The Whole Death Catalog

by Harold Schechter

  Condolence Letters

  There was a time when literate people prided themselves on their ability to compose articulate letters to friends. That, of course, was before the advent of e-mail and instant messaging. Nowadays, letter writing has joined the ranks of other increasingly obsolete skills, such as performing long division by hand and driving a standard-shift car.

  Even today, however, there are occasions when no other form of communication will do. Preeminent among these is when a bereaved friend is in need of consolation. Somehow, a heartfelt “Sry 4 ur loss” transmitted via cell phone just won’t cut it.

  Given how hard some people find it to express themselves in writing—plus the inherent difficulty of conveying one’s sympathy in a way that doesn’t seem phony or trite—composing a meaningful condolence letter can seem like a daunting task. Experts in the field of grief counseling offer a number of suggestions.

  Ideally, you should handwrite a condolence letter on tasteful stationery within two weeks of learning about the death. You should strive for a natural, conversational style that avoids both flowery sentiment and stilted, overly “proper” language. The letter can be as short as a few sentences, though longer letters, running as much as a few pages, are perfectly acceptable.

  Since the purpose of a condolence letter is twofold—to pay final respects to the dead and offer comfort to the living—it should consist of the following components, according to grief experts Leonard Zunin and Hilary Stanton Zunin:

  Acknowledge the loss. Assuming that you didn’t hear the news from the person you’re writing to, you should begin by explaining how you learned about the death and expressing your dismay. (“I was heartbroken when I heard from Bill last night about your father’s death.”)

  Convey your sympathy. In sincere, straightforward language, offer your sympathy and emotional support. (“No words can adequately express my sadness, but I want you to know that my thoughts and prayers are with you at this difficult time.”)

  Mention the special qualities of the deceased. If you knew the deceased well, describe the traits you most admired in him or her. (“Your father was not only an exceptionally generous and warmhearted man but one of the happiest I’ve ever known. He never seemed to lose his capacity to enjoy the small, simple pleasures of life.”)

  Recall a specific memory of the deceased. If possible, relate an anecdote that evokes the special qualities of the person. (“I remember walking through the town park just a few months ago and seeing him in the playground with his granddaughter Suzie. They were together on the seesaw and, from the look on their faces, it was hard to tell who was having more fun, the seven-year-old girl or her seventy-year-old grandpa.”)

  Remind the bereaved of his or her own personal strengths. The death of a loved one can render a person so emotionally fragile, so profoundly insecure, that a few reassuring words, bolstering the bereaved’s sense of self-worth, can be very important. (“From personal experience, I know how hard it is to lose a father. But I also know that, like your father, you are a person of great inner strength and resilience and that these qualities will help see you through this difficult time.”)

  Offer assistance. People in the early stages of grief can always use a little help dealing with the daily demands of life—cooking, cleaning, errand running, and so on. If you are ready and willing to assist in specific ways, say so. Generalized offers—“If I can help out in any way, let me know”—are much less effective and tend to ring a little hollow. (“As someone who cares deeply about you and your family, I hope you’ll allow me to help out in the coming weeks. I’ll call in a few days to see if there’s anything I can do.”)

  End with a thoughtful phrase. Instead of a conventional sign-off—“sincerely,” “best wishes,” “yours truly,” “warmly,” or the like—conclude with a final, heartfelt phrase. (Among the suggestions offered by the Zunins: “Our hearts are with you always,” “We share in your grief and send you our love,” or “You know you have my deepest sympathy and my friendship always.”)

  If, for whatever reason, you feel absolutely incapable of writing a condolence letter, a store-bought sympathy card will do. Even in this case, however, you should add a brief message of your own—even if it’s just a line or two expressing your love and support.

  RECOMMENDED READING

  For a lucid, comprehensive guide that will tell you how to write condolence letters to everyone from the parents of teenage suicides to military wives whose husbands have been killed in action to children who have suffered the loss of a pet, see Leonard M. Zunin and Hilary Stanton Zunin’s The Art of Condolence: What to Write, What to Say, What to Do at a Time of Loss (Harper-Perennial, 1991). Also recommended: Helen Fitzgerald’s The Mourning Handbook: The Most Comprehensive Resource Offering Practical and Compassionate Advice on Coping with All Aspects of Death and Dying (Fireside, 1995). You can also find a useful tip sheet at http://dying.about.com/od/thegrievingprocess/a/condolence.htm.

