but this year, i’m afraid, i won’t be thrilled to see the bright orange signs covering up the remnants of failed businesses. and that is specifically because of one collection that they’ve introduced this year: the lizzie borden collection.

don’t get me wrong: i am fascinated by the borden murders, and lizzie herself. the did she/didn’t she narrative is one of those mysteries that draws me in every time, and on the whole of it, her trial is an acute combination of a society that deeply believed women to be incapable of these kinds of acts, and who also had a bustling news media ready and willing to publish anything and everything about the woman who maybe did commit these kinds of acts. fall river in august 1892 was a powder-keg of capitalism, racism, and also a changing world, and lizzie herself became a kind of beacon for the conversations. plus, just like now, true crime required an audience who were fully prepared to speculate wildly.

i’ve talked about true crime before on this very substack and in basically every podcast interview that allows me to even touch on the subject. my issue with true crime in practise is that it does a lot of harm to living, suffering communities. and so at this point you’re probably like “nash, please. lizzie borden has been dead for a century? pretty sure she’s not getting her feelings hurt by this.”

thankfully, i’m allowed to take issue with true crime multidimensionally, and so my particular issue with the lizzie borden collection is actually hinging on two things: a. she was acquitted of murdering her father and step mother in trial, so posthumously making a bunch of plastic decor calling her a murderer is in bad taste judicially, and b. there’s something inherently disturbing about the line in which someone stops being a person and starts being halloween decor.

imagine if we used lizzie as a jumping off point for other spirit halloween collections. a display pig farm where belle gunness buried the men she murdered for insurance money? an embalm your own civil war soldier? gravestones for the jack the ripper victims? tragedy doesn’t make the best home decor, really.

the difference between those hopefully never marketable items and lizzie is that, culturally, lizzie passed into folklore instead of being firmly rooted in history. even that rhyme on her horrifying foam tombstone up there is historically inaccurate, but kids have been skipping to it since the murders happened - and at least once directly in front of lizzie’s house when she was alive. the mystery of august 1892 made it hard for us to think of lizzie as a real person - she stayed in the public eye after her acquittal, and never spoke of the murders. she is buried in fall river next to her sister and her parents and stepmother, which, if she did murder her father and stepmum, is a weird choice. (or, for PR, a brilliant one.) all the things we find unknowable and curious about her are made all the more intriguing because she lived for 30 years after the ordeal, and for the most part, it was a historically insignificant life.

for us, mysteries can’t be anticlimactic. humans love turning history into self-contained stories, but they need endings. when we talk about murders, specifically, they need resolutions: sarah jane robinson, the boston borgia, gets caught and jailed. belle gunness, the chicago widower, maybe is murdered herself, or disappears without being heard from again. jack the ripper vanishes from whitechapel without a word. those are the kind of endings that let us tell history as a story: a start, an event, and a resolution. lizzie’s story gives us none of the ending. she can’t be a sad story, because she maybe killed them. and she can’t be a lesson, because nothing ever (apparently) happened to her afterwards. lizzie moved houses, she went to church, she lived with an actress, owned dogs, fought with her sister, and died of complications from a gallbladder removal. she died, and her sister died, and her maid died, all without ever saying what happened in that house.

like jack the ripper, she became her own mystery. but unlike jack, we’ve known who she was all along, and so its hard to separate the mystery of the murders of abby and andrew borden without including lizzie. once her story crossed over from “crime history” to “intriguing murder mystery”, culturally all bets were off. and as time went on, here we are, with our own very purchasable lizzie borden gravestone, for only $60. what a bargain!

her actual grave looks nothing like that, by the way, obviously. what acquitted woman would have a rhyme slandering her on her own grave?

and look, if for some reason you have to use lizzie as a halloween prop, i think it would be nicer to have it be historically accurate. i mean, you can buy a replica axe at the lizzie borden museum in fall river after walking through the family home and laying on the (replica) couch that andrew borden was axed to death on.

but using her real name, birth and death dates on a foam gravestone for $60 that is at least violating some minor libel laws seems inappropriate at best. she isn’t a trademarked scooby doo villain.

and look, at the risk of sounding like a hypocrite - which i am actually happy to do but not right now - i have obviously been to her house museum (those pictures are mine). i own and have on my office wall a copy of august 5 1892’s the boston daily globe, reporting on the murders. but both the house and the newspaper are representing lizzie borden the human being, not lizzie borden the murderous archetype. the museum is at least preserving the ambiguity of the crime. you can walk through the house and appreciate the extremely weird layout of victorian homes, and you can see the evidence that they keep there, preserved for interpretation. there’s a difference in being curious and/or delving into the history of her without stripping her of her former humanity. when we tell these stories, or represent them, that part matters.

do i think lizzie murdered her father and stepmother? yeah, i pretty much do. does my belief matter in how her story is told or how she is represented in larger media? it does not. as much as we love turning history into stories - and maybe lessons - it doesn’t give us the right to pick and choose what parts make it into story and what parts don’t. she was, in her time, acquitted of those murders. she lived a long life after those murders in partial ostracism from her own community.

i’m beefing with spirit halloween specifically right now because this is new to them and they clearly think it’s going to be a big seller - it’s all over my algorithm. but to be clear, they are a symptom, and not a cause.

we made lizzie into mythology.

we spent over a century being unable to tolerate that she was a full, nuanced person, who didn’t act the way we expected her to, and who was acquitted and no one else was tried instead. there’s no ending, and so we rewrote her into one. our secret murderous woman hiding in plain sight. our closeted lesbian, in love with her maid, caught in the act, and then played by kristen stewart. our overburdened, socially awkward daughter, whose father was abusing her and killed her pigeons. our anxious churchgoer who was given morphine for anxiety and killed her father and stepmother in a fugue state. we’ve spent years and years evaluating and rewriting lizzie’s story to make sense, to fulfil a generational narrative, and we’re still doing it. so why shouldn’t spirit halloween get in on the action? humans digest reality by making people into stories, and businesses understand that stories sell, and clearly spirit halloween has decided what kind of story they are selling.

but here’s my problem: if tomorrow we discover proof that lizzie was innocent, how can we reconcile that with her killer mythology? more importantly, how quickly would spirit halloween pull these from the shelves?

and the thing is: they probably wouldn’t. lizzie has served so many purposes as an archetype, and this time around, she’s made it into halloween horror. without a knowable ending, we’ve forced lizzie to change her face to help us codify social hierarchy, feminism, and psychology. today, she’s made the evolution into a one-dimensional monster, one complete with accessories.

we’ve spent 130 years building and rebuilding the idea of lizzie borden, but what’s ironic is the only thing spirit halloween can’t sell us is the truth. we’ll never know if she was innocent or guilty, and if she was guilty, how or what led her to that morning in august 1892. we won’t ever know the real lizzie borden, but the good news is that a version of her is purchasable today for just sixty dollars. and if you call now, maybe they’ll include the replica axe for free!

but today i want to chat a bit about the lindsay clancy case. and not because i’m suddenly reversing my entire policy on true crime or because i believe my personal opinion is relevant, but because i can no longer go anywhere on the internet without running into some version of “well i had postpartum depression and i didn’t kill my kids,” and i thought it was time for someone to point out some problems with this.

and look. i’m going to start out with some personal things about me, that aren’t super relevant to these problems, but just to give you an idea of where to start with this. humans are not great, in general, at nuance, particularly when it does not involve us specifically. we don’t like uncertainty, and we eschew ambivalence. for eons, we have met most tragedies with an immediacy to understand what happened so that it can’t befall us, and this case is no different than all the rest in that way. but let me just say this: on january 24, 2023, i lived down the street from the clancy family in duxbury, though i never knew them. i was in one of the worst places in my own mental health, and my kids were very young still, and when the news hit, i remember thinking very clearly: thank god it was her and not me.

now i never had postpartum psychosis, or even (diagnosed) postpartum depression. and i was never, to my knowledge, ever at risk for hurting my children, nor did i ever really think about doing so. but i was relieved in my own way to think that lightning didn’t strike twice this close, and now we were safe from me.

i’ve been trying to not watch the trial itself, but here we are. like i say, humans are always keen to look at the remnants of a tragedy from the outside and find ways to make it make sense, even me, however hypocritical. but the clancy case has been nagging at me for weeks, because of the response its getting across the internet. and i feel compelled to point out that society, as a whole, is doing a pretty bad job at talking about this case.

to start with, just in case you were thinking i had my own theories about what happened inside that house: i don’t. and i’m not interested in doing any of that. i wasn’t there, and to be perfectly blunt, not one event has a single and objective narrative, not even horrible ones. what happened to lindsay that day is not what happened to patrick, and it’s not what happened to their children. those are all unknowable things. i doubt even what lindsay and patrick remember from that day is “the truth” because that’s just not how human memories work - and we will (hopefully) never have direct access to anyone else’s internal experience, so here we are.

but i recognise the impulse in thinking “this couldn’t happen to me” or “i could never have done this” because right up there i did it myself. i heard what had happened down the street from me and i thought well at least it was her. i wasn’t curious about lindsay clancy, not really. i was using her as a tool to reassure myself that she and i were different. and in that use i found i had accidentally done exactly what we’ve been doing for centuries: i had engaged in a post-death social ritual, a belief that, if we can really understand how something happens, we can save ourselves from it.

the comments sections of the coverage are doing a lot of the same work. it’s not the morality olympics, although it sounds a lot like that: they aren’t necessarily (we are generalising on this) intending to sound like they believe they are better than lindsay, they are performing an ancestral, secret human magic to protect themselves from what they don’t understand. it’s a salt circle for tragedy instead of ghosts.

consider, for a moment, what those comments would look like tomorrow if both the judge and jury said: “i guess we will never know what happened” and left it at that. it’s pretty unfathomable, because humans cannot accept the unknowable, particularly in cases like this one. we can’t, in our conscience, let that mean nothing, which is largely the reason that we can’t stop watching this trial, because we have to know.

one of the things i love most about humanity is that, in the face of death, we invented meaning. we couldn’t stop dying, so we invented ritual. we couldn’t explain random chance, so we invented Reasons (TM). if we had to live in the face of death and know that it was coming, we were determined to make that life mean something. and we invented, and kept inventing, rituals and memorials to help build that meaning into death, and also used those meanings to help us keep living. so what i find most interesting about cases like lindsay’s is that we are still revising that meaning, and choosing stories to adjust it. in those comments sections are the evidence of this, each line a small proof: if i can pinpoint exactly where lindsay and i diverged, i can understand how this happened to her, and how that keeps me safe from it, as if bad things could be avoided as long as you attended the right lectures and took good notes.

we know it doesn’t work this way, and yet here we are. what’s interesting still is that i know it doesn’t work this way, and i understand a lot of precisely why we think this way, and there i was doing it too. humans love rules, and we love understanding why things are the way they are. our own meaning, specifically, exempts us from the tragedies of others, because we wouldn’t do the things they did, because we have, and did, acknowledge the rules in the right ways.

