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125 essay Get the Shovel Mass graves and missing rites Kathryn Lofton When i was a child, my father hunted small game from the backdoor of our home, a little house surrounded by other houses and duplexes in a Midwestern city. He sometimes boiled the carcasses in the garage so he could recon­ struct the animals’ skeletons, bleaching the bones and carefully wiring together the parts into lattice sculptures. Sometimes he had no plans for artistry, and just killed the animals to rid his yard of intrusion. These bodies he buried at the bases of trees and bushes at the border of the lawn in the darkest part of the night. 126 | Kathryn Lofton Once, when I was eight, I thought he had killed a tabby that occasionally accompanied me for a half-­ block as I walked to school. I waited until he went to the hardware store for something, maybe two weeks after the suspected crime, and I ran outside to dig up the freshest grave in the backyard. I exhumed the body with the intent to say a proper goodbye. Maybe too I wanted the measure of my father’s menace. The smell when I got to the animal’s body was so awful I threw up my lunchtime sandwich. I scrambled to rebury the creature and spray down my sick, reconstructing the scene so he would not guess at my investigations. It wasn’t the tabby. Still, as I raked the dirt back over its body, I sang “Edelweiss” from The Sound of Music, which I decided was the most solemn song I knew. Every child knows that when something dies it should receive a funeral. Sociologists have explained repeatedly that theorizing society necessitates theorizing ritual. Ritual is the mechanism by which society understands itself, knows what it is, and restates what it wants to support or decry. Three months into the pandemic, I have been invited to a lot of rituals even as I shelter in place. I’ve been invited to rab­ binical and priestly ordinations of former students via Zoom. Friends have requested my attendance at virtual Passover meals; a colleague asked that I join a virtual church service to hear her preach. The Committee on Jewish Law and Standards in Conservative Judaism has offered guidance for remote gatherings in a time of COVID-­ 19, including the recitation of the mourner’s Kaddish. I’ve read about people managing to hold weddings in spite of the shutdown. I wonder how some rituals can be made possible, and why­others can’t. Funeral homes resort to storing bodies on ice; bodies pile up in trucks; bodies overflow morgues. “We can’t properly bury our dead because of the situation,” people are saying. And I think: Is that true? If a funeral is a ceremony that honors the dead, do the Get the Shovel | 127 conditions of the pandemic preclude us from conducting them? And what does it mean if we can’t hold these rituals to honor the dead? I turn to the experts to help answer these questions, those people in forensic science and crisis management who have faced these logistics before. I read about mortuary provision in major accidents, natural disasters, or acts of hostility that cause mass fatalities. I read an article titled “Steadily Increasing Control: The Professionalization of Mass Death” in Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management that explains, “Today, as well, the handling of large numbers of bodies—and their personal effects—has become a specialized business.” I read, too, “Memorial services are an important step in the pro­ cess of handling of the dead.” In a 2015 article in Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, the authors exhort, “Two of the most enduring American values are respect for the deceased and compassion for the bereaved.” According to the experts, if we can provide funerals, we should provide funerals. It’s not logistics that keeps us from saying prayers or finding ways to gather ourselves socially. It is our society, or present lack thereof. It is hard to make a ritual when you don’t know what society you feel good about constituting. I read a study about early medieval...

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