  The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

  —VLADIMIR NABOKOV

  Grief Dreams

  Back in 1895, Sigmund Freud became convinced that he had solved one of the great mysteries of the ages: the hidden meaning of dreams. It seemed entirely possible, he wrote to a friend from his home in Vienna, that “some day on this house, one will read on a marble tablet: ‘Here revealed itself, on July 24, 1895, the secret of the dream to Dr. Sigm. Freud.’”

  Despite his absolute assurance that he had finally decoded this age-old riddle, Freud’s theory has not aged well. Nowadays his psychoanalytical interpretation of dreams as fulfillments of repressed erotic wishes has been largely discredited. Indeed, certain scientists insist that dreams are just random neuronal events with no hidden meaning at all. Other researchers, however, continue to believe that dreams do play a significant role in the emotional and psychological life of the dreamer, even if it’s not the erotic one insisted on by Freud.

  One variety of dream that has drawn particular attention from researchers in recent years has been the dream about a dead loved one. In a pioneering 1992 essay, “Through a Glass Darkly: Images of the Dead in Dreams,” Harvard psychology professor Deirdre Barrett analyzed seventy-seven such dreams and found that they fell into four major categories, roughly corresponding to the stages of grief as famously outlined by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.

  The first and most common is the “back-to-life dream,” which tends to occur shortly after a death. Though these dreams are sometimes accompanied by intense feelings of joy at the longed-for return of the loved one, they are often intensely disturbing, like this recurrent nightmare by a young woman who had been the primary caretaker of her terminally ill grandmother until the latter’s death three months earlier:

  A recurring dream I have is that my grandmother visits me in a hotel. I say, “Oh, you’ve come back to me,” and she says, “Yes, we are going to try it again and see if I live this time.” Suddenly, she collapses on the bathroom floor. I try to revive her, but I can’t. I am panic-stricken and scream, “You can’t die, I have to do it right this time!”

  Next in frequency are what Barrett calls “advice dreams,” in which the dead person returns to offer words of wisdom to the dreamer. In contrast to the previous category, these dreams generally occur long after the loved one’s death and are almost always pleasant, as in this example:

  My father died nine years ago but I often dream that he returns, especially at times of stress in my life. I tell him problems I am having and sometimes he just listens and I feel better. But usually he gives me advice, sometimes very clear, sometimes garbled. In the instances where it is clear, it is always good advice but things I already know I should do. But just seeing him and hearing it from him makes me feel better.

  The third category of death dream, which Barrett calls the “leave-taking” type, also tends to make bereaved people feel better, helping them to “resolve their g
rief in waking life.” Barrett cites the example of a young woman whose grandmother died suddenly in a hospice before they had a chance to say goodbye. For months afterward, the young woman was “tormented by guilt.” One night, however, she dreamed that she was awakened by the ringing of the hallway phone:

  As I picked up the phone, the dark hallway became fully illuminated. I said “hello” and my grandmother’s voice said, “Hello, Sally this is grandma.” I said, “Hi, how are you?” We spoke for about ten minutes. Finally, my grandmother said she had to go. I said, “OK Gram, take care, I love you.” She said, “I love you, too, goodbye.” As I hung up the phone, the illuminated hallway became dark again. I walked back to bed and fell asleep. When I woke up for real the next morning, and ever since then, I have been at peace with my grandmother’s death.

  Telephone calls also figure prominently in the final category, which Barrett labels “state-of-death.” These are dreams in which the sleeper is contacted by a dead person who reports on conditions in the afterlife. In the majority of examples collected by Barrett, the deceased gets in touch with the dreamer by phone, though other means of communication are sometimes employed, as in the case of “one young man who dreamed his dead grandmother appeared on a television talk show to be interviewed about what it was like to be dead.”