just for the record, the rules we invented can’t, by definition, keep us safe. this is not to say that they don’t have uses, because they do - at the core of this, those comments are there to show “we do not understand, and that is scary”. from that perspective, that fear is the reason we can’t let this case stop dominating our thoughts and algorithms. we found new ways to talk about this kind of fear, and to ritualise our behaviour about it - instagram comments are the new evil eye, so to speak - but we’ve been the same since.

the human experience is less a “choose your own adventure” in which you can pretend you didn’t pick that option that you peeked at earlier and didn’t like the outcome, and more of a “well, let’s hope that one was a lesson i can learn from” stack of greeting cards (assuming, of course, that our perception of time as linear is cognitively correct. i really do not like quantum physics, to be honest.) i wasn’t morally different than lindsay because i thought to myself “well now i am safe”, just like the ritualised behaviour in the comments aren’t morally different than me or her inherently. i just want us all to remember that this performance is about the need to understand - and the fear of never knowing - rather than condemning a person based on our own perceptions. one of the things i worry about, in this tidal wave of ritual, is that, on the face of it, it can look an awful lot like cruelty. ‘it can’t happen to me because of [insert reason here]’ also can suggest 'but i don’t care if it happens to you, as long as it keeps me safe’ which is less fun human ritualised behaviour and more of a failing of society. “i could never have done that” might make you (a general ‘you’) feel better, but if it lands in a space of grieving families and suffering communities, it’s doing a lot more harm than good.

in truth, it seems like a lot of things failed this particular family. and we don’t need to understand that completely, or protect ourselves from it, in order to decide that it’s unacceptable to allow that kind of failure to repeat itself. we can let two things be true at once: we can keep assuring ourselves that we are safe, and we can assure each other that we are not alone in the fear that we are not safe. communities have obligations to each other, and the internet is not exempt from that, despite being very, very large. we are all people, even those of us that become headlines, or warnings, or lessons. and so in the wake of this, i hope that while performing our rituals to find some kind of meaning for ourselves, that we can also remember that we also owe each other enough humanity to admit that our own fear does not excuse even accidental cruelty. if we’re going to keep ritualising meaning to live through the unknowable - and listen, at this point, we’ve got enough years of data on this to make it a pretty solid bet - then we should make sure those rituals help us survive it together.

in the beginning, stephen tells a prospective haunted client “most times, a ghost is a wish.” it’s a bit of a throwaway moment, designed to have us dismiss him for being a sceptic and sort of a bully to his ghost-believing family. sure, stephen, capitalise on your family’s pain and be blasé about it.

as we watch the events of the show unfold, however, that sentiment sort of reverberates through the actions of it. the twins, as adults, get haunted by their childhood ghosts, who are designed to draw them back to hill house to be with the ghost of their mother, who had feared them becoming adults. in turn, olivia’s ghost tells her lies until she is convinced she must kill her children to save them (or rather, “wake them up” and stop from going out into the real world) until ultimately she kills herself.

this is gothic fiction at its soul, and why i follow the flanagan universe like a stalker. i’m a horror fan, but only so far as the romance is there - and i don’t mean lovers, i mean simple the romance of existing. in the darkness, there are horrors, but only in that darkness are we reminded of what the light looks like. or some other gandalf-esq comforting observation.

if at this point you’re like “but nash, flanagan’s hill house was based on shirley jackson’s book of the same name” - yes, thank you. i do love shirley jackson, but i’ll be honest: her version of nell isn’t as good as victoria pedretti’s. (or maybe i am just gay. or maybe both?) flanagan’s second series, the haunting of bly manor, was based on henry james’ the turn of screw - and both are excellent literary examples of this ghost/love story.

ghosts, as an idea, have been around since basically humans starting dying. early humanity across the globe collectively watched each other die and later thought “damn, i wish crug was here for this.”

the ghost as a “monster” crops up essentially as soon as human storytelling does, and in lots of ways, but often representing the same re-personified grief in various forms. (fascinating the way humans invented stories simply to torture ourselves differently than reality already does). the banshees of ireland aren’t just the dead, but also warnings for the community to prepare for more death - and, coming from a culture that could have really used preparation for mass death events (looking at you, england) the banshee’s business is a bit unsurprising. la llorona is grief and motherhood and regret packaged into womanhood and mourning. (also super interesting that this kind of grief is always in the form of women, but we’ll get to that another day.) ghosts in different places, in different times, are all performing what look, on the surface, like different things: warnings, revenge, love. but they are all an answer to the same question: how can humans keep communicating with each other after we die? and, at the core of this, too, is: how can grief be transcendent?

we can see that grief easily in how often we bring the dead into our fiction as actors. think about hamlet, haunted by the ghost of his murdered father, and macbeth, haunted by his own crimes in the form of his friend that he had killed. in the face of death ending our chance to communicate, to apologise, to atone, we have always found ways to believe in the improbable: to bridge the gap between life and death, and continue the conversations. “echo, i will not speak with thee, for thou art a dead thing” be damned. the babadook, gay icon that he is, is another lovely example of this love turned grief turned horror. because that’s what makes this kind of horror story beautiful. grief is a monster in the shape of loss, made by humanity, a veritable, more modern answer to what mythology used to represent for human consciousness. think about daniel radcliffe’s the lady in black, too: all terrifying, ghostly representations borne from grief. because grief is, itself, terrifying. because it means there was someone who used to be here, who isn’t now, and we don’t know where they are. and we also know that someday it will happen to us, and we don’t know what that’s like, either.

the dead really hit their cultural peak in the 19th century. and there’s a reason that the victorians were the masters at this kind of storytelling (before flanagan, anyway). and that reason is because they were really, really great at dying. the victorian cities were dirty, disease ridden places (hello, cholera epidemics) and many of their medicines were made with poison. quite literally.

and it’s not just that they were good at it - death was everywhere. in their neighbourhoods, in their homes, in the streets. dying was everyone’s business, because it happened all around them, and it required the whole community to practise it. grief had physical representation in the form of mourning clothes and jewellery, and funeral processions took lengths of the street in public horse-carts, with the coffin visible for the trip. deathbeds were attended by family and friends as events, and dying well was a concept everyone wished for. even murder, in the hands of the victorians, became public: between the inventions of the penny dreadfuls, and chapbooks, and public trials and executions, dying was a shared convention.

pretty unsurprising, then, that the victorians gave ghosts a more centre stage as the answer to the question: what happens to love when we lose someone?

in 1848 the fox sisters, then just teenagers, heralded in a new entire phenomena by communicating with their dead peddler ghost who lived in their basement. though one of the sisters would go on to publicly reveal that their communications with the dead were a fraud and they had just learned to crack their toe joints in specific ways (thanks, arthritis!) seances and mediums had already entranced the west entirely. maybe the fox sisters were frauds, but that didn’t mean the dead didn’t want to talk. and everyone was all so desperate to hear them that not even the logic or evidence of it mattered.

once ghosts could talk, it felt obvious that next they’d move into pictures. after all, what’s a podcast without gratuitous selfies? ghost photography entered the scene right about the US civil war times, about midcentury. william mumler was a photographer who, in 1862, was sitting for a selfie when his dead cousin inconveniently popped by for a visit and ended up caught in the photo. mumler was tried as a fraud but acquitted in court - because the idea that the dead could still be here is a lot more powerful than the idea that mumler was just a guy with a creative streak and a camera. besides, maybe mumler was a fraud, but that didn’t mean the dead didn’t want to get their picture taken.

and it wasn’t just ghosts getting into the photography game. the physical dead could do it too - giving us postmortem photography. it’s generally creepy for us today, but in the victorian times, for some families it was the only time they’d have an actual photograph of a relative, especially children, who tended to die quite often in the 19th century. having those meant, for the first time, you didn’t have to worry about forgetting what someone looked like - you could just look at their picture, a small piece of proof that they existed.

today, we find the idea of ghosts talking to us, visiting us, sneaking into our instagram selfies, unsettling or outright scary. part of this is just societal evolution, but part of it is that we are so distanced from what death looks like that the suggestion of it lingering with us is actually terrifying. (plus, if we grapple with the concept of ghosts, we all have to worry that our dead grandparents are just hanging around and watching us masturbate. we are all worrying about this, right?)

but we aren’t as distanced from our ancestor innovators as we seem. horror is, after all, one of the biggest consumable medias, in television, film, and literary forms. sure, we don’t routinely talk to the dead - or do we? there are millions of facebook and instagram profiles that belong to the dead, and we post on those as forms of commemoration and grief. well, fine, there’s that, but we don’t take pictures of the dead - or do we? there are hundreds of artists working out there now, adding our dead loved ones to our birthdays, our weddings, our family portraits. we get tattoos of initials and handprints and photographs, we make jewellery out of ashes, we plant trees and flowers on graves and watch what blooms, made of them.

and we’re doing all of this while laughing at our ancestors and their silly little ghost photos and ouija boards. what idiots!

if our boy stephen is right, and a ghost is a wish, then humanity keeps wishing for ways to make our relationships permanent, even against the sheer relentlessness of biology. we might not believe in the existence of ghosts anymore, at least not in the same ways as our victorian family members, but we never stopped wishing for them.

it’s apparently going to be the hottest summer on record for the 10th year in a row, or, as the climate scientists like to say “jesus christ, not again, we can’t keep saying the same things” and yet i was in a michael’s craft store earlier today, and you wouldn’t know being in there that it was summer at all anymore. “summerween” gets earlier and earlier every year, and so we’ve been in code orange since at least the third week of june.

and i get that for people who aren’t obsessed with halloween, that’s annoying. especially because those people are usually christmas people, and we can’t do christmas earlier because of halloween. so halloween getting the summer and fall as a prominent holiday maybe feels unfair.

but here’s why it’s great, actually (not for consumering reasons, anyway): halloween is the only holiday we have where people, kids specifically, get to dive into the nuances of death and monsters and other scary stuff in a way that feels safe.

looking at the michael’s summerween collection might not give that impression, i know. disco ghosts do not an obvious teaching moment make. however, i love making a long-winded, seemingly endless point, and so let’s take a look at the history of halloween.

the holiday that we know today has a long, somewhat windy related path back to the celts, native (of a sort, i support) to ireland and scotland. because my irish history is a lot stronger than my scottish - tá gaeilge agam (again, of a sort) - we’ll broadly set ourselves there for now.

the holiday that the celts celebrated around october 31 was called samhain (pronounced SOW-in). celtic days began after the sun set, so the evening of october 31 itself marks the beginning of the typically 3 day affair. samhain also marked the end of the harvest season, and gave communities an opportunity to come together before the winter set in as a social group to mark a passing of a year. in ireland, those communities sometimes, according to archaeologists (who are just historians that for some reason like being outside, where the bugs are) met at the hill of tara, the seat of the ancient kings.

in general, those celebrations and feasts took place near a bonfire and gave the living a chance to voice their squabbles with each other, and with the dead, since it was believed that the evening of samhain also marked the time when the veil was thinnest between here and whatever lies beyond here1, giving the ancient celts an opportunity to really give it out to grandma for dying on them earlier that year and therefore not having to help with the harvest. the gatherings also dealt with taxes owed and debts incurred, and public trials - and maybe even some executions - for crimes against each other. archaeologists also found a significant amount of evidence that alcohol was a big part of these gatherings.

i don’t think the importance of a community gathering where we dealt with death - and life - and the idea of the in-between can really be overstated, especially since today we all really struggle with lots of those concepts separately, death in particular. but to be honest, i love overstating things, so.

death as a process used to be something communities practiced. not the dying part itself, obviously, but talking about it. seeing it. waiting for it. sitting beside it while it happens. ritualising it. children weren't kept away from death because death wasn't something that happened somewhere else, behind the doors of a hospital or funeral home. it happened in their house, and in all their neighbours’ houses.

and now, instead of that, halloween is one of the few places where we still let children look at mortality before actually experiencing it or understanding what it represents. i mean, can you imagine if we let a puritan child loose today in a craft store in october? stand aside, 1692’s court of oyer and terminer: little prudence has entered the building.

