Tuesday 24 September 2013

Grieving in the 21st century: Tattoo tributes, mobile memorials and virtual visitations


"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust" may be the traditional view when it comes to death. But "ashes to tattoos" is one unconventional way people have found to honor their dead, as mourning goes skin-deep, mobile, wearable and virtual this century.

It's all part of new methods of denying the "messiness of the corpse" and "returning" the dead to us, whether by paying tribute through car decals, T-shirts, online memorials or tattoos etched in conventional ink or even mixed with "cremains" -- cremated human remains, says Baylor University scholar and author Candi Cann, Ph.D.

"With 'do-it-yourself' memorials, people are creating their own ways of memorializing the dead, particularly in a more secularized society," said Cann, an assistant professor of religion in Baylor's Honors College. "Some people are alienated from some common traditions such as a long funeral Mass. Cohesive rituals may not be part of their lives."

She made a presentation on "bodiless" memorials at the recent international conference, "Death, Dying and Disposal," of the Association for the Study of Death and Society. Photos of unconventional tributes are in her forthcoming book Virtual Afterlives: Grieving the Dead in the 21st Century, based on interviews with the bereaved.

Such memorials are "the opposite of what occurs in the religious realm with martyrs and saints, and with relics," she said. "Martyrs and saints bring us closer to holiness and to God through their bodies and narratives of their suffering."

In a secular setting, movies and television shows increasingly dwell on the spectacle of corpses -- everything from a vampire's gory victim to a body on an autopsy table as a pathologist and assistant chat nearby. But when death is up close and personal, mourners are increasingly uncomfortable with the reality of the corpse, Cann says.

Granted, death has never been pretty, and humanity has dealt with that through embalming, purchasing elaborate headstones, and, more recently, embedding ashes in ocean reefs -- or even giving the departed a sendoff with a fireworks display that includes ashes.

But modern-day bodiless memorials are increasingly "returning" the dead to us through visual or virtual "replacements" that are more personal than a memorial in a cemetery or in nature.

With tattoos as tributes, "The idea may seem new, but it's not that far removed from the customs in Victorian England" or the Civil War, when people might wear a lock of a loved one's hair or a photo in a brooch or watch chain, Cann said.

"People simply want to carry the dead with them," she said. "They see a tattoo as forever."

In one photo in Cann's book, a father displays a tattooed likeness of his son's smiling face. The young man, who drowned, had longed during his life for a tattoo of Hawaii; in the image on his father's back, the son sports such a tattoo.

Generally, it's young people who get tattoos to express grief, Cann said. "Often, they choose one of their grandparents that died, because that's their first loss."

To memorialize her grandmother, one young woman opted for a tattoo of a bottle of window cleaner, accompanied by the sentiment "Put some Windex on it" -- a frequent admonition of her grandma.

Then there are tattoos from cremains that are etched into the skin after blending microscopic ash with tattoo ink. Medical experts caution that such tattoos may be risky, and many tattoo artists refuse to do them to avoid legal complications. Some balk at other types of memorial tattoos, too, Cann learned in interviews with them.

"The artist wants to do something personal, yet they also want to do something representative of their work," she said. "They might see flowers or angels as boring or cliché, and that's not how they want their work to be represented."

Other expressions of grief are just as personal, but temporary.

All-black apparel at funerals has long been an expression of grief, but these days, a "mourning T-shirt" may be the deceased person's favorite color. It may display dates of birth and death, an image, and an affectionate nickname.

"A T-shirt also is a way for people who aren't family or allowed time off from work to say, 'I am grieving,'" Cann said.

Car decals, as well as shoe polish or liquid chalk on vehicle windows, are being used to pay tribute to the dead, not just support for causes and sports teams or good wishes for newlyweds.

And while it has long been common to leave teddy bears or erect wooden crosses at the scene of a tragedy, people are becoming more imaginative and personal. One of Cann's photos shows a snow-white "ghost bike," festooned with a maroon Christmas garland and placed at the site of a bicycle accident.

But "the bike is a clean, pristine version - not the one that was mangled," Cann said.

Besides funeral home websites that allow "virtual visitors" to sign guest books, online mourning has evolved to include Facebook's "R.I.P." permanent memorials, as well virtual tombstones, which allow people to use their smartphones to scan headstone codes and launch websites with an interactive life story for those who visit the grave in person or online.

While spontaneous public memorials with flowers and teddy bears sprang up in Newtown, Conn., after the mass murders at a school, as well as after the Boston Marathon bombings and the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas, "those spaces are becoming smaller in geography and time," with people differing over how much is enough, Cann said.

After the shootings at a theater in Aurora, Colo., memorials were allowed to remain for three months, and then moved to the city's archives for a future public memorial, while in Newtown, they were removed after two weeks, she said.