  While some researchers question Barrett’s direct correlation between death dreams and the phases of waking grief, all agree that they serve an important psychological function, keeping alive our connections to departed loved ones and helping us to come to terms with their loss. Psychologist Patricia Garfield has written an entire book on the subject, The Dream Messenger: How Dreams of the Departed Bring Healing Gifts (Simon & Schuster, 1997). Based on her analysis of roughly one thousand examples, Garfield concludes that most dreams about dead loved ones contain nine standard elements: something that signals the imminent arrival of the “dream messenger” (Garfield’s term for the image of the deceased); the arrival itself; details relating to the physical appearance of the dead person (who may or may not look as he or she did in life); other departed family members or friends who may appear as “attendants;” a message delivered by the deceased; a gift conferred by same; a farewell embrace; the departure of the “dream messenger;” and the feelings that the reawakened person experiences in the aftermath of the dream.

  Garfield is exceptionally open-minded about the ultimate source of such dreams, refusing to dismiss the possibility that they might be “actual encounters with the spirits of the deceased.” Few scientists would entertain such a supernatural explanation. Most would agree, however, that—wherever they spring from—these nocturnal visions tend to be “exceptionally vivid, emotionally packed, and may dramatically alter the life and belief system of the dreamer.”

  The Victorians: Fetishists of Death

  The Victorians might have been inordinately squeamish about sex—covering bare piano legs with crinolines, for example, and insisting that no well-bred young lady would ever feel anything as debased as erotic desire. But they made up for their sexual prudery with an unbridled indulgence in matters relating to death—an almost orgiastic wallow in bereavement rituals.

  Queen Victoria herself epitomized—and helped promote—this phenomenon. After the sudden death of her husband, Prince Albert, in December 1861, she plunged into a state of deep mourning from which she never fully emerged. Until her own death forty years later, she dressed exclusively in widow’s weeds and maintained a domestic routine that bordered on the necrophilic. “Each morning,” as D. Lyn Hunter writes, “servants set out Albert’s clothes, brought hot water for his shaving cup, scoured his chamber pot, and changed his bed linens. The glass from which he took his last dose of medicine stayed by his bedside for nearly four decades.”

  Taking their cue from the beloved monarch, Victorians on both sides of the Atlantic made a fetish of mourning, giving themselves over to elaborate, highly formalized death rituals. Middle-and upper-class funerals reached new heights of ostentation, with opulent hearses, luxurious coffins, extravagant processions, and professional pallbearers decked out in elaborate costumes. Etiquette manuals such as The Mourner’s Book, The Mourners Friend, and The Mourners Gift spelled out the often dizzyingly complex dress codes for widows, who were required to remain in mourning attire for more than two years. Memorial “hairwork jewelry,” fashioned from locks of the deceased, became a hot-selling item, along with other varieties of mortuary merchandise, from black-edged mourning stationery to embossed “memorial cards” handed out as souvenirs following the obsequies.

  Inside the home, parlor walls were adorned with somber lithographs of grief-stricken survivors weeping over tombstones, cupboard shelves displayed little glass domes enclosing the desiccated remains of old funeral wreaths, and fireplace mantels sported framed photographic portraits of dead babies laid out in their cribs. Beautifully landscaped “garden cemeteries” became a favorite site for Sunday outings. Tear-jerking ballads such as “Little Sister Has Gone to Sleep” became sheet-music best sellers, while poetasters grew famous composing doggerel about the tragic demise of innocent victims. Even kiddies got in on the act, gobbling up picture books such as Who Killed Cock Robin? that featured lavishly illustrated funeral scenes.

  It’s for good reason that one British scholar, James Stevens Curl, calls his indispensable study of late-nineteenth-century mortuary practices The Victorian Celebration of Death.

  RECOMMENDED READING

  James Stevens Curl’s book (issued in 2000 by Sutton) deals exclusively with British mortuary customs, as does Trevor May’s slender but information-packed The Victorian Undertaker (Sire, 2000). For the American side of Victorian mourning rituals, see A Time to Mourn: Expressions of Grief in Nineteenth-Century America (Museums of Stony Brook, 1980), edited by Martha V. Pike and Janice Gray Armstrong, and Karen Halttunen’s Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (Yale University Press, 1982).

  Widow’s Wear

  Though it would still be regarded as a breach of decorum to show up at a funeral wearing, say, a Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts, the rules governing the proper attire for such solemn occasions have relaxed considerably over time. Indeed, even in the not-so-distant past, people here and abroad were required to follow stringent dress codes not only at funerals but during the ensuing (often quite extended) mourning period.

  This was particularly true for women. The practice of wearing “widow’s weeds” (from the Old English wed, meaning “garment”) extends back to the Middle Ages, when wealthy women—who were expected to forsake their social and sexual lives following the death of their husbands—often retired to convents and dressed in the austere, somber manner of nuns.

  Renaissance lady in widow’s weeds.

  In succeeding centuries, mourning garments became increasingly stylish, at least among the aristocracy As early as the fifteenth century (according to costume historian Lou Taylor), “the temptations of fashionable dress became too much for aristocratic widows, and from that date onward, very slowly at first and then with increasing speed, widows’ dresses became more and more fashionable.” In Elizabethan England, some shameless aristocratic widows went so far as to deck themselves out in wheeled farthingales, long stomachers, and neck ruffs. At this point, black was not yet the exclusive color of mourning. On the contrary, the French style known as deuil blanc, or “white mourning,” was common among European royalty.

  By the Victorian era, mourning dress had turned into something of a fashion fetish on both sides of the Atlantic. To a great extent, the craze was inspired by Queen Victoria herself, who—following the sudden death of her beloved husband, Albert, in 1861—shrouded herself in crape-covered black garments and continued to wear mourning clothes for the remaining forty years of her life.

  Victorian women’s magazines such as Godey’s Lady’s Book, Gentlewoman, and Sylvia’s Home Journal devoted endless articles to the subject of widow’s wardrobes, complete with engraved illu
strations of the latest in stylish mourning wear. A typical picture might show a Victorian beauty arrayed in “tasteful mourning toilette consisting of a dress in soft black silk, with dull surface, which is veiled with a tunic of transparent spotted net ornamented with a fine design in narrow braiding, while the collar is in black silk guipure lace.”

  At the same time manuals, with titles such as Notes on Fashionable Mourning, set forth the complex, if not utterly bewildering, rules of mourning etiquette. Readers were instructed, for example, that “mothers should wear black without crape for six weeks after the death of the mothers-or fathers-in-law of their married children,” while “a second wife, on the death of her husband’s first wife’s parents, was expected to wear black silk, without crape, for six weeks.”

  The dress code was especially onerous for widows, who were required to be in “full mourning” for no less than two years. This protracted period of public bereavement consisted of three distinct stages: “deep mourning,” a year-and-a-day-long stretch during which the widow wore dull black garments shrouded from shoulder to floor in heavy black crape, along with a long black “weeping veil” when venturing outside; “second mourning,” a nine-month period when she was allowed to ease up a bit on the crape and add a few black silk trimmings to her toilette; and “third (or ordinary) mourning,” when she could dispense with the crape altogether and adorn her somber apparel with a certain amount of funereal frippery—“black ribbon, embroidery or lace.” Even after enduring the two-year sartorial restrictions of full mourning, widows were required to enter into a period of “half mourning,” which, as Lou Taylor explains, “lasted anywhere from six months to a lifetime. Many widows never came out of half mourning…. Half mourning consisted of the fashions of the day but made up in special half mourning colors. These included a range of soft mauves, variously called violet, pansy, lilac, scabious, and heliotrope.” Along with all the other hallmarks of Victorian society—from bustles and whalebone corsets to the view of women as docile “domestic angels” devoid of sexual feelings—these elaborate rituals were killed off by the enormous social upheavals of the post-World War I era. Mourning dress became increasingly rare in both the United States and Great Britain as the century progressed. By now, things have reached such a pass that, as Lou Taylor somewhat wistfully notes, “It has become difficult to identify widows.”