“so samhain was a huge deal to the ancient celts, and today we trick or treat for some reason” is what i imagine you’re saying right now in some form of confusion. and you’re so right for that, by the way, since it takes me forever to get to a point. let’s jump ahead slightly - glossing over the crusades and invasions and the christianisation of ireland/the west, which combined most of the pagan holidays into existing christian ones and for which we get the name “halloween”, which came from the re-naming of november 1 as “all saints’ day” or “all hallows’ day” making october 31 “all hallows’ eve”. thanks, jesus?

halloween became a holiday for tricksters as a passive nod to the faeries, or more likely, as part of their master plan, and the pranks were getting… slightly less safe with every year. (i’m skipping over a lot more history in the name of time and also probably your patience level.) in the US in the 1930s and 40s, with impoverished youth using the evening as a way to prank trains by derailing them and destroying a family’s livelihood by completely disassembling - and then reassembling - their horse-cart onto the roof of their house. or burning buildings down. you know, classic prank stuff. eventually by the 50s america had had enough - probably had no horse-carts left - and starting having small parties with candy to entice the children inside, where they couldn’t routinely set fires without being noticed. over time, we got a more recognisable halloween evening that included more costumes and candy and considerably less arson.

and by today i mean literally in the middle of a transatlantic heatwave which is threatening to set my lawn on fire if i so much as move one single blade of grass with my toe as i leave to go to michael’s for more halloween decorations. which are currently out, as i said. in a world that largely uses its very whispery voice to say things like “she passed away” or “he’s no longer with us” to allude to a human dying, it’s important to acknowledge how strange it must seem to children to hold hands with their trusted adults, hear that, and then walk right smack into a display of 40 plastic pink disco skeletons.

and while it’s always funny to watch children walk directly into things, it’s also really important that they get to see skeletons in a way that isn’t a defleshed person they used to know, because that’s horrifying and generally not a PG experience. but as they become self-aware, and they begin to understand that they and everyone they know will die someday, getting to experience some of that iconography in ways that are not traumatising can help children grapple with the ideas of existence.

think of halloween as a dress rehearsal of sorts. is their nana dying scary? yes, absolutely it is. and to be fair, the adults in their life in the midst of a grieving process probably aren’t up for longwinded, uncertain conversations with curious toddlers. but if you can get a whole season to expose said toddler to the idea of what death means, and what it looks like, in a way that isn’t nana dying in a hospital room and adults being overwhelmed and sad, well then, i think that’s an opportunity we could take. it’s the same as watching your child play doctor, or pretend to be married: childhood is all practise for the real thing - without really understanding what the “real thing” is when you’re practising it at first. halloween is just the only time we let kids practise at actually mortality, which personally i think may be slightly more important than recess marriages and doll motherhood.

and halloween’s not just ghosts and skeletons, either. the entire concept of what’s “scary” is the at the core of halloween and its decor. without halloween, maybe only german children would hear about a guy rising out of a grave to suck the blood out of an alive guy, because the germans either are really, really good at child-rearing, or they really, really misunderstand gentle parenting, and the brothers grimm are their version of the super nanny. but with halloween, monsters can be transformed into tame, fictionalised, and even silly versions of their former icons, and in so doing, things that humans fear inherently - the dark, the dead, the unexplainable - can be reproduced in a safe environment that allows the curious to ask questions instead. and that curiosity leads to better grappling with reality. in the same way that the people of the ancient world explained horrifying phenomena like an eclipse and were like “well, the gods are pissed actually,” giving children ways to understand grief, and fear, and social stigma in the form of ghosts and werewolves and witches offer them an opportunity to explore the scary thing against a backdrop of safety.

so is nana a ghost now? no one can really answer that, unless nana feels like committing to a seance and really bringing the answers. but since she’s not going to do that apparently, giving kids access to ghosts and skeletons and the idea of the beyond is basically the same as allowing a community a place to meet and figure out how to survive together, and also to acknowledge the people that are no longer sitting by the fire with them. it gives them a place to ask questions, to get a few tools, and to sit with - and in - the dark, eat a medically inadvisable amount of sugar in one sitting, and feel a bit more comfortable with all of it.

and since it’s also the hottest years on earth, it’s also a good way to remember that summer can’t last forever, and neither can we. eventually the sun will put away its magnifying glass - or at least turn it directly on australia, but for now, we can at least take our children into a marshall’s and be reminded that everything ends, both summer and life. and that’s what halloween does best: it lets us rehearse it before we live it.

plus, isn’t that what consumerism is really for anyway? i mean, if memento mori decor was good enough for the victorians, who are we to argue?

for those of you keeping score at home, i began 2026 with 50% of my grandparents, and now, just as we are beginning march, i am at 0%. that’s a pretty intense burn rate, all things considered, but in their defense, 2026 has been a truly awful year so far. i can’t blame either of them for opting out.

still, this does leave me in the predicament of mourning two grandmothers AND catherine o’hara. but i’m being really brave about it, you guys, i promise.

my mum navigated both of her parents’ illnesses and deaths pretty much by herself, in part because she is the only girl, and also in part because one of her brothers selfishly died before their parents. carrying someone through a life-ending illness is an administrative nightmare, by the way. particularly if they reach a point where they can no longer be actively participating in the scheduling of appointments or making choices. so when my grandfather was diagnosed with cancer, my overwhelmed mother was forced to start keeping a little notebook. the notebook quickly became a record of all of his doctor meetings, diagnoses, end of life wishes, budgets, funeral plans, contact numbers for various specialists, lawyers, nursing homes, hospice nurses, literature handed over to help aid in understanding death and dying. the dictation of a few important wishes of the man himself. passages from visiting priests. copies of his medical information, including his DNR. later, the contents of his wallet. the deed to his home. the invoice from his cremation. the last pages are his death certificate and his obituary.

my mother nicknamed the tome “the book of bob.” it became a go-to for anyone taking him to an appointment or helping plan his care. after his ashes were interred and life settled into his absence, his book sat on my grandparent’s coffee table, so that my grandmother, already slipping away into dementia, could still talk to him.

only a year later, my grandmother got her own book. no longer able to distinguish between days or understand that her own brain was an unreliable narrator, management of her care fell again to my mother. she moved the book of bob to a prominent shelf and started “the book of mo”.

the book of mo quickly became just as hefty as the book of bob, and then surpassed it. my grandmother’s cognitive decline but overall physical health meant that even though she was technically dying, the dying process was going to be a rather long one. ultimately, it took her nearly 4 years to complete the transition, which she stubbornly resisted the entire time it was happening. she finally passed in her sleep as the month of february handed the keys to march.

my mother, at 62, had finally become parentless. in their place, she had her two books, filled with memories and to-do lists and final chapters. together, she and i emptied their home of their last artefacts, and it was sold to a new family. but the books remain with us still.

the books have an administrative purpose, but also a deeply emotional one. in terms of history, neither of my mother’s parents will add anything of particular importance to the highlights of the last century, but these books are little proofs of them, testaments of the culminations of two very full lives. i imagine this will be what many of us leave behind: collections of documents and wishes, bills to be paid and things to be organised (although my generation and the subsequent ones will also leave rather coloured digital lives as well.)

diaries like the books my mother made for her parents are rarer now in the digital age, probably, but for centuries, books like those helped historians and anthropologists get real glimpses into the lives and deaths of average people. martha ballard, the midwife in maine in the 18th century, is a wonderful example of how we can use these personal recollections to help build a larger understanding of the time period and the context in which average folks were living. (the fantastic historian laurel thatcher ulrich rediscovered martha’s diaries and wrote a very incredible book about it and her, which you should read.) the rich and powerful always had different rules, but for the centuries of history of our ancestors, you and i, diaries like the books of bob and mo are a window through which we are granted access to what might otherwise be mere speculation and secrets of daily life.

my other grandmother, my father’s mother, kept her own book. she had been a dedicated civil servant her whole life, and was extremely type a and organised, and so it surprised none of her 4 living children that she kept an entire binder of her wishes, important documents, and people to call when she passed. she, in a stark comparison to my mother’s parents, lived to 90 and was entirely independent until christmas eve in 2025, when she had a heart attack in her own home. not wishing to ruin christmas for anyone, she waited until the following morning, went to the hospital, and died a month later of congestive heart failure on her own terms.

i’ve been thinking a lot lately about how our deaths can mirror our lives. my grandmother clung to her independence and her dignity even as death began to rob her of both, and she passed only after having agreed to do so, and having finally added the final of her wishes to her own binder of plans. at the time of her death, she had also organised much of her own things, donated what she suspected we would not want, and found a buyer for her house.

my mother’s parents, though, both choose a different approach. both of them had high and gendered expectations for my mother, which she had performed for her whole life, and through both of their deaths. they had planned for her to be of use for them as a nurse and caretaker, and she fulfilled this expectation without question and with only mildly resentment. both of their actual deaths were also much like their lives: both resisted until utterly the last moments, steadfast in their determination to simply keep going. as people, even elderly, they had refused to slow down or accept that there were things they could no longer do. my grandparents together had seen much more of the world than i can hope to, and even in their 70s were still going on cruises to alaska and sampling the various cultures of mainland europe.

comparatively, my other grandmother preferred the solitude of her own home. she was happiest in her own routine and with her own company, with the exception of sundays: she was an italian, and had long understood her role of matriarch came with hosting and cooking for her 5 children and their families. though her death was relatively quick, as far as elderly deaths go, she didn’t pass until her children, their spouses, and all of her 13 grandchildren had been to her hospital room to see her and say goodbye. if she’d had a large ring on, i believe we would have been expected to kiss it upon entrance to her room.