But when such public memorials are removed, Cann said, they almost invariably return in "the virtual realm . . . The dead will return to haunt us if we do not acknowledge them."

Tuesday 24 September 2013

http://www.baylor.edu/mediacommunications/news.php?action=story&story=133098

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Difficult duty: Recovering those who have been lost at sea


Closure can be hard to come by when a loved one dies at sea. Sometimes a boat is found the next day. Other times, the weather conditions make an immediate search impossible. Families sometimes must hold funeral services that can feel incomplete, and seafront communities create memorials to bring a sense of finality.

In Maine, there are some 23 trained divers among the state's police, marine patrol and warden service who work hard in sometimes dangerous conditions to help families achieve closure when tragedy strikes at sea. Though the divers go about their task with the professionalism needed, they know they are making a difference for families and friends of those who die on the water, said Mike Joy, dive team leader for the warden service.

"Every diver knows how important their job is," Joy said in an email interview.

If a body is lost in saltwater, the recovery effort is usually led by the Maine State Police, who maintain a team of ten divers. All are full-time police officers who mostly operate on land but have special diving and aquatic police work training, said Trooper Matthew Grant, the force's dive team leader.

The team is augmented by three divers from the Maine Marine Patrol, which also provides logistical support. If the body recovery effort is needed in inland waters, the ten-diver team of the Maine Game Warden Service takes the lead, but each team stands ready to help the other when needed.

In some ways, the work the divers do is similar to the work they are trained to do on land. On land or by sea, it can involve dealing daily with death and grieving families. Standard police training helps divers examine a scene they may find underwater to evaluate the situation for safety and look for evidence, said Grant.

"When you’re looking for evidence or making a recovery, you have to sort of shift into low gear and kind of do the best you can, given the conditions. You take a moment and sort of analyze things," he said.

But in other ways, diving work is much more dynamic and dangerous than much of the work the wardens or police do on land, Joy and Grant agree. The environment of a scene of a water accident may change completely every five minutes. And conditions often are treacherous, said Joy. Sometimes recovery efforts may need to be delayed for weeks or months to make sure divers are safe, even though such a delay may grieve a family awaiting word.

"We often dive in locations where people would not dive," Joy said. "Every dive we conduct is in a black-water condition, zero visibility."

Both the warden service and the police force also have support systems in place to help divers process their experiences after recovery efforts are complete. Whether an incident happens on land or in water, there are procedures in place to evaluate the emotional well-being of wardens and police and to give them the space to talk about their feelings.

The divers also learn to lean on each other for emotional support, Joy said. It's emotionally difficult work, but wardens and police, by necessity, train themselves to maintain an emotional distance in their work, said Grant.

"I wouldn't necessarily say you become hardened," said Grant. "But you do become accustomed to it."

Body recovery work does make the divers evangelical about boating safety, however. Too often, Grant said, he recovers bodies of fishermen who do not have on the gear that gives them the best chance for survival. The newest generation of survival suits is designed to be more lightweight and easier to wear, but too often fishermen can underestimate the danger of their conditions, or overestimate their swimming ability, Grant said. They keep the suits nearby and think they will have time to don the suits should trouble arise. In his work, Grant says he knows otherwise.

"An inch too far away is still too far away," he said.

Tuesday 24 September 2013

http://www.workingwaterfront.com/articles/Difficult-duty-Recovering-those-who-have-been-lost-at-sea/15583/

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Five more bodies pulled from massive mudslide in Mexico


Rescuers have pulled five bodies from a massive mudslide that buried part of a village in southwestern Mexico, where 68 people were reported missing, the interior minister said Monday.

Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong did not indicate whether the bodies belonged to any of the people who were declared missing in La Pintada following deadly storms that battered Mexico last week.

President Enrique Pena Nieto said over the weekend that there was little hope of finding anybody alive in the village, which was swamped by a mudslide as people celebrated independence day on September 16.

Osorio Chong told Radio Formula that authorities found Monday eight bodies in a mudslide “very similar to La Pintada” in the town of Acatepec in the mountains of Guerrero state. He said two other people were found drowned in a river.

Authorities said late Sunday at least 110 people have died nationwide since last week’s double impact from tropical storms Ingrid and Manuel.

The death toll does not include the 68 missing from La Pintada and Osorio Chong did not give an updated body count.

Abel Barrera, director of the Tlachinollan Human Rights Center of the Mountain, told AFP that local authorities have confirmed an additional 42 deaths linked to landslides and drownings in the region.

Tuesday 24 September 2013

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/09/23/five-more-bodies-pulled-from-massive-mudslide-in-mexico/

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