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69 Disposition of the body. When passengers are lost at sea, survivors pray for recovery of the bodies. The passengers are lost, but relatives want to know where the ship went down; they need to reconstruct events, even if that reconstruction cannot be certain. They speak of waiting forever for their lost loved ones to return. If they don’t know the details of death and haven’t recovered the remains, they can’t relinquish the hope that the dead may resurface. They speak of closure, their need to pick up the mantle of living. There is a difference in feeling and meaning between lost at sea and buried at sea. The former implies a quarrel with death that can’t be won; the latter suggests acceptance and a process completed. Grief for soldiers missing in action, whose bodies are never recovered, cannot be laid to rest. A son’s grave at Arlington is, by contrast to this unfinished death, comforting. In the rituals of mourning, we substitute a final resting place, even one so unmarked as the sea, for the actual place of death. We do so to write over the terrible image of trauma. Substitution of place is our profound device in death and its aftermath. The image of final burial comforts us because we, the survivors, compose it. It is authored rather than thrust upon us, already engraved. Choice of the place and manner of burial gains us composure against the suddenness of 70 tragedy. Those who were lost are no longer lost: they are laid to rest. Meanwhile, the rituals of cremation purify the image of autopsy. The work of mourning is incomplete without a final substitution (“So Lycidus, sunk low, but mounted high”). About death we say that closure is necessary. If questions about cause or manner exist, answers must be found. Yet suicide frustrates causal explanations. We perform autopsy—the clinical inspection of the body—to ascertain the physiological cause of death. Birth certificates note the time we come into the world, and death certificates note the time we depart, sometimes with a false exactitude. But dates and times, places and paths—are these the answers we seek? Joel left no instructions for the disposition of his body. He knew quite well that’s the business of survivors. His father thought the Rose Garden a good match, I’m sure. It’s true that Joel loved roses, loved their difficulty. But his love was intimate, for that which grew in his backyard, climbing a seasoned trellis , not an orchestrated display. Woodlawn must be an orderly place, with rows of rose arbors, a fountain from which no water springs, and emptiness. There death is sanitized, corporately managed. The Rose Garden at Woodlawn may have comforted Joel’s father, but it does not console me. For me he is lost at sea. ...

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