bob, meanwhile, died with his two living children and only after maureen had taken his hand. i had been at his deathbed for three days, but he waited for me to go get bagels so that it was just his wife and children in the room. maureen, on the other hand, waited days to be finally left alone, so that in true irish catholic guilt, my mother would be haunted about it, despite having sat with her every day for weeks nonstop.

i can only hope to get a death that feels like an homage to my entire personality, though i fear this will mean i die in some sort of slapstick comedy falling off a wall that is about 18 inches high, or getting scurvy in the 21st century. all in all, if it makes people laugh, i think i’m okay with it. at 38, i already have a myriad of health conditions that grow every year, so i also hope that if my children do end up with a book of nash, that my death is made more humorous by the sheer amount of medical diagnoses they have to fit inside of one notebook.

i had talked a bit last post about the fact that humans need funerals. we are community-based social creatures, and ultimately being able to mourn in some recognised way at the end of a life is one of the only ways grief is seen, felt, and normalised. one of the questions i get a lot is what i want my own funeral to look like. none of my grandparents wanted one, and despite them, we hosted our own versions anyway. and in this, my own wishes are negligible: funerals are not for the dead, but for us, still here on earth. funerals are about our dead person, but they are not for them. and so my answer to this question is always: whatever my children wish to do. whatever helps them derive meaning and comfort once i am no longer here is what i want. if they want to strap my lifeless form onto a rocket and send me directly to the sun, or if they want to host a full puritan burial reenactment, i am happy with those options and everything in between. my death is mine, my very last thing earthly to do in a way that suits me. my funeral? not so much.

it’s that belief that has lead me to help plan 3 funerals for people that expressly did not want them, and i recognise that there is probably some disrespect in that. but in fairness, if they didn’t want me to do it, then i guess they could have haunted me at some point, and so fair i’ve been haunting-free. (it’s also likely that they have tried and i have been too adhd to notice their attempts, in which case they should have known who they were trying to haunt by now.)

but because they didn’t want funerals, and because they all chose to be cremated with no burial place, it makes their ties to the physical landscape of death somewhat less physical. as a person who studies gravestones professionally, i’m decently offended, but as a person who also cleans and conserves gravestones in their spare time, how long can we truly expect to have a physical memorial for everyone?

the books of bob and mo may someday be discarded or otherwise found among strange things you can buy at goodwill for 5.99. but for now, they hold the stories of both of their final years in a way that is more reflective of them than any gravestone could be. my other grandmother’s binder does the same - except that she also, at 90 years old, had an instagram account, which serves a similar purpose.

all of this leads me to wonder what the “gravestones” of the future really look like. with so many of us on social media, eventually the dead will simply outnumber the living on some platforms. a study by the oxford internet institute predicted that this will happen to facebook by 2070. so in theory you can wander through physical and metaphysical graveyards, depending on whether or not you want to leave your house.

a few posts back, i talked about how an archaeologist i worked with had remarked that the future of archaeology would look like “the inside of a christmas tree shop”. and in a lot of ways, she’s right. capitalism and thereby consumerism has changed the sheer volume and emotionality of most things we own or keep. i don’t know too many people these days with family heirlooms, either. but while the physical archaeology will look like a combination of the christmas tree shop and microplastic organisms who gained sentience and formed communities, we will have to contend with a digital archaeology as well. if our commemorations are on social media, and the footprint of our lives is there also, how can we build a social historical picture of someone living now? (provided, of course, that we are not destroyed in a nuclear war in the next few years, which, you know. seems more likely every day.)

i have zero answers for any of my questions in this post, by the way. or any other questions, while i am being honest. deathways are constantly changing, and i imagine generationally it’s always been a source of anxiety. the puritans, for instance, complained loudly and vehemently as idolatry invaded their gravestones, and as community members began having larger funerals that involved beer and food and momento mori gifts. the victorians watched as queen victoria basically reinvented mourning and found their entire social structure predicated on the attendance and glamour of their own funeral, as well as the “good”ness of their own death. so i think we’re in good company if we are wondering about how death will change over the next generations.

as for me, well, i’ll take whatever comes next in the same way i accept everything else: complaining the entire time it’s happening. personally, i think we should convince billionaires to dedicate most of their money to building their own pyramids, and i’d love a large and terrifying weeping statute over my moss-covered grave in some spooky corner somewhere, next to a tree that is perpetually being struck by lightning. i would also love it if my grave said something super ominous, like “we hope she’s at rest” or “45 taco bell spicy potato soft tacos is the limit for most humans, by the way” but i’ll take whatever my kids offer me and pinky promise not to haunt them for it - except maybe digitally, where AI can recreate my likeness to be poorly hologrammed in for family game night or something as equally horrifying. at any rate, like our man frodo says, there is no going back. which i realise now makes it sound like i am saying the future of death and dying commemoration is akin to travelling to mordor, which is good, because that’s precisely what i am saying. here’s hoping you brought potatoes for the road.

i loved my nonni - and i am not writing this in a room with her bell, just in case she managed to somehow make it some kind of horcrux - but she’s not necessarily a person i’d routinely ask for advice. she was an avid fox news listener in her later years, and i’m just not really sure her advice would have jived appropriately with my gay life choices. she cried when i got a undercut, just saying. still, the bell is a beautiful, thoughtful tribute gift that only she could have come up with: it’s loud and breakable and now has to live in my home, so there’s that, but it’s also a very nice way to remember her. (i was afraid we’d all be gifted with the board game parcheesi, which she dominated at and lorded us all over with, but only because - and i can say this now - she was a ferocious cheater.)

anyway, she died holding my hand while i watched her take her last breath. not a lot of people my age get that kind of experience nowadays, as far as the sampling of my friends i have asked, and so i’m grateful that i have now ushered two of my grandparents out of this world this way - i’ve still got one more to go, so i’m holding out hope i get a nice passing score of 75%. (an intrusive thought: am i the problem?) for a person in the states, i’ve seen a lot more death up close and personal than most people i know, and in a way, i’m grateful for those moments. there’s nothing quite like the experience of saying “tell god i said to go fuck himself” at the very moment a loved one is passing thru.

all this being said, nonni specifically didn’t want a funeral. this is the second of my grandparents to pass and ask for us to do nothing at all, and i fear this is a pattern of the silent generation - their avoidance for feelings continues right into the grave. (i guess i don’t really foresee this concern for the boomers, because, as a child of boomers, their love for self-spectacle is truly inspirational.)

as a trend, though, it does worry me. my children have been at the bedside of their dying relatives, but that is because i am a strange parent, and because being a part of the dying process is important to us to begin to work on how to grieve. it’s a skill set that i fear is dying alongside our loved ones, and it’s just another thing capitalism has taken from us. as a culture, we put the focus on getting back to things, using work as a distraction, and not talking about our feelings unless we are in a room with someone who is paid to care once a week and never allowed to tell anyone we were there.

i’ve been working for a long time on a book about how the rise of victorian industry and capitalism ruined death and mourning for all of us here in the modern day, and if i ever finish it, you guys will be the first to know. but in the meantime, here are the highlights: the victorian social scene culminated with death. who you were as a living person, how successful and loved you were, became directly tied to your funeral and burial. it was so socially consuming that victorians bought funeral insurance so they could pay the cost for their burial before they died.

because if there was anything embarrassing about dying in the 19th century, it was having to force your family to have a funeral that was less about how sad they were and more about how much money they could spend to be sad about it.

the point being is that in the 19th century, we (the west) created a funeral culture that was socially labourious and industrially innovative, and because of both of those things, it was ruled by capital. meaning if it was important to you, it was important to the people who could charge you for it.

in the modern day, this has become incredibly obvious. here in late stage capitalism, though, death is less a social event and more of some that we’d pay to not see, particularly here in the states, where the horrors of experiencing a civil war lead to a culture of people who’d prefer to never see a dead body in their entire life, and those people are our great-great-grandparents. we innovated our way into embalming so well that our dead people look like they are “sleeping” - and that’s when we view them at all. roughly 60% of today’s deaths are cremations in the US, and that’s predicted to rise to about 80% in the next decade or two. part of this feels like avoidance, and part of it feels cost-effective, since cremations are cheaper - though not by much. and i can tell you, just by the reaction i got at the funeral home, that morticians are very shocked if you ask to attend your loved one’s cremation.

when nonni passed, the hospice folks told us it was okay to leave the room while they cleaned her and got her ready for the funeral home to process. when pressed on this, they said i could stay, but made it clear that this was also a strange request and something they didn’t particularly want to encourage. and this is, in part, what i mean when i say that we are so distanced from death here that the workers themselves - for whom it is their daily responsibility - think we are weirdos to want to participate in.

now that we don’t participate in it, though, i’m finding a lot of my friends and family face the idea of death with an anxiety that rivals someone being hunted for sport in a greatest game type fiction. even my family, who sat bedside with my nonni, spent days in uncomfortable silence and then, when the moment came, were like “now what?”

and that, my friends, is the problem. the “now, what?” of death is because this is where grief is supposed to live, but can’t, because… no one knows what to do. we play very little part in the work of death, and we are so avoidant of it, that our grief becomes a thing on the to-do list before we get back to work and pretend the entire thing didn’t happen. grief on display makes us uncomfortable, and the event of it is expensive, which is why so many of us aren’t even having funerals or going to them - who wants to pay money to be sad when you can just pretend you aren’t, quietly, and alone, in your own house?

and so this is why, somewhat at my behest (begging), my family and i are saying goodbye to nonni in the way we know how (and will all comfortably accept): we will disperse her ashes on the beach on which she lived, with all of our bells in hand. inevitably, we will do this without planning for the wind, so there’s a very high chance that in our one moment of grief together, we will all end up inhaling her and choking instead. but at least, for that moment, as we share my asthma inhaler, we will have faced the loss of our matriarch together, as a family, and have that one moment of shared grief across our generations. as a small spectacle, i think it might still count as progress.

sure, it’s no mourning jewellery, or undertakers’ carriage on a parade through the downtown, like the victorians would have arranged. and she wasn’t arterially pumped full of formaldehyde so we could stare at her somewhat waxen form for a few hours. in fairness, i think in today’s money, one single mourning ring could probably bankrupt us all. but yeeting nonni’s cat litter-esq new form on a beach is a fairly cost-effective strategy that still includes us grieving together, and that is, i think, how you win at death and capitalism.

i recognise this is an enormous topic area, so here are some perimeters - this one (of probably 113 future posts) is going to be about why studying deathways through gravestones is cool and neat and important - and also, how we first shaped the iconography of the earliest stones in new england. think of it like the intro cliffnotes, though, because i’m planning to deep dive into more of the specifics later on.

one thing to know before we get to it: yes, the colonists are also colonisers. they moved into occupied wampanoag land holding a charter granting them the land by the king of england, who had zero claim to it, and proceeded to eradicate the indigenous tribes over the next few decades by brute force, war, and assimilation. the wampanoag people survive to this day, to their credit entirely, despite the repeated and often cruel attempts by the fledging and future U.S. government, though in significantly reduced numbers. originally, the tribes of the wampanoag numbered around 69. today, there are 3 surviving tribes. you can and should hear more about their history directly from them.

early new england had several colonies that made it up, and they were largely culturally homogenous (english), with the primary exception being at plymouth. here’s why: in 1620, a group of puritans, calling themselves separatists, left england in search of religious freedom and had settled, with some contrition, in holland. but they didn’t love it there, and they were a bit …racist about the dutch. they didn’t love england and/or the church of england, though. eventually they managed to barter with the king for a charter of land (see point above) so that they could practise being all religiously free someplace else, which they did, obviously. we’ll chat about the whole separatist thing another day.

in order to really understand early new england gravestone iconography, you’ve got to know a little about puritan belief systems (picture this as a title card with oldschool microsoft wordart). england moved to embrace protestantism and the church of england during the reign of our boy henry the viii in 1534 - he wanted a divorce and the catholic pope wouldn’t give it, so he just… made a new church, and got himself divorced. ah, the history of men. however, angelicanism seemed, to some, to retain too much of the pomp and circumstance of catholicism, which, if you know anything about catholicism, you can probably understand. so some angelicans broke off and formed purtianism, a more stripped down version of christianity. one of the major tenants of puritanism, besides being really bleak, is predestination - the idea that god has already decided whether or not you get into heaven, and you get to spend your life trying to be sinless and reading the signs to see if you are truly pure at heart or if you’re just super sneaky, i guess. in part because of the sin thing, and in part because of the pure disgust at catholic practises, the puritans reject any symbolism that could be considered idoltry - and cherubs are right up there on the list. which is how we/early new england get the deaths heads.

it’s simple, it’s not religious, it’s just a skull and some wings. et violá. more on this later.

once they arrived in new england, death was a daily reality: whether it was analyzing one’s personal destination, overseeing the deathbed scenes of a loved one and interpreting their fate, attending numerous weekly sermons, or mourning at a funeral for a neighbor. it’s not really surprising, then, that the cultures they developed around death were somewhat macabre by today’s standards. one common late 17^th century epitaph clearly shows the relationship that the average puritan had with death:

“Remember me as you pass by/

As now you are, so once was I/

As now I am, soon you will be/

Prepare for death and follow me.”

which sounds metal as hell, but also kind of a bummer. puritan funerals were no picnic either: no prayers, no sermons, simple markers. a five foot deep dug grave and a shroud were the only requirements for burial. the puritans were real “can’t bring it what you!” people.

one of the ways in which we can understand a culture historically is to examine how members of that culture treat their dead. deathways is an anthropological all-inclusive term that reflects culturally observed processes which surround dying, burials, and memorials in an identifiable community. at the core of its definition are the ways in which a community learns to cope with the mortality of its members through rituals, religious or otherwise. just as communities evolve, death does too, likely in response to larger cultural changes, thus the reason deathways are examined as a process, and not as stagnant ideologies. examining deathways as a function of time can show significant changes in cultural practices, which are also represented in other aspects of the community. 

gravestones are a unique source of deathway evidence from which we can interpret changes in this cultural history. using this lens, we can focus on the relationship between iconography on gravestones and deathways as they develop in the colonies over time.

gravestones and iconographic patterns can also be used to understand genealogical, disease and mortality trends, and other ethnographic and statistical extrapolations of communities. they are particularly useful as a lens for cultural interpretation since they are named, dated, and placed in situ, (latin for “right the fuck there and staying”) and are thereby strong evidence of changes in belief surrounding death when examined as a temporal grouping.

generational changes also impacted the practices of early colonial deathways, as the first settlers, for whom the separation and colonial experiment was basically their raison d'etre , began to die and their children and grandchildren became community leaders.  eventually, funeral culture grew to include beer and wine, mourning jewelry and fashion, eulogies and sermons, and detailed wills; gravestone iconography began to include portraiture and more careful carving. carver workshops became major actors in the cultural shift of deathways, influencing the movement from religious austerity to commemoration. basically, after the first guys started to die, funerals became fun again.

but before we get into all that, we need to talk about 1620. specifically, the winter of 1620. specifically the winter of 1620 in what would become plymouth, massachusetts. spec- okay, sorry, i’m done.

the colonists landed at plymouth in december of 1620 after months at sea, and they were entirely unprepared for winter, which is probably exactly the opposite of what they wanted (to be fair to them, they left england months late and were aiming for virginia, so really 0 out of 2). william bradford, who would become the governor of the new colony after only a few months, described the entire experience in his travel diary, which is great for us as historians, but i would personally be horrified about. please remember to burn this entire substack when i die, lest it be used for someone’s phd dissertation.

bradford lamented about the frequency of death; 52 of the 102 passengers died in the first months due to exposure and sickness, so it was a pretty solid thing to lament about. at times, there were only six able settlers to tend to the sick and continue building the necessary settlements:

“but that which was most sad and lamentable was that in 2 or 3 months’ time half of [our] company died, especially in january and february, being the depth of winter, and wanting houses and other comforts, being infected with scurvy and other diseases... sometimes two or three persons died in a day.” 

the survival of plymouth became entirely dependent on completing the town – finishing building houses and starting to grow crops – as well as burying their many dead.

a little on the plymouth landscape set up: the deaths in the first winter were interred in a mass grave at the foot of a hill inside the settlement, which became known as cole’s hill. because of the landscape, originally, there was a fort atop burial hill, so colonists could see the surrounding area and the sea – prior to its use as a cemetery, the hill was known as fort hill, and was used as a military outpost during king philip’s war in 1675. cole’s hill was used only for those who died in the first winter; definitively by 1680, the colonists were using burial hill as their cemetery.

how do we know about cole’s hill, you ask? what a phenomenal question. the mass grave at cole’s hill was uncovered by more modern plymouth residents between 1885 and 1921, when rainstorms loosened and brought down the soil. bones of roughly eleven people were reinterred in a new crypt on the hill under a dedicated monument. i would like to reiterate that the reason we know about cole’s hill is because of bone mudslides. history is so delightfully hardcore sometimes.

the discovery of that mass grave cemented the historical conjectures about the its existence, as it was most certainly an english burial: there were no grave goods, and the bodies, being what they were, appeared to be buried prone and laying east to west. those were the only attributes for burials during the first winter, a severe break from the traditions back in england, even for puritans. 

the first few months were fraught with death and fear, and though the retreat of winter helped the colonists gain a footing in the new land, they were never too distanced from death. in a july 1621 letter to a friend still in england bradford continues to lament (he was like, really good at lamenting):

“…it please god to visit us with death daily, and with so general a disease that the living were scarce able to bury the dead, and the well not in any measure sufficient to tend to sick.” 

the colonists also knew there were natives in the nearby lands, but without a translator or prior contact, they weren’t sure of how they would be received. (to read more about that contact, and also about the wampanoag history prior to colonisation, check out this post.) instead, like their fellow settlers at jamestown, they began building walls to protect themselves from potential raids. some scholarship suggests that their fears of raids ran so deep as to force them to bury their dead at night so that the natives couldn’t know how precariousness their hold on the settlement had become; the inscription on the monument at cole’s hill reads:

“here under the cover of darkness the fast dwindling company laid their dead, leveling the earth above them lest the indians should learn how many were the graves.”

as starvation set in, some settlers ventured out and dug up native burials in search of food in their grave goods, an act they themselves admitted was pretty fucked up (okay, they didn’t say it quite that way, but you get it). in a study of the effects of relatedness and mortality, using plymouth colony as a case study, sociobiologists mccullough and barton declared that the first winter at plymouth “by any definition constituted a demographic crisis.” any deathways that may have existed were eclipsed by needs of survival for the remaining colonists. whereas deathways back in england were becoming more complex and more tied to social status (thank you, early capitalism), deathways in plymouth in 1620 disintegrated almost entirely. 

but never fear, dear reader: after that first winter, settlers began working with a tribe of nearby natives, the wampanoag (under the leadership of massasoit, and with the help of squanto as translator), who taught them how to fertilize the soil and make stores for harsher weather. a new, fresh-faced group of settlers arrived on the fortune in spring, and the colony began to establish itself; by the 1630s, plymouth colony had around 300 settlers. once they did stabilize, space for a burying ground was likely established and settlers who died henceforth were given burials there.

so they settled in, and they probably allocated at least part of burial hill as a burying ground. a very quick aside on the linguistics here: “burying ground” is where we buried people (i know, it’s hard to believe), and they are secular grounds, not tied to a church, as the first settlers believed in freedom of religion. which today seems like a fun little irony (and kind of even then)!

just as things began improving for the fledgling settlement in the spring of 1621, governor john carver was working in the fields one morning and collapsed; he died a few days later. our boy william bradford briefly described his funeral: “he was buried in the best manner they could, with some volleys of shots.” there is no mention of where his physical burial was made, however, nor is there mention for anyone else in the following decades. consequently, the question of burial location has become the source of much hot scholarly gossip. some maintain that it was used around the time of the first meeting house in 1637 while others suggest that it was as early as 1621, with governor john carver’s burial being one of the first.  sound off below if you’ve got opinions.

governor carver’s 1621 funeral was likely simple. because of his position, he would have received a grave, a shroud, and a decent attendance of mourners, with the only addition being a volley of shot, a tribute to his leadership role in the colony. there may have been a wooden marker with his name at his burial location, but if he was given one, it does not exist now (the true drawback of wood: it has a tendency to just return to nature on us). there were most likely no prayers and no sermons, as those commemorations were not part of an early puritan funeral. due to their belief in predestination, puritans did not see the point in prayers for the dead; they were either already in heaven or in damnation, and no prayers could help them - which, i imagine, is a fairly tough outlook to have when 50% of your neighbours are dying. in 1634, john canne summarized the puritan beliefs on funerals as such:

“concerning burials this they say: all prayers either over or for the dead are not only superstitious and vain but also are idolatry and against the plain scriptures of God…mourning in black garments for the dead, if it be not hypocritical, yet it is superstitious and heathenish: funeral services they also utterly condemn…”

just to summarise: they really, really hated displays of affection.

though little exists in the way of tangible evidence for these early puritan funerals, we do have a detailed description of them from a somewhat critical observer from england. in 1638, a solicitor named thomas lechford came to the colonies after spending time in an english prison for some kind of shady dealings at a trial of a friend - lawyers do be lawyering, even historically. lechford was keen to see the religious workings in the puritan settlement, though he came to disagree with them and was eventually cast away from the church. in what would be known as the first yelp review of a funeral, he described the ceremonies, namely to set about his disapproval:

“at burials, nothing is read, nor is any funeral sermon made, but all the neighborhood, or a good company of them, come together by the tolling of the bell, and carry the dead solemnly to his grave, and there stand by him while he is buried. the ministers are most commonly present.”

what lechford described is similar to what canne noted almost ten years earlier, which suggests that there was little change in funerals for over a decade. not really a surprise for a community still trying to rebuild (or build, in general, i suppose).

but by midcentury, as the original settlers began to die and their children became town elders, and as the nearby colonies became established, social structures became more complex and layered.  deathways, too, became more elaborate. in plymouth colony and particularly in other developing new england settlements, in the latter half of the seventeenth century, deathways mirror the cultural changes. historian john demos notes some of this changes as being reflective of the “apparent conflict between the religious aims of the founders and the very worldly concerns of subsequent generations.” (essentially: parents, they just don’t understand.) even governor bradford noticed the shift; in an somewhat overdramatic emotional metaphor, he compares plymouth to an aging widow whose children have either died (“been worn away by death”) or been absorbed into other families.

the generational shift has a part to play in understanding how deathways evolved in light of the massachusetts bay colony charter in 1691. the bay colony saw many more immigrants during the great migration in the 1630s and 40s than plymouth did; immigrants which had none of the puritan fervor like the first settlers (which is probably pretty understandable - who wants to spend their entire life trying to figure out if god damned you before you were even born?).

the bay colony also drew more financial resources from england than plymouth did. this meant that they were more able to adapt to cultural influences than plymouth. you know what they say: mo’ money, mo’ deathways. no, i don’t regret this horrible joke.

i know at this point you’re probably like: weren’t we going to talk about gravestones, nash? and to that i say: everything in its own time, mate. you’ve got to stop rushing history.

in 1657, one plymouth colony resident called titus waymouth died, and his estate was charged for his burial, which included a coffin at a cost of eight shillings.

waymouth was not the first to get a coffin, but the estate bill is interesting nonetheless, as it presents the itemized cost of an entire funeral in 1657. in later years, grave rails would be added to burials, and, in time, wooden markers. some scholars assume those markers had painted epitaphs and iconography, but since there are none extant, nothing is certain (cue x-files music?). 

plymouth colony’s vital records, in which the colonists dictated the births, marriages and deaths in the colony, became more detailed as time went on. in the 1630s, until around the 1650s, death announcements merely stated “john faunce died the 29^th of november” or “thomas gray dyed about the seuenth [sic] of june.” in later years, the records include details about lives and deaths in these announcements, as this rather …flowery example shows: 

“mistris elizabeth warren, an aged widow, aged aboue 90 yeares, deceased on the second of october, 1673, whoe, hauing liued a godly life, came to her graue as a shoke of corn fully ripe. shee was honorably buried on the 24^th of october aforesaid.” 

in 1677, plymouth resident christopher wadsworth expressed in his will the hope that “my body have a comely and decent burial; and that my funeral expenses together with all my just and due debts be paid out of my personal estate;” in the same vein, george soule’s will expresses his wish that “i comitt my soule into the hands of almighty god whoe gave it and my body to be decently buried in the place appointed for that use whensoever hee shall please to take mee hence.” all over the colonies, wills expressed a deep anxiety over their burial requirements.

as exemplified by wadsworth and soule, “decent burials” along with dying “hopefully” became the standard language of this time period. the desire for a decent burial stems from knowing that the body would be interred and protected from the elements and desecration.  dying “hopefully” connoted a number of things: dying without fear or reproach and without discernable haunted visions. deathbed scenes were an important part of determining whether someone was being sent to salvation. they were social events that helped the living navigate the dying process and determine where their loved ones might have gone. last words and emotions were often used to interpret signs that they were chosen for heaven, hence “dying hopefully” meant they may have been saved. it’s hard to let go of old family traditions, like trying to figure out if god liked you or not.

the inclusion of these details represents a desire to know about the death and burial of community members. often puritans reported death of friends and family in meticulous and detailed ways - we see you, shoke of corn fully ripe granny! historian peter benes relates this fixation to what he terms the puritan ‘anticipation’ of death. and the uncertainty was a central part of being saved: as historian david stannard put it, “doubt of salvation was essential to salvation.” the moment of death was the cessation of that anxiety (relatable), and thereby meant to be somewhat hopeful. dying ‘hopefully’ or dying ‘well’ was meant to convey the best possible passing.

in the latter half of the 17^th century, gravestones began crop up around the landscape, and because of this, more is known about the physical burials than in the previous decades (i told you we’d get there!). iconography is one source of information, which reveals through symbolism beliefs about life and death. curiously, puritans in regular old england eschewed all iconography, but new england settlers, when they decided to have gravestones made of slate, “could not be satisfied with the colorless doctrines their ministers intoned at the grave” (ludwig, graven images). put simply, the standard puritan imagery on gravestones was unique to new england in part due to their isolation. whereas in merry old england puritans cited iconography as heresy, in the face of such hardships in the new world, settlers turned to iconography to express what their religious beliefs denied them. once the unspoken agreement across the colonies to include gravestone imagery had spread, it was fairly unanimous: “after 1668, no Puritan family was ready to commit its loved ones to the cold earth without an appropriate cluster of symbols hovering protectively over the grave” (ibid). puritans did not use this imagery in any other place; unlike other christian sects, which embraced angels and representations of the trinity in other visual ways, puritans avoided iconography in all of its other forms but grave marking. 

epitaphs are also revealing in determining relationships with death. epitaphs for this time period are fairly uncommon in plymouth, but they are more common in the massachusetts bay colony, just as iconography and stone markers make their appearances there much earlier than in plymouth. 

historian harriet forbes was the first to show that the gravestones themselves were made from slate from inside new england, instead of being brought in by trade routes and supply ships. this might seem obvious, since slate is pretty abundant, but the first markers were likely made of wood for simpler reasons than access: wood was easier to manipulate, quicker to produce, and given the nature of the early puritan funeral, having more permanent markers would maybe have been likely seen as idolatry.

gravestones have language that is specific to probing them. of the mid 17th c stones in early new england and beyond, nearly all include a tympanum, the most topmost aspect of a stone, often curved and containing some kind of engraved iconography. many also include crowns and laterals; the laterals, sometimes called shoulders, are sidepieces that also contain scrollwork or decoration and are wing-like sides of a typical arch stone. crowns are the top pieces of those laterals and also include the tympanum. headstones are the main stones which contain the biographical information as well as iconography, but also appearing at burial hill – and in other burying grounds at the time – were footstones. those are small, rectangular stones that mark the edge of the grave, at the foot of the deceased. 

we’re gonna stop there for now, partially because there’s so much more to talk about, and partially because i need to decide what gravestones i want to show you out of the 500 or so that i like and that show us something neato about iconographic changes and the deathways that inspire them. (and also partially because substack just warned me i was getting close to the character limit). then there’s the whole carver trade and how that influenced and was influenced by deathways. and also the momento mori goods.

i want to end on a quick note about the puritans. in popular culture, they are often represented as austere people who only dressed in black and white and really loved turkey and shoes with belt buckles. some of that is true (the shoes) and the rest of it is largely made up for allegorical purposes. in reality, even though the puritans had really super strict religious rules, and also were kind of shit about inclusion and, you know, not colonising people to take their land, they also weren’t as cold as everyone believes. they lost children - usually around 40% of them didn’t make it to adulthood, and 1 in 10 babies were dead before turning 1 - and they had an extremely stressful relationship with their god. primary sources like samuel sewall’s diary give us a better glimpse into that world and how often grief visited them. it’s really no wonder that their burying grounds were places to remind them that life is brief, and that they filled those grounds with iconography that invoked that anxiety. but the language around that brevity - “here lies the body” “here lies interred the body of” - reminds us too that only bodies are buried. their loved ones were elsewhere.

suggestions for further reading:

Peter Benes. The Masks of Orthodoxy: Folk Gravestone Carving in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, 1689-1805. Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1977.

Peter Benes. “The Caricature Hypothesis Re-Examined: The Animated Skull as a Puritan Folk Image” Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife Studies. Boston: Boston University, 1980

William Bradford. Of Plymouth Plantation. Ed. Harold Paget. 1920.

Francis Bremer. “The Origins and Growth of the Puritan Movement.” University Press of New England

Frederick Burgess. English Churchyard Memorials. London: 1963. 20-21.

James Deetz. The Time of Their Lives: Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth Colony. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 2000.

James Deetz and Edward Dethlefsen. “Death’s Heads, Cherubs, and Willow Trees: Experimental Archaeology in Colonial Cemeteries.” American Antiquity, Vol 31, No 4 (April 1966) pp 502-510

James Deetz and Edward Dethlefsen. “Some Social Aspects of New England Colonial Mortuary Art”. Memoirs of the Society for American Archaeology, No 25, Approaches to the Social Dimensions of Mortuary Practices (1971), pp 30-38.

John Demos. “Notes on Life in Plymouth Colony.” The William and Mary Quarterly Vol 22, No 2 (April 1965) pp 264-286

John Demos. A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony. 2^nd Ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 

John Demos. Circles and Lines: The Shape of Life in Early America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Benjamin Drew. Burial Hill, Plymouth, MA: its monuments and gravestones numbered and briefly described and the inscriptions and epitaphs thereon carefully copied. Plymouth, MA: Avery and Doten, 1894.

James J Farrell. Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830-1920. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980.

Harriet M. Forbes. Gravestones of Early New England. New York: Da Capo, 1967. 

Betsy Friedberg. “National Register of Historical Places Registration Form: Old Burial Hill, Plymouth, MA Application.” Betsy Friedberg MHC NR Director. Boston: August 10, 2012.

David D. Hall. A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in Early New England. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2011. 

David D. Hall. “The Gravestone Image as a Puritan Cultural Code.” Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife Studies Seminar. Boston: Boston University; 2nd edition (1980)

David Landon and Christa M. Beranek, “Project 400: The Plymouth Colony Archaeological Survey, 2014 Field Season, Burial Hill” The Fiske Center for Archaeological Research, 13 August 2014.

George Langdon.  Pilgrim Colony: A History of New Plymouth, 1620-1691. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966

Thomas Lechford. Plaine Dealings, or Newes from New England. Boston: J.K. Wiggins and William Parsons Lunt, 1867.

Nigel Llewellyn. The Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual c. 1500- c. 1800. 

Allan I Ludwig. Graven images: New England Stonecarving and its Symbols, 1650-1815. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1966.

John M McCullough and Elaine York Barton. “Relatedness and Mortality Risk During a Crisis Year: Plymouth Colony, 1620-1621.” Ethnology and Sociobiology, vol 12, issue 3, 1991. Pp 195-209. 

James E McWilliams. Building the Bay Colony: Local Economy and Culture in Early Massachusetts. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007. 

Gerald F. Moran and Maris A. Vinovskis “The Great Care of Godly Parents: Early Childhood in Puritan New England.” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development. Vol. 50, No. 4/5, History and Research in Child Development (1985), pp. 24-37

Edmund S. Morgan. Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea. New York: Cornell University Press, 1963.

Eileen O’Connor. “Shoemakers and Stone Markers: Gravestones as Material Culture of the Quakers from Lynn, Massachusetts”

Stephen O’Neill. “Beginnings: The 17th Century Origins of Burial Hill.” Plymouth: Pilgrim Hall Museum, 2012. Print.

Records of Plymouth Colony: Births, Marriages, Deaths, Burials and Other Records, 1633-1689. Nathaniel Shurtleff, ed. Boston: William White, 1857.

Polly Rettig. “Cole’s Hill: National Register of Historic Places Application”. United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service. 1974.

Erik R. Seeman. Death in the New World: Cross-Cultural Encounters 1492-1800. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. 

Samuel Sewall. The Diary and Life of Samuel Sewall. Mel Yazawa, ed. Boston: Bedford Books, 1998.

David Stannard. The Puritan Way of Death: A Study of Religion, Culture and Social Change. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. 

Eugene Aubrey Stratton. Plymouth Colony: Its History and People 1620-1691. Ancestry, 1986.

James Thatcher. History of the Town of Plymouth, from its first settlement in 1620 to the present time, with a concise history of the Aborigines of New England, and their wars with the English &c. 2nd. Boston: Marsh, Capon and Lyon, 1835.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. New York: Random House, 1990.

Edward Winslow and William Bradford. Mourt’s Relation, Or Journal of the Plantation at Plymouth. Ed. Henry Martyn Dexter. Boston: J.K. Wiggin, 1865. 

Marilyn Yalom. The American Resting Place: 400 Years of History through Our Cemeteries and Burial Grounds. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008.  

Michael Zuckerman. Peaceable Kingdoms: New England Towns in the 18^th Century. New York: Norton and Company, 1970.

it’s a lie, of course. if you’re older than 10 you probably know this already. (if you’re under 10 - my little friend, i appreciate you making it here, but there are definitely better places on the internet for you to be.) but in reality that little tale was invented by mid 19th c politicians trying to sell the reconstruction of the US as the civil war raged on in the background: America the Myth, something all states should want to be a part of. in 1863, Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday, and the pilgrims, who had, over the years, increasingly becoming symbols of american grit and fortitude, were cemented in history as the heroes of thanksgiving. it helped, too, that creating this little tale helped erase the horrors that colonialism had wrought on new england’s shores, especially as the war being fought was largely due to a different source of colonialism. ah, revisionist history.

so if you’re already looking for places to poke holes while your famously politically contentious uncle drinks himself under the table before the main course comes out, here’s how the story really goes - as much as we can know it, anyway.

in 1616, an epidemic slammed right into new england. we don’t know what the disease was, and there have been many theories over the years, but suffice it to say that whatever it was, it was brought here by colonisation, and the native tribes in the area were immunologically defenceless. over the next three years, it waxed and waned without ever disappearing, leaving some tribes with a 90% mortality rate. the wabanaki, the wampanoag, and the massachusetts bore the brunt of the epidemic, which probably ran through their trade routes, while the narragansett, slightly to the south (in and around modern day rhode island) suffered a slightly less severe outbreak.

most tribes collapsed into neighbouring tribes, or died out altogether. death rituals were scarce, if at all, and tribes feared being caught vulnerable to attack - both from neighbouring tribes, and from would-be settlers.

the epidemic finally lessened in late 1619, but the damage to the population was finished. when Squanto returned to his home village of Patuxet (modern day Plymouth), he found it empty.

that’s where things roughly stood in 1620, when the mayflower stumbled into Cape Cod in november 1620. that winter is a story for another day, as it invites its own comparisons, so i’ll be brief and hit the highlights.

the mayflower was meant to leave england in may, but it was leaking quite severely, and leaving was delayed until september. you can probably already guess how much of a problem that presents, but maybe it’s just because you and i know how calendars and weather work. the settlers arrived in Cape Cod when they were meant to be in Virginia, but listen: they believed they were God’s chosen people, and when God seems to be putting up obstacles to your goals, i guess you just… work with what you get, instead of reading the writing on the wall. or something.

so they land at Plymouth, formerly the site of Patuxet, and the first thing they do is wander around a bit and, naturally, do some light grave robbing. (i’m being blasé, but in reality, they noticed some grass woven mats on the ground, so they moved them, noticed it was a grave covering, and then proceeded to take some of the more useful grave goods, like corn. so i’m not even being that blasé, honestly.)

somehow they do not get immediately cursed and/or haunted - or at least, not enough to send them packing - and they manage to survive through the first winter. i say survive, but they had a roughly 50% mortality rate, so that might be a little underselling it.

moving slightly forward in time for the sake of getting to the point, but the settlers are rescued, basically, by the Wampanoag, who are back in the area and decide to enter into a deeply uneasy but mutually beneficial pact that will help both sides survive. the settlers get food and land knowledge, and the Wampanoag get access to English guns, which, in addition to being threatening to their enemies, also make great trade currencies.

the pact makes for uneasy living. both sides are moderately distrustful of the other (one with *significantly* more reason) but both are determined to uphold their side of the agreement. at least while Massasoit, the current Wampanoag sachem, lives.

which brings us, if we agree to skip over a lot, to the “first” “thanksgiving”. in all likelihood it was in september or october of 1621. it was, essentially, a three day rager on the beach for the colonists, and included gun salutes and feasting and whatever else 17 c families did for fun (church?).

i should note that “thanksgivings” in and of themselves were not invented on this three day weekend. thanksgivings, in the English lexicon, were actually celebrated pretty often, particularly during wars or just sometimes when the vibes were off. so it wasn’t a new thing that the colonists made up.

however, this is where things get kind of fun. and when i say fun, you can probably guess that this is dripping with sarcasm. see, thats how the colonists describe the whole thing - a fun beach party with food and celebration. but according to the Wampanoag, they actually weren’t even invited to the original party - they showed up after hearing gunfire, and assumed the colony was being attacked. since they had the treaty in place, they were bound to come to the colonists’ aid, but when they got there, it was just a bunch of white people getting drunk on the beach. so they stayed around in case someone did try to attack now that everyone with a gun was completely legless.

obviously that’s two pretty different recollections. thinking critically, the Wampanoag narrative smells more like the truth, but it’s also worth mentioning that this “first thanksgiving” wasn’t a big event for either side. in reality, none of the contemporary sources mention it for more than a line or two. but in the mid-civil war, the US desperately needed a rebrand, and having this fictional, peaceful meal between two cultures that eventually led to the creation of America was a fairly solid metaphor, even if it was a lie.

it was also a key thing for white people to point to in order to downplay the horrible effects of colonisation and assimilation. “we befriended them”, the narrative implies, which doesn’t really take the sting out of “and then we killed them or sold them into slavery so we could take their land, because we believe they were/are inferior to us.”

so there you go. it’s not a wholesome story of collaboration, or even an interesting cross-cultural historic event. it’s just propaganda. so in a way, the first thanksgiving is kind of like the ones we sit through every year - a reminder that not everyone deserves to have power, that there should be significantly more guns laws, and also, probably, that turkey is extremely easy to overcook.

suggestions for further reading:

Cohen, Matt. “‘The Indians Told Them That Sickness Would Follow’: A Response to Miraculous Plagues.” The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 70, no. 4, Oct. 2013, pp. 827–31. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5309/willmaryquar.70.4.0827.

“The Great Dying 1616–1619, ‘By God’s Visitation, a Wonderful Plague.’” Historic Ipswich, 18 Nov. 2021, historicipswich.org/the-great-dying-1616-1619-by-gods-visitation-a-wonderful-plague/.

A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth; Mourt’s Relation: A Relation or Journal of the English Plantation Settled at Plymouth in New England, by Certain English Adventurers Both Merchants and Others. Edited by Dwight B. Heath, Project Gutenberg, 2006, www.gutenberg.org/files/19663/19663-h/19663-h.htm.

Marr, John S. “The 1616–1619 New England Epidemics That Transformed ‘Virgin Soil’ into ‘Widowed Land.’” Emerging Infectious Diseases, vol. 16, no. 2, Feb. 2010, pp. 276–86. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, doi:10.3201/eid1602.090276.

Seeman, Erik R. Death in the New World: Cross-Cultural Encounters, 1492–1800. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.

Silverman, David J. This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.

Teaching American Indian History with Primary Sources. Edited by Denise D. Knight and Erik M. Zissu, The Choices Program, Brown University, 2020, www.choices.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Teaching-American-Indian-History-with-Primary-Sources-Compliant-1-2.pdf. Accessed 10 Aug. 2023.

look, i realise it’s been ages since i posted on this but let’s just all pretend i’ve been doing posts this whole time as a fun secret between friends. especially if my publisher asks you.

i wanted to jump back into things with a little show and tell moment. part of it is fun and interesting, and part of it is sad, but for me it’s a nice midpoint between the two.

i mentioned in a previous post that i used to intern in the city archaeology lab. while i was there, the city hired us to conduct a pre-construction dig at a nearby cemetery; the firehouse - next door to the cemetery - was being renovated. (anytime there’s a concern about disarticulated remains at a construction site, cities and towns are required to call in archaeologists or anthropologists.)

this cemetery, today called Eliot Burying Ground, was sometimes referred to as the Eustis St Burying Ground or Old Roxbury Burying Ground, is the oldest extant burying ground in Roxbury, and one of the 3 oldest in Boston metro, with the first interment made in 1633. burying here stopped in 1854 with the exception of family tombs, so it’s had a fair expanse of colonial history. its current name, Eliot, is the surname of one of the more prominent dead members of its population - John Eliot, d 1690, who was a reverend and missionary. he is mostly known for his work translating the english bible texts into the Massachusett language as part of his goal to convert them. later those same texts would be used to force the Wampanoag and other tribes into “praying towns,” so, you know. not a great look.

that’s enough history for now. this post isn’t about any of the inhabitants of the Eliot Burying Ground, but about the surrounding alive community.

i was part of the dig staff in 2009. 2009 was not a great year for the economy, as my fellow millennials may recall. we went into the site with the plan to excavate as much dirt near the falling wall of the old firehouse as possible, which the reasonable expectation that we’d end up having a bunch of broken, buried gravestone pieces and some disarticulated remains on our hands.

i mention it’s 2009 because of the unexpected artefacts we ended up finding during the course of the dig. this part of Boston, both in 2009 and today, is largely a black community. i mention this only because its relevant.

only a few weeks into the dig, when we were still not finding cool things and just moving dirt around, we opened the gate one morning and discovered the cemetery grounds were being used for another purpose overnight.

of course, i had no idea what i was looking at, and probably neither will you. this is the first thing i saw that morning.

if you are like: is that blood? yes, you’re correct. it’s very much blood. a lovely rained upon puddle of blood on top of an old tomb.

i’m white, from the suburbs, and i’ve lived a relatively sheltered life. i’ve also consumed an ungodly amount of crime television, so my first instinct is that all of us are about to be standing in the location of a gruesome murder. thankfully, our director was there before i could start screaming my head off and/or traipsing around looking for the rest of the theoretical dead guy.

one of the coolest things about cemeteries and burying grounds is that they’ve always been home to non-dead people stuff. in the early colonial days, they were also grounds where people grazed their animals, and often, they were used as fort sites during times of combat. in later history, they became sites of quiet contemplation as the victorian romanticisation of death lead us to the creation of burial grounds with arboretums and gardens. but we’ve always used these spaces not just as a tangible place to remember our dead, but to commemorate the life that surrounds them, too. it’s very memento mori of us.

so there we are, walking into work, and facing not an insignificant amount of blood on a tombstone. and not just that, either - after a few minutes of wandering around apprehensively, our director finds a bag under one of the braces by the firehouse.

she pokes the bag with a stick, and to our extreme delight, it’s not random human parts. but it is a head - of a chicken. that head is also pretty likely the source of the blood on the stone. because if it walks like a beheaded chicken, and talks like a beheaded chicken, well then, it’s probably a beheaded chicken.

our director is the only person grinning at this discovery, and it’s because she exactly what’s going on - this site has become a place for locals to practise Santeria.

Santeria is an afro-caribbean religion that has ties to the slave trade, when it was practised as a form of resistance. it’s kind of an intersection between a west african religion called Yoruba and a general spiritualism with a bit of catholicism in there for fun. i am not an expert in this or even close to, so this is my very high level understanding.

to our surprise, the director has seen this before. it’s one of those things you learn about cemeteries in urban areas - sometimes they are a quiet place to do or sell drugs, and sometimes they are a quiet place to practise a generational religion born from trauma and resistance with the hope of improving your family’s finances or to cure an illness. (and sometimes both!)

it’s not uncommon across the states to see Santeria artefacts in or around cemeteries, especially during financial depressions. here’s an article from an instance in Florida in 2019. here’s another - also from Florida - in 2023. (fuck me up, Florida!)

as the dig went on, we’d find more and more curious leftovers that suggested the practise was ongoing - but, thankfully for my anxiety, no more heads. at least no more animal heads. i can’t say we didn’t find a disarticulated head or two.

the most interesting thing about it is the role the Eliot Burying Ground played in its community is that it was dependent on the time of day. we couldn’t stay after dusk (city rules!) and it seemed as soon as we left, it became some other place entirely. to me, it seemed like - and i hate making this reference, by the way - the room of requirement in that wizard series with Daniel Radcliffe. (i refuse to recognise the author.) it was whatever its people needed it to be.

cemeteries are still playing the multi-service role today, it just looks a little different than animal grazing or victorian laying about with large lace umbrellas and uncomfortable undergarments. if anything, the role they play is more important than the others, because we’ve strayed pretty far from being comfortable with death. so whatever we end up doing in cemeteries - spiritualism, drugs, having sex on our own mothers’ grave (looking at you, mary shelly) - at least we’re in there. looking at all the symbolism we’ve created over hundreds of years to remind us that someday, we’ll also be gone.

but if we’re lucky, maybe someday our tombs will get to play host to a Santeria ritual or two.

ah, the duality of man: born to die and terrified of it. but also, maybe sometimes not?

a lot of people have started to use the term ‘death positive’. here’s what i don’t like about it - death sort of sucks. it’s painful and it’s hard and it’s inevitable for all of us. and so even though ‘death positivity’ doesn’t meant ‘yay! here’s to grandpa kicking the bucket!’ you have to admit, it sort of sounds like it does.

i prefer the term that i’ve only recently made up just to complicate things, and that term is ‘death realism.’ for me it evokes both the simple objective fact that death comes for us all (for any death and friends fans, you are welcome for that playing in your head) and that being a realist is part of it. we don’t have to be positive about it. we aren’t required to process or accept it or any of the other things that might go along with a more specific purpose of it all. instead death realism gives me a way to say ‘i know it’s coming and hey, that is kind of lame’ because reality is just like that.

i’ve been suicidal for a long time. most of my memorable life. i can say with some confidence that pretty much as soon as my brain could process self awareness, it was like: well, this is the worst. maybe we should not? do it? anymore?

i’ve talked endlessly about this in therapy and before i say the next thing let me preface with this: the best, most effective clarification about childhoods is that both of these things can be true - your parents could have done the best they possibly could for you, and that can still fall short of the parents you needed them to be.

(i did a paragraph break not because this story needed one but to let that sit with you for a moment, in case you needed it.)

i was 14 the first time i hurt myself on purpose. i had no idea what i was doing or even really why, but i did know that my own thoughts were painful and i felt lonely and lost. i had recently gone through puberty (very quickly for some reason) and that made me feel more alienated from everyone. the adults in my life had no idea how to interact with me going from looking like a child to a fully-figured biological female in one summer and all of their comments and uncomfort made that very clear to me. i hated myself for being a girl and for making people realise i was a girl, too.

my parents had even less of an idea about what to do about that, since i have two brothers and i grew up with two boy cousins. as a child i was genderless, really - i wore dresses on occasion but it didn’t seem different to me, just more unnecessary adult-fussing pointlessly for holidays and things. my brothers were often dressed as uncomfortable as me, anyway, for different reasons, so it seemed equal even if it wasn’t. but suddenly i couldn’t hang out with them or their friends anymore. my old clothes didn’t fit and my parents were horrified if i tried to wear them. we went from a very calm, largely peaceful relationship to full on screaming matches about my clothing - i’d replaced all the old things with large, boxy sweatshirts and jeans and refused to wear dress up clothes. i asked my teachers to refer to me by my middle name, which is ryan, only for that to be ignored completely, or met with a classroom of giggles and stares from classmates who had known me since elementary school, or, on one occasion, to being publicly told no because i was a girl and ‘ryan is not a girls’ name’ (this was unfortunately in the very early aughts) which i found equally confusing because it was my name.

that same year, only a few weeks before my ‘attempt’ i was supposed to go to a middle school dance. it was going to be very boring and i had few friends and no interest in attending, but then my parents got the bright idea to ask my older brother to attend as a chaperone. probably they thought this was genius, since a lot of my classmates accused me of making him up (he didn’t live with us and he is 7 years older than me). my mother excitedly bought me a dress for the evening’s theme, and my brother arrived in his suit - only i point blank refused to get dressed. it ended in tears, of course - mine and my mother’s - and i can vividly remember my father screaming at me from the bottom of the stairs that every girl in her right mind would be in a dress and i wasn’t better or more special than them and could i please just for once not make everything dramatic and difficult?

somehow i did end up winning that battle. i’m not sure how - likely we just ran out of time and they were forced to either tell my brother he’d come down for nothing or just bring me as i was, which was in a loose fitting orange romper. i don’t remember anything at all about the dance.

a few long, hard weeks later, i was in the shower shaving off all my body hair, which, until a few months ago, had been perfectly societally acceptable. but now i had to shower everyday and apparently shave it all off. i stared at the razor in my hand, and, sobbing, used the blades to open the veins at my wrists.

immediately i was shocked at how much it bled. combined with the running water i was sure i was dying. in reality the cuts weren’t deep, but panic set in. i got out of the shower and wrapped them both in gauze and tape and ran back to my room to cry.

my mother came in to check on me later that day, since i hadn’t emerged, and i ended up telling her about the cuts. she cried and told me not to do it again. i promised i wouldn’t.

if i had been young now, i think everything else would have been different for me. my parents would have known better how to have conversations about puberty and probably have put me in therapy to deal with the very obvious depression. but this was in 2002.

that same year, a member of our class attempted suicide, but for ‘real’ - she slit her wrists wide open and spent three weeks in the hospital. everyone talked about her in whispers when she came back, and she went from being one of the popular girls to a shadow wearing giant sweaters and heavy black makeup. it seemed like everyone was afraid of her.

except me. i was jealous. i understood that was a fucked up thing to think but i still watched her in awe.

i ate lunch with her once, pretty soon after. cafeteria meals weren’t my thing generally but i wanted to get close to her. she told me about her depression diagnosis and i remember the even more fucked thought process that followed: i wanted to have real depression.

two things to unpack here, mainly in case my teenage self time travels and reads this: 1. i discovered this as an adult but wow, good lord, was i neurodivergent. there’s something to be said for always feeling like you’re watching humans have emotions from outside a window and you’re just breathing at the glass and fogging it up when you try and 2. i did have real depression. just because she made a more serious attempt does not mean my feelings didn’t qualify. i wasn’t ‘being dramatic’ , there are just levels to this shit. and a knowledge base i didn’t have.

even as an adult whose thoughts always ran dark, i didn’t let myself call it depression. i wasn’t always full scale suicidal, either, but my brain always did enjoy a good dip into the ‘hey, i bet that would kill us. and to be honest, who would even care if it did?’

but mainly i survived school because there was something to do. i could fulfil my dopamine and serotonin levels with academics and after school activities and homework. i could think about college and then, when i got there, the levels were filled by drug and alcohol abuse and homework. in my twenties i filled them by completing the checklist of everything my family could possibly want me to do: get a job, get another degree, get a partner, get married, get a house, have a kid, have another kid.

i made it to 30 alive and exhausted. i’d always suspected, objectively, even as a teen, that i would kill myself before then. but there i was, 31, with two children, two cats, a partner and a job. and a dog.

finally at 32, my brain, tired of being ignored and having not created any of the good chemicals since i had my son, decided to absolutely just go for it.

it started as a sore throat and nausea. nothing too major, but i couldn’t eat anything. shortly after, i couldn’t sleep either. with all my new time not eating or sleeping, i ran. i’d never in my life been athletic, and so the sudden change alarmed everyone i knew. i lost a lot of weight very quickly, and everyone told me i looked great. ‘much better’ even. with no reason to stop, even after the sore throat and nausea subsided, i kept running. and not eating or sleeping. i was exhausted constantly and on the brink of tears at any moment, but for the first time in my entire life, my body wasn’t a source of loathing and shame. i had control over it and that fuelled me, even though the depth of my self-hatred suddenly seemed bottomless.

i never called it an eating disorder. at least not to anyone but myself, but even that was years later. but it was. and finally i couldn’t keep going - my insides were bloated and painful, and i had started shitting blood. i went to a gastroenterologist who thought it was probably crohn’s disease and spent months putting me through invasive tests and more blood work than i had blood. all of it was inconclusive - and it wