the care they depend on through an extended community of family and friends. As you might imagine, this has mixed results that often play out along socio-economic lines.

Another challenge is the restrictive legal landscape for end-of-life care. Deathcare is inordinately restricted, especially in Louisiana, requiring a licensed funeral director to handle many basic deathcare tasks such as transporting a body, holding a wake or memorial service with the body present, etc. By law, a body must be in the custody of a licensed funeral director from death until disposition, so a family must hire a licensed funeral director to chaperone any activity (bathing, wake, funeral, etc.) with their loved one. This can be prohibitively expensive for families.

If someone wanted to start a death care collective in their community what are some of the initial things they would need to do?

Do your due diligence to understand what resources already exist within the community and map these, to determine where the greatest gaps are. Start with where there is perceived need but, above all else, listen to your community. Survey care providers in your region and ask what they see as the greatest need. Be sure to speak to those dealing with end-of-life within the healthcare system, but also look at those dealing with death after it has occurred – which will primarily be those in the funeral industry. Look at your local laws, particularly at your state’s indigent death program, and how it may change from region to region throughout your state. What happens to someone in your area when a family can’t afford even the most affordable disposition? Understand how many people are “lost” to the indigent death program. Try to find these people’s communities. There’s almost always a family member or friend trying to see to that person’s needs, but they might not be able to raise the money, or they may not be able to get in touch. Try to meet your community right where it’s at in terms of need and be prepared to pivot as the needs change.

Wake was recently featured in the Washington Post article The Uphill Battle for LGBTQ People After Death for your Louisiana LGBTQ End of Life Guide, spearheaded by board member Ezra Salter, who is working with The Order to expand to other states. Could you give an overview of the guide? What has been the response to it?

The Louisiana LGBTQ+ End of Life Guide is a comprehensive primer on end-of-life care in Louisiana with the explicit inclusion of issues relevant to the LGBTQIA+ community. The guide covers specific steps people can take to protect the inclusion and agency of chosen family (as opposed to or in addition to biological family) at end of life. Examples of topics the guide covers include a document called a Primary Right of Disposition, which assigns the right to make decisions about what happens to your body after death to a person of your choosing (rather than to legal next of kin), information about how to ensure the correct gender marker is used on a death certificate, and how to advocate for oneself in the hetero- and cis-normative healthcare and deathcare systems.

The response to the guide has been so positive and we’ve heard from many folks across the U.S. who are interested in seeing something similar for their state. We’re thrilled the Order of the Good Death will be working with Wake board member, Ezra Salter, to develop similar resources for other states.

Applications for our Good Death Fellowship will open again summer 2023.

Fellowships are open to thought leaders and community organizers within the death positive community that have a project intended to make death a more meaningful, sustainable, and equitable experience for all, including but not limited to education, community care, art, events, technology, and/or advocacy.

This grant provides funding to selected Fellows to launch or advance their existing work on a specific project in their area of expertise. In addition to funding they will receive expert support, access to resources, and connection to a community with a passion for changing the future of death care.

Visit our Good Death Fellowship page to learn more. Meet all of our 2022 Good Death Fellows. 

Photo by Tiziana Onstead

If you’re like me, your TikTok FYP is a mashup of some of the most macabre content on the internet – unsolved mysteries, mortuary horror stories, dark history – and the most hyper-feminine content around – makeup tutorials, shopping hauls, and anything and everything Barbie, Hello Kitty, you get the idea. Smack dab in the center of these disparate genres of content is estate sale TikTok; predominantly young content creators who have all but turned scouring estate sales into an Olympic sport. Typically they frequent the homes – or more specifically mansions – of recently deceased people in high end areas of California, New York etc.; most of them use apps or websites to track the best upcoming sales. They document the lengths they go to be the first in line to nab the good stuff, waking up at ungodly hours, and traveling long distances.

It’s fascinating content to watch and it scratches a lot of itches; it indulges those of us who love to shop, who live to find unique and high value items at bargain prices; there’s real estate porn – most of the homes they visit are relatively lavish time capsules, filled with relics from eras past. There’s also a benign voyeurism to it; depending on whose estate it is, shoppers browse through everything from bone china and real silver dishes to kinkier lingerie or flamboyant home goods.

There’s also something I can’t shake when I watch influencers rifling through the homes of dead people for content; is that it sometimes feels craven or shallow and it makes me sad to think about the deceased, wherever they are, seeing their life’s belongings scavenged for a 50-second video. Still, I’m someone who’s worked for years to undo a lot of my own death-phobia and I’ve come to understand much of estate shopping can be an ethical, eco-friendly way to consume goods, and even a way to honor the life of whoever’s items are for sale. I’m also a lawyer and I know how estate sales work and how they happen; it’s often something that the deceased is aware of ahead of time, or that the family has arranged. It’s sad but it’s not necessarily exploitive; it’s a way for families to recover costs or give new life to the items their loved one’s once cherished.

