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

1. The Bodiless Memorial: The Dis-location of the Body

17 1 The Bodiless Memorial The Dis-location of the Body Grieving without Bodies Recent years have seen an upsurge in spontaneous and grassroots memorialization1 and the rise of popular memorials for the dead: the Columbine shooting memorial, the memorial of Diana outside Kensington Palace, the Oklahoma bombing memorial, the Aurora, Colorado , shootout memorial, the World Trade Center memorial,2 and most recently the Sandy Hook Elementary School memorial. In addition to these large specters of public memorialization, there has been an enormous upswing in local and personal memorialization. Erika Doss discusses this trend in her recent book, Memorial Mania, documenting the phenomenon of memorialization in popular culture and its growing popularity.3 The most curious aspect of this trend is the movement toward memorialization without the body. From spontaneous memorials to memorial services (as opposed to funerals), there is a key element missing: the dead body. Whether it is a memorial located at the place the body was last intact before its death, such as roadside memorials and the Sandy Hook Elementary memorial, or it is a memorial service held with cremated remains and no corpse, bodiless memorials are clearly indicative of the trend toward memorialization without bodies. In this chapter I address the displacement of the body in contemporary memorialization and question the possible problems and meanings behind this displacement. Then I analyze several of the more recent popular bodiless memorials that have emerged in the last ten years, including ghostbike memorials and me- 18 Virtual afterliVes morials at the sites of the Nickel Mines tragedy, the Aurora, Colorado , movie theater shootout, and the Sandy Hook Elementary School killings. The traditional purpose of the funeral is manyfold, but it has two primary functions: the ritual that allows the proper disposal of the body in a way that prepares the dead for the next phase of life after death, and the ritual working through of grief for the community that knew the dead person. Even those who do not believe in an afterlife , however, can acknowledge the funeral’s purpose of providing for the “correct” disposal of the dead. (Whether religious or merely sanitary, the disposal of the corpse is still a necessary aspect of the funeral.) Prevalent in the last 150 years, however, has been the (primarily Western) cultural view of the necessity of the viewing of the embalmed corpse as a part of the remaining community’s “grief work” over the dead person.4 Death rituals traditionally emphasize the dead body as central to the ritual itself, providing an encounter with the dead that allows the bereaved to personally confront death. What then do we do without a body? What does it mean when we memorialize at the site of death as opposed to the location of the dead body itself? Bodiless memorials offer a way to express one’s grief in a publicly sanctioned way, but without the confrontation of death and the corpse. Bodiless memorials—whether they are a spontaneous memorial at the site of death, or a service without the corpse—are a remembering and celebration of the body without the body. In short, a bodiless memorial is a disembodied memorial for the body. As Karen Wilson Baptist wrote about a personal memorial she attended in honor of a deceased colleague: “I sensed no comfort in this contemporary celebration of death. There was no casket, no urn, no body in the room. Nobody led us into ritual commemoration; rather there was an open microphone at the front of the room. Speak at will. Share a story . But we did not share stories nor did we sing laments together: there was no grave to attend to, no ashes to scatter.”5 Baptist goes on to write in this very personal encounter of how this bodiless memorial left her feeling emotionally disembodied—as though the deceased person being memorialized was somehow expected to be present yet gone—and how difficult this was for her own grief work. In short, the memorial allowed her to remember but not to encounter death it- 19 The Bodiless Memorial self. There is no space for grieving because without the encounter of the corpse itself, there is a fundamental denial of death, underscored by the missing body. The dead body has both figuratively and literally gone missing from death; but with this dis-placement of the body, death itself has become denied, and grieving itself becomes marginalized . Bodies and...