Virtual Afterlives: Grieving the Dead in the Twenty-First Century

5. Grieving the Dead in Alternative Spaces

133 5 Grieving the Dead in Alternative Spaces Transactional Grieving and the Appropriation of the Dead From the dead body to the virtual body and from material memorials to virtual memorials, one thing is clear: the bodiless nature of memorialization of the dead across cultures. There is a move to replacing the body with something else in order to remember the dead. In postindustrial, Protestant, and capitalist societies such as the United States (and Western Europe, though it is not covered in this book), this trend seems much more prominent and is moving at a faster rate than it is in the developing world. This is occurring for a variety of factors. Death is being denied through the disappearance of the body, by embalmment or cremation. Though embalmment and cremation occur in other societies, the interaction in those societies with the dead body before embalmment and cremation is much more involved. For example, in India the oldest child is expected to light the funeral pyre and begin the cremation of the deceased parent, whereas in Japan the oldest child accompanies the body to the crematorium and pushes the button to begin the burning of the body. In both instances, the family is actively involved in the cremation process, but in the United States people often die in a hospital and are then sent to a morgue, and then to the crematorium. There is little interaction with the dying, the dead, or the burial process. As globalization and industrialization increase, traditional cultural values and norms will be further eroded, and the trend toward bodiless memorialization will only intensify. Additionally, as the world’s population and accompa- 134 Virtual afterliVes nying land scarcity continue to increase, the body as corpse will continue to disappear as countries look for new and innovative ways to dispose of the dead. Ultimately, the rise of memorialization is concurrent with the disappearance of the body. Though not all cultures practice the same types of memorialization (for example, tattoo memorials are not prevalent in cultures that do not approve of tattooing), several commonalities appear. There seems to be a move across various cultures to replace the body in some form with a material or virtual reminder of the deceased. This desire to replace the missing body reveals a need for the living to maintain some sort of relationship with the dead. These memorials include various religious traditions, such as the Chinese Confucian tradition of replacing the missing body with a tablet that represents the deceased person, and, in Japan, the Buddhist memorial altar placed in the home and given daily offerings of incense, candles, prayers, and food. One well known example is the Mexican Day of the Dead ceremony, in which the dead are reinscribed in the world through a photo or an artistic rendering and given offerings and celebrated each year on All Saints Day and All Souls Day (November 1–2). In all these traditions, there is a transactional element between the living and the dead, symbolizing the need to keep the dead involved in the world of the living. Judaism, Islam, Chinese religions, Japanese Buddhism, and Roman Catholicism all have religious rituals that recognize the need to inscribe the dead onto the world of the living, whether through proscriptions against cremation (Judaism and Islam) and regular acts of memorialization,1 through material objects such as ancestor tablets and altars, or even in the religious imagination of the dead through a world of saints, martyrs, and the regular intercession by and for the dead. The trend toward memorialization , both material and virtual, is a popular response to this universal need to continue to keep the dead in the realm of the living. Whether offerings left at the material memorials of shootings or at ghostbike memorials, or virtual candles and teddy bears given to the dead on Internet memorials, these interactions, both religious and popular, reveal the ongoing transactional nature of the relationship between the living and the dead. The dead need to inhabit the world through their absence if they 135 Grieving the Dead in Alternative Spaces are no longer present. Ghostbikes, for example, use white in their symbolic rendering of a phantom—attempting to re-create the image of a bike and thereby a ghostly apparition of a biker once present. Gifts and notes to the dead reveal this need as well; at the Boston Marathon memorial, running shoes, notes, teddy bears, and...