I was curious though if this is something regular estate sale shoppers keep in mind; I’m an outsider looking into this rapidly expanding culture through a screen and a series of curated videos, but is there death awareness behind #estatesaletok, and can the normalizing of buying and repurposing items from dead people actually be a good thing for our shared consciousness about mortality?

Danielle Vanacore is a vintage reseller who runs Scout & Supply; she regularly attends estate sales to source goods for her shop. She says she’s witnessed resellers rummage through people’s homes in a way that makes her feel uncomfortable, and points to the rapidly growing popularity of estate sales and material greed during the pandemic.

“When I witness this type of vulturism, it makes me think more about the original owner of the estate, which in most cases, is deceased, and their family,” she says. “Does this person have sons or daughters/grandchildren who weren’t able to pick through these possible heirlooms prior to this sale? Is the deceased looking down on us rummaging through their things wondering who the hell we are and why are we rummaging through their things?”

Still, the alternative is worse. Items leftover from estate sales are usually thrown in dumpsters so despite any misgivings, being able to buy and resell these items is honoring them the best way they can be, given the circumstances.

Vanacore also says she is intentional about how she honors the items she buys at estate sales; as a reseller she hones in only on pieces she feels she can sell. She’s not the kind of buyer who lines up at 3am for entry so she usually gets in once things have been picked over; this gives her an opportunity to show some love to pieces that might otherwise have been overlooked.

“I’m always happy to pick up clothing items and other small items that may have staining, flaws, or need mending as these are all things I am confident in fixing,” she says. “I love repairing and upcycling old worn garments which in a way makes me feel like I am honoring the deceased by restoring things that would have most likely been thrown out.”

She says most of the time buyers don’t really think too much about the whole death aspect of things, but occasionally it can add to the appeal. “You get that one overthinking weirdo like myself who thinks they’re potentially bringing home a haunted dress (and I completely welcome it).”

Courtesy of Zak Foster

Quilt artist Zak Foster sits in front of his burial quilt, Jackpot, named for all the red 7s floating around on it. Zak says, “At the end of my life I hope I still feel like I’ve hit the jackpot of life.”

Being able to give items a second life is a common thread in estate sale and second hand culture both for items that are sold as is and those used to create something new. Zak Foster makes burial memory quilts – you may have even seen his work on A$AP Rocky at the Met Gala. He uses textiles from thrifted goods or significant items in a person’s life to create either memory quilts – something used to memorialize a moment in time like an anniversary or retirement, or burial quilts, which are buried with a loved one.

He believes strongly in the importance of reusing and repurposing goods as a way to combat the overconsumption that plagues our society.

“It is my hope that when we talk about giving objects a second life, that we do it from a place that acknowledges 1) the significance of particular objects that we lived with, and 2) the overwhelming amount of consumer goods that are unnecessarily produced each year,” he says. “We should seek out objects that already exist in this world before we go to the store and buy anything new. You need a cheese grater? Go to the thrift store.”

Honoring the goods’ past life while balancing that reality of consumption is also a central tenant of his work.

“I also hope that when we’re working with significant objects from the past, that we do so with a sense of a certain amount of respect,” he says. “I often say that everything is sacred and nothing is sacred, I think about that a lot with older pieces. You can work with these objects in a way that taps into their history and storytelling power, which to my mind is the most powerful way to work with them. But at the same time we can’t keep everything. There is simply too many things stored in humanity’s attic. If you look at grandma’s wedding dress, and you need a pair of curtains, go for it.”

Material goods are both finite and tangible, and an enduring marker of who we are long after we’re gone; there are even death care workers who dedicate their practice specifically to the reality that our stuff, so to speak, often outlives us; antique businesses like Dead People’s Stuff who make no bones (pun intended) about the reality of the items they sell.

It’s impossible to siphon off these practices from the reality of death – from our awareness of mortality and its ever creeping embrace. And while on the surface this might feel morbid, indulging in the beauty and appreciation of estate sales and giving items that would have ended up in a dump or landfill new life can actually bring us to a closer and healthier awareness of inevitably of dying.

“Mortality seems to be the bookends on the human experience,” says Foster. “Mortality decides when we start and when we stop. And it’s so easy to get lost in the day-to-day moments and we imagine that things will always continue just like this present moment. So by engaging in proactive, death-positive practices like burial quilts and memory quilts, I can maintain a strong connection to my own dwindling days and the work that needs to be done.”

Photo by Jason Schmidt

Guillermo del Toro on the set of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, 2022.

The article contains spoilers for Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, available to watch on Netflix, is a rich and imaginative take on a familiar story. Rather than transforming his protagonist into flesh and blood, del Toro uses the concept of a “real” boy to comment on the most universal aspect of the human condition: death. In doing so, he invites us to witness the sheer power of grief, and encourages us to think more broadly about mortality, which no-one can escape. Pinocchio illustrates the importance of being able to process the reality of death – not just for yourself, but for your loved ones.

We are first introduced to Geppetto’s son Carlo, a good-natured and happy boy, as they go about their daily life amidst a backdrop of a fascist Italy. The two clearly share a wonderful bond. When Carlo is killed, his father is deeply affected by the loss, barely working or eating. His anger and misery inspire him to create Pinocchio, underscoring grief’s potential as a creative, as well as a destructive force. As lightning and thunder flash a drunken Geppetto hacks at the tree standing over his son’s grave; close-ups of his tools and the brilliantly-executed sound effects immerse us in his process. His anguish and fury are enthralling and frightening, but they don’t just capture the attention of the audience. Moved by Geppetto’s mourning, a spirit visits his house to animate Pinocchio, enlisting the help of Sebastian J. Cricket – insect, homeowner, and narrator of the story – to help Pinocchio be “good.” This proves to be quite the journey. Pinocchio finds it difficult to be a well-behaved boy, and cannot be a real one; as such, he finds himself struggling to live up to the legacy of Geppetto’s son Carlo, in whose image he was created. It is significant that Geppetto needs to work through his grief in order to appreciate his second son as his own person, not a shadow of the one he has already lost. His character is a moving exploration of the devastating impact death can have. The spirit that first animates Pinocchio refers to herself as a guardian of the ‘little things, forgotten things’ – it is an important reminder that, although Geppetto’s grief threatens to destabilise his entire life, the world is far bigger than a singular loss.

Netflix

This sentiment is also apparent in Pinocchio’s portrayal of the afterlife. After Pinocchio’s first death (via car accident), we see his body processed by a quartet of skeletal rabbits. To them, death is a matter of administration – and it’s no wonder, because Pinocchio’s coffin is one of many. When they discover that he is in fact alive, they are mildly put-out; but, overall, their focus is predominantly on their card game. They show Pinocchio to ‘the boss’, a sister of the spirit that initially gave Pinocchio life. As we soon find out, she does not share her sibling’s ‘sentimental’ nature. She tells Pinocchio that he was simply not supposed to have life, ‘no more than a chair or table should’ – and, as a result, ‘cannot truly, truly die.’ Pinocchio is initially pleased to discover that he is immortal, but becomes disheartened when she makes her point about wooden furniture plainer: he, unlike Carlo, is not a real boy.

Netflix

The spirit explains her philosophy of death – that, all in all, ‘the one thing that makes human life precious and meaningful … is how brief it is.’ I’ve of course heard such sentiments before, but never framed as intriguingly as del Toro depicts it. The after-life is filled with sand-glasses and running sand, which Pinocchio falls through on his way back to Earth; there, too, the constant presence of danger means we are also constantly thinking about time. Or, to be more precise, how much time we might have left with any one person.

However, the sand-glasses aren’t just there to remind us of the possibility of imminent loss; they dictate the rules of Pinocchio’s personal afterlife. (Unsurprisingly, it turns out to be slightly different when you’re technically a wooden puppet.) Every time he dies, the spirit overturns a sandglass and waits for it to run out. When it does, she sends him back.

“The one thing that makes human life precious and meaningful…is how brief it is.”

Pinocchio eventually breaks these rules, in order to save the life of his father Geppetto. The spirit demands that he do so himself, underscoring the significance of human agency; Del Toro has spoken about the ‘virtue of disobedience’, something which Pinocchio’s character certainly demonstrates. Throughout the film, when it seems that he has failed to be a “good” boy, it is generally that he has failed to follow orders.

The significance of Pinocchio’s strong spirit is clear alongside the film’s portrayal of fascism. One of the film’s prominent characters is the podesta, an officer within Italy’s fascist regime. He recognises that Pinocchio has the potential to be the ideal soldier, in that he cannot die; however, he also knows that Pinocchio will not obey.

Netflix

This trait proves itself to be dangerous. During military training, the boys are divided up into two “teams”: one captained by Pinocchio, and the second by his dear friend Candlewick. As the podesta’s son, Candlewick struggles under immense pressure, and the idea that he is a coward if he fears dying for his country. In this vein, the expectation is that the exercise will end with one boy “killing” the other. When they cooperate instead, the podesta demands that he ‘shoot the puppet’, this time with a real gun. Collaboration, skill and determination are not rewarded; fascism values obedience, and that is a quality Pinocchio has proven himself not to show. Here, del Toro’s message is apparent: when given certain orders, it is far more noble to disobey. Pinocchio’s principles may put him in danger, but they are also deeply important in a world governed by brutality and division. One of his later deaths is actually ordered by Mussolini.

Pinocchio eventually breaks the rules of the afterlife, so that he can save his father. This act makes him mortal too. As such,  his disobedience not only makes him a “good” boy, in that he puts his father before himself, but the mortality that results from this act arguably makes him a real one. This, he resolutely accepts his own mortality and that of his loved ones.

In the final scene, we watch as his family slowly begins to leave him. As more graves appear, he leaves flowers; Sebastian, as always, is kept in Pinocchio’s heart. The soft sunlight reflects his attitude toward death in contrast to Geppetto’s earlier in the film; although he remembers and honors those he has lost, he also understands that he must move on into the world – which, our narrator believes, ‘embraced him.’

Courtesy of Edna Clyne-Rekhy

Snapshot of Edna and Major

Edna Clyne was nineteen years old and living in Inverness, Scotland, in 1959, when her Labrador Retriever named Major died. He was her first dog. Not the family’s first, there had been others in the house, but the first that had been hers alone. “He was a very special dog,” she told me, “Sometimes I would just sit and talk to him, and I felt that he could understand every word I said.” Her mother used to ask how Edna had trained Major to be so gentle and obedient, and she still laughs about the question, explaining that she had never trained him at all, it was natural between them. Many of us who have had pets have known one like that, the one that truly understands, the one who lives as a piece of us.

Courtesy of Edna Clyne-Rekhy

Edna’s original copy of The Rainbow Bridge, handwritten on a sheet of notebook paper

We can also understand the pain of their passing. The day after Major died Edna felt a compulsion. There was something she needed to write, and while she hadn’t preconceived any of it, it was there, words longing to be heard. She remembers it being a warm and wonderful feeling, like Major himself was guiding her in what to write. There was a notebook nearby and she pulled a piece of paper from it and began. When Edna filled the page she turned it over—only to find there was already something written there. Oops, she had in her haste inadvertently pulled a page from her sister’s notebook. No matter. She erased her sister’s words as best she could, and then filled half the page with her own until she was done. Then she turned the paper back over and put a title on it, two words: “Rainbow Bridge.”

Courtesy of Edna Clyne-Rekhy

The back of Edna’s original copy of The Rainbow Bridge, handwritten on a sheet of notebook paper with her sister’s writing crossed out at the bottom

Yes, that Rainbow Bridge. It is probably impossible, at least in the English-speaking world, to have lost a cherished pet and have never heard of the Rainbow Bridge. The words composed by Edna at Major’s passing are nearly ubiquitous in the world of animal mourning. They are printed on sheets passed out to people when they pick up the ashes of cremated pets. Sympathy cards and posters are found with them. Snippets of the text are frequently used in epitaphs dedicated to beloved animals. Some pet cemeteries even have them inscribed for all visitors to see, on giant stone tablets that look like something handed by God to Moses. Her words are so well known that even though they are confined to grieving pet owners they comprise one of the most influential pieces of mourning literature ever written.

Photographed by Paul Koudounaris

Craig Road Pet Cemetery in Las Vegas

As a concept, what nineteen year old Edna envisioned is a kind of limbo where deceased pets are returned to their most hale form and cavort in newfound youth in an Elysian setting. But it is not paradise itself. Rather, it is a kind of way station where the spirit of an animal waits for the arrival of its earthly human companion, so that they may cross the Bridge together, to achieve true and eternal paradise in each other’s company, and to thereafter never again be parted. The Rainbow Bridge has been referred to as “chicken soup for the soul,” as a kind of simple comfort for grieving hearts.[1] This is not an unfair assessment, but it is also something much more.

Those who have grown up in Western culture, and especially under a Christian dominated spiritual system, have frequently been discouraged from believing that animals have an afterlife, the standard line being that non-humans lack souls, and therefore cannot enter Heaven or participate in eternity. In truth, this is in no way a canonical belief, and anyone who claims it to be is ignoring centuries of debate on the issue of animals and souls among religious scholars. It is not a simple matter, and that is no doubt why it has been grossly oversimplified and presented in one-sided terms: animals have no souls, there is no eternity for them. Yet to people who have found their greatest joy in their pets, how can there be a paradise without them?

And that is precisely why the Rainbow Bridge has become so popular. It serves as a kind of theological plug in. As an elastic concept that can be applied to any faith, it provides a clearly expressed means for us to reunite with our pets in the afterlife. In so doing, it gives hope where a person may have been previously acculturated to believe there was none. Yet despite the overwhelming popularity of the Rainbow Bridge, its author has never received credit. It is usually listed as anonymous, and if one tries to get to the source one must run the gantlet of a wide range of purported authors who have tried to claim it as their own.

Photographed by Paul Koudounaris

A grave marker for a dog named Allie Bille in Winterhaven, California which reads “I’ll meet you at the Rainbow Bridge.”

When nineteen year old Edna finished the original draft, and went through and crossed out a few words to swap them for others, she showed it to her mother. “My darling girl, you are very special,” was the response, although her mother also pointed out that it was a bit messy, and asked if she didn’t want to write it out again. Edna didn’t write it out again, the copy with the crossed out words was fine, it was true to the moment. She showed it to some other people who were close to her and then put the paper away, not showing it to anyone else for a long time.

Later she married Jack Rekhy, adding his last name to hers, and she showed it to him. Jack thought it was wonderful and suggested she publish it. But Edna didn’t want to, telling him it was something private between herself and Major. But it wasn’t so private that she couldn’t share it with friends. She decided to make a few copies. She didn’t have access to any sort of photocopy machine, so she typed them out individually and gave them to people she was close to. She never imagined that what she had written would go beyond that circle, but the people who were touched by her words shared them with others. Of course, Edna’s name wasn’t on it, and as more and more people shared the Rainbow Bridge it became cut off from its source.

By the early 1990s it had crossed the Atlantic and was being shared by animal lovers’ groups in the United States. This was still a very small and obscure audience. But in early 1994 a reader who had seen the words printed in a Humane Society newsletter wrote to Dear Abby. The work of mother and daughter team of Pauline and Jeanne Phillips, Dear Abby was the largest circulation syndicated newspaper column in the United States, offering advice and words of wisdom to an audience of 100,000,000 readers. On February 20, Dear Abby printed the letter, which advised, “if you print this you had better warn your readers to get out their hankies before they read it,” and was signed by “An old softy in Grand Rapids, Michigan.” And underneath was the entire text of the Rainbow Bridge.[2]

The Dear Abby column as it appeared in the Sacramento Bee, February 20, 1994

It provoked an overwhelming response, mailbags full of letters from pet owners who had been touched, as if these words were exactly the ones they had been waiting all their lives to hear. The world now had the Rainbow Bridge—and the Rainbow Bridge had no author. Dear Abby recognized the oversight in publishing the text anonymously, and had in the same column asked her readers to please write in with a name so it could be properly credited and its creator recognized. None did, and it is unlikely any of them could have guessed that the author of the Rainbow Bridge was by that time already 35 years old and had been written by a Scottish teenager.

Lacking a single author, the Rainbow Bridge soon had many, as various animal experts and grief counselors stepped forward to claim the words as theirs. Booklets started to appear helping to justify their claims, although since none of them appeared before Dear Abby ran the text it is hard to see how they had any credibility. The United States Copyright Office lists fifteen separate claims under the title of Rainbow Bridge within five years of Dear Abby’s column. [3] Of course, this was all happening across the Atlantic so Edna had no idea any of it was going on. I told her that I had a book in my possession, published also in 1994, by an American author who said the Rainbow Bridge was originally the work of a Native American shaman, who had recited it to him while wearing a special story telling mask—she responded with a dismissive chuckle. [4]

There may not have been a shaman involved, but there is nonetheless something mythic about the text. With its author unknown to them, essayists have analyzed its components to reveal a wide range of potential sources for its imagery. The rainbow, especially in connection to animals, must be a reference to Noah and his Ark, it has been decided. And the bridge between realms is an allusion to the Bifrost Bridge in Norse Mythology. As for the idyllic setting filled with loving and peaceful animals, clearly that is derived from 11 Isaiah, which mentions how the wolf shall live with the lamb and the leopard lie down with the calf. Fitting all of this together seems like advanced stuff for the average teenager, and I prodded Edna about her influences. Surely she must have had a spiritual upbringing, or been immersed at a young age in the study of mythology. Absolutely not, she insists. The words really did just come to her in the compulsion to write, lost in the warm feeling that Major himself was directing her hand.

But then she offers more. Major’s passing was not her first encounter with death. Her father, an architect, died when she was fifteen. She was angry at him for leaving. Alone with the body, she looked down at him in his coffin, hands folded over his chest and head lead cold to the touch, and let him know exactly how she felt. Her anger was answered by an epiphany. As she stared at his face she suddenly envisioned his eyes wide open staring up at her, and heard his voice. “Dinn-a worry,” he told her, a Scottish phrase meaning don’t worry, then “athing’ll be a-richt,” everything will be alright. She felt a sudden, warm feeling, and at that moment her mother peered into the room to check on her, and told her the exact same words she had just heard in her father’s voice. At that moment she knew that there must be some kind of god, that something benevolent did exist beyond us, and she has never doubted it since. And that warm feeling she felt at that time was the same warm feeling that overcame her when she felt the compulsion to write the Rainbow Bridge.

Courtesy of Edna Clyne-Rekhy

Edna today, with her dogs Zannussi and Missy

Edna is 82 years old now. It has been 63 years since she sat down to memorialize Major, but she has never been without the page on which the words were written. There is a box of odds and ends in her attic. It’s marked, “If you can’t find it, it’s in here,” and that is where the original is now stored. She confessed that when she took it out to take photos of it for me that she started to cry, the old piece of paper still carries that much emotional power for her. I asked her thoughts on the strange journey those words have taken, and whether she harbored any resentment about her authorship of them having been forgotten. She told me it was wrong of people to try to claim it as theirs, and like anyone who has poured their heart into a text she’s not too keen on the alternate versions floating around, with people having changed some of her original prose.

More than anything though, she is simply flattered that something she wrote so long ago has resonated with such a vast number of people—the fact that it has comforted so many is the greatest possible homage to her love for Major. Not that she has ever fully understood the extent of her accomplishment. Edna had never even heard of Dear Abby until I mentioned the name and told her how the column shared her words with 100,000,000 Americans. She knew nothing about the inscribed tablets in pet cemeteries. She had also never heard the abbreviation ATB, I had to explain that it meant “At The Bridge,” and that there are entire mourning groups based around those three letters, which signify the pets waiting to meet their owners at a place she invented for Major.

But nothing took her aback as when I asked if she has any advice to share for people suffering from the loss of a pet—because she, is after all, the world’s greatest expert on animal mourning. She asked if I really thought that was true, to which I could only respond, “Well you wrote the Rainbow Bridge, didn’t you?” Her response was then immediate—get another pet. We discussed it, how the relationship with a new pet will never be the same as the relationship with the old one, but it can be equally special and loving in different ways. There’s no reason to deny yourself or another animal that love, your previous pet certainly wouldn’t have wanted you to live without it.

There would never be another Major, but Edna has indeed always continued to have dogs. She hasn’t lived in Inverness continually. There were several years in India, where Jack was a physician. They lived in Agra, not fifteen minutes from the Taj Mahal, and Edna used to rescue street dogs. After he retired they moved to Spain and bought an olive farm. She had dogs there too, and one day they came running to her. Something was up, and she followed them to the back of the house. There, inside the washing machine, was a young dog. He was an Andalusian Podenco, and he was hiding in there, badly injured, having been beaten by another olive farmer who was training him to hunt boar. She took in that one too, and called him Zanussi, after the name of the washing machine’s manufacturer.

It was in Spain that Jack first exhibited Alzheimer’s. They returned to Scotland, where he would eventually die from it, and Edna would once again write. A book called Zanussi and Jack, with a photo on the cover of Zanussi exactly as she had found him in the washing machine. And once again her words would be stolen, although this time she wasn’t flattered. The funds from the book were to go to an Alzheimer’s fund in memory of her husband, but it turned out a shady printer had been making his own copies and selling them behind her back, so she pulled the book, but hopes to put out a revised edition. (Note: the book is available both in Kindle and hard copy, but searching current online marketplaces only brings up pirated editions. This article can be updated if an official copy approved by Edna is released, but since we cannot be sure when that might happen, the author and editor suggest that if a person purchases a pirated copy they might also donate some percent of the purchase price to Alzheimer’s research, and thereby honor her original intentions.)

She still has Zanussi, who is now 11, as well as a Bichon Frisé, Missy, a professionally trained caregiver dog who is so thorough in her work that every night at 8 pm she brings forth Edna’s slippers, pajamas, and nightgown, one piece at a time, and gives a bark to signify that it is time to prepare for bed. Zanussi was at Edna’s feet when we spoke, and she offered to tell me a secret about dogs. Maybe it’s not so much a secret, and for Edna it is more like an essential truth. Certainly it is the truth which underlies the Rainbow Bridge itself, and why words written for Major over six decades ago have touched so many people, and no doubt will continue to touch them for generations to come. “If you love a dog,” she explained, “if you truly love it, it will always live on.”

As an addendum, we offer the Rainbow Bridge as transcribed from Edna’s original text written upon Major’s Death:

The Rainbow Bridge

By Edna Clyne-Rekhy

Just this side of heaven is a place called Rainbow Bridge. When an animal dies that has been especially close to someone here, your pet goes to Rainbow Bridge. There are meadows and hills for all of our special friends so they can run and play together. There is plenty of food, water, and sunshine, and friends are warm and comfortable. All the animals who have been ill and old are restored to health and strength, those who were hurt are made better and strong again, like we remember them before they go to heaven. They are happy and content except for one small thing, they each miss someone very special to them who had to be left behind. They all run and play together, but the day comes when one suddenly stops and looks into the distance, his bright eyes are shineing (sic), his body shakes. Suddenly he begins to run from the herd, rushing over the grass, his legs carrying him faster and faster, and when you and your special friend finally meet, you cuddle in a happy hug never to be apart again. You and your pet are in tears. Your hands again cuddle his head and you look again into his trusting eyes, so long gone from life, but never absent from your heart, and then you cross the Rainbow Bridge together.

Resources

[1] The quote is from Ann-Marie Gardner, “Animals: What is the Rainbow Bridge and why do we think dead pets cross it,” Washington Post, May 1, 1998; the article was syndicated and is found in several other American newspapers.

[2] The bulk of newspapers which carried Dear Abby ran the column on February 20, but because publication schedules vary some ran it later. The press clipping included here is from The Sacramento Bee. There were follow-ups to the original column. Dear Abby also published some letters from pet owners reacting to the text, and the column ran the Rainbow Bridge in its entirety again in 1998.

[3] These claims start in 1995 although it is clear that several were filed in 1994. It is unclear how many of them are attempts to claim Edna’s text since there had previously been copyright claims under that title, and completely unrelated—Rainbow Bridge had been used as the title of a text copyrighted by the Rajneesh Foundation in 1979, for example, and a copyright had also previously been held under that title for a piece of music used in the motion picture MASH. There is a dramatic increase in filings under Rainbow Bridge after the Dear Abby column, however, and in some cases influence of Edna’s text is obvious from the filings alone, as they include words like “afterlife” and “pets” in the notes.

[4] The book mentioned is William N. Britton, The Legend of the Rainbow Bridge, Savannah Publishing, 1994. Another claimant frequently cited is Dr. Wallace Sife, a professional grief counselor, who has stated the belief that the Rainbow Bridge was derived from a poem he wrote, apparently in the 1980s, called “Pet Heaven.” One claimant of the text, an Oregon man named Paul Dahm, is said to have copyrighted a version of the Rainbow Bridge in 1994, although this does not appear among registered copyrights. He published a book in 1997 called The Rainbow Bridge with Running Tide Press in Oregon, and that book is listed with the United States Copyright Office in that year.

 

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Tania El Khoury’s Gardens Speak, via Bryn Mawr College

Entering a darkened room with a floor of dark, earthy soil equipped with only a flashlight and translucent poncho, you trail others bearing the same. With muffled footsteps, you kneel before a grave, laying down your flashlight as your hand moves aside a small mound of soil big enough to cradle your ear. As you lay your head down you begin to hear a voice…

So begins the visitor’s experience of Lebanese artist Tania El Khoury’s Gardens Speak, an interactive sound installation that has exhibited internationally since 2014. Transforming the art gallery into an intimate graveyard, Gardens Speak invites visitors to experience ten oral histories of activists and protestors who were buried in Syrian gardens during the early years of the Syrian uprising against the Bashar al-Assad regime. El Khoury describes these garden burials as “a continuing collaboration between the living and the dead.” Laying down in the soil, listening to the Syrian martyrs’ stories, the visitor becomes part of the story – and part of a collective resistance.

Through her multimedia art installations and performances, El Khoury often represents the lived experiences of those escaping violence and war in the Middle East. She especially uses the act of storytelling to engage audiences and gallery visitors, with spoken stories of the lives and deaths of those caught in struggles for justice. In the early years of the Syrian uprising, El Khoury started to collect photographs of civilians’ gardens-turned-cemeteries, along with oral histories about them. In a bilingual publication accompanying Gardens Speak, the artist notes that activists would attend the martyrs’ funerals as an act of resistance against the al-Assad regime, with funerals, a place of mourning, also becoming a place for political organizing and showing solidarity. Mourning the dead became another way to resist.

Tania El Khoury’s Gardens Speak, via Bryn Mawr College

With ten tombstones punctuating the soft dirt, visitors to Gardens Speak come to lie down in the soil, parallel to the dead resting below. Each of the buried martyrs seems to whisper in your ear, as buried audio speakers quietly tell their story to the individual visitor. Telling the stories of the victims of political violence is a crucial part of maintaining resistance, and El Khoury seeks to have the visitor embody those very stories. The stories were first written in Arabic by writer Keenana Issa, who, after her arrest by the al-Assad regime, was working in exile in Beirut with El Khoury in 2013-2014. Constructed from the testimonies of families and friends of the dead, the stories are told in the first person, with each of the ten storytellers recounting their final living moments and even what came after death, telling of friends crying, praying, singing, or standing silently over their bodies.

Some of the martyrs’ funerals were silent out of necessity, with only the sound of soil falling into the grave.  Being quiet is taking care, lest the sounds of mourning attract nearby security forces who would disrupt the moment of laying to rest. This quietness carries over to Gardens Speak, as the visitor lays quietly, listening to the oral histories of the deceased, remembering their stories – not reenacting their deaths but lying with the dead and listening in solidarity.

From your place in the gallery-turned-garden, ear to the soil, you hear the story of Basil Shehadeh, a documentary filmmaker who was also a friend of Keenana. Basil made his first films about the Syrian uprising from the United States, but became disillusioned, wanting to document testimony from Syrians in Syria. Basil returned to Syria and filmed a series of short films with friends, though his computer crashed and lost all their work. He laments the loss of his friends’ work, and the loss of the filmed testimonies, the voices of Syrian civilians now silenced. Basil tells us how he died in old Homs; he was filming with four of his friends when a mortar shell fell on them. At the end of his story, he says, “If my story was ever important, it is only because it carries with it so many other people’s stories.” Basil’s desire to share Syria’s voices is realized through the continuity of his own beyond the grave, mingling with the voices of other murdered activists and protestors in the soil of Gardens Speak.

Tania El Khoury’s Gardens Speak

In its content and aim, the installation moves from the individual to the collective. By listening to and embodying the individual story, the visitor themselves listens to, attends to, and embodies the collective. As Basil hoped for his own work to do, we hear not just one story but the story of many Syrians, of those who are buried in gardens, and those who are still alive and struggling to live under a brutal regime. While the visitor to Gardens Speak is just a visitor – they will not occupy the same ground, the same garden, the same politics as the deceased – they nevertheless enact an ethics of care.

The ethics of care, a concept first coined by American feminist ethicist and psychologist Carol Gilligan in the 1980s, emphasizes interpersonal relationships in taking care of others, particularly through practices that undo oppressive societal or cultural structures as we attend to and take responsibility for others’ needs. This concept has come to influence other fields of study and practice, too, like art and the nature of the relationship between artist, artwork, and viewer. How people are represented artistically by the artist – and how the visitor engages the artwork and the people represented – is an ethical question. In Gardens Speak, the visitor literally gets their hands dirty for the dead, lying with them and listening to their stories – stories which are themselves crafted through the care of many collaborators.  The visitor cannot be passive – they must be active, responding to the soil. We must reckon with the dead, where they are spatially, what they have left behind, and what we should do next.

The ethics of care also acknowledges the impact of the politics and culture in shaping the private sphere. In other words, politics and culture shape and affect the relationships we have with friends, family, and others, near and far, at home and abroad, as explored by American feminist philosopher Virginia Held in her book The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global.  We see this interplay of politics, culture, and the private sphere in El Khoury’s installation and the real-world place it represents: the garden. Becoming a space of mourning and resistance, the garden, a once-private space of the home, is directly affected and restructured by state-sanctioned violence in Syria, as are the lives of the living and the dead that inhabit it. The stories from these gardens, passed from family and friends to writer and artist, across the boundaries of nation and language, find their place in the ears of Gardens Speak’s many visitors.

Basil’s story has come to an end. But before you brush away the dirt and leave the garden, you have one final task – you may write a letter to Basil, to be buried next to his grave. What will you say? How will you respond? Will you offer condolences, a message of solidarity, a prayer, a “thank you,” a question? El Khoury has amassed many letters from Gardens Speak. Some of these letters have been shared with surviving family and friends of the martyrs, and some have been reproduced in El Khoury’s publication and other installations. Whether addressing the dead or those who live on, or the world more generally, these letters come about only through listening and a place of mutual rest, a place displaced and reimagined, from Syrian gardens to art galleries and museums across the globe. Gardens Speak invigorates mourning as an act of collective resistance; in lying with the dead, in hearing their stories and responding to them, we carry their struggle onward.