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The
funeral industry wasn't always like it is today. Rituals and practices
evolve over time, and made relatively sudden changes when society
changes. Collector's Weekly spoke to undertaker Caitlin Doughty, the
founder of the
Order of the Good Death, about how funeral practices have moved away from the personal to the industrial.
Originally,
the way we handled death in America was very simple, something I would
ideally like to go back to. If somebody died, the family kept the body
in the home. They washed them, wrapped them in a shroud, and then
carried them to the graveyard and put them directly in the ground.
Collectors Weekly: All within a short time after a person’s death?
Doughty:
Yeah, two days or so after the death. But this was in very small towns
with communities that could rally to make this happen. There were huge
numbers of fatalities during the early years of the American Colonies.
Eventually capitalism took over, and death was pulled away from the
family.
The first major change was embalming, a chemical
treatment of the corpse to preserve it, which is a uniquely American
practice. Embalming started during the Civil War, and soon after,
anybody could be embalmed, and it was more about creating a standardized
product, or what they now call a “memory picture.” Especially in the
growing cities, it became clear that taking care of the body yourself
was hard emotional work, and people realized they could pay somebody to
do it. People who used to be cabinet makers now said, “I can make
coffins,” and people who were just dressmakers were like, “I can make
funeral mourning clothes,” and all these things now sold as part of the
funeral industry.
The services quickly became centralized, with a
funeral director or mortician or undertaker, somebody who could take
the body away and handle everything. Now the family didn’t have to do
any of the hard work around their loved one’s death. This transition
happened in the late 19th century, and spilled over into the early 20th
century as well.
Read more about the traditions of
the past surrounding death, and how historic events shaped the way we
deal with the loss of a loved one today.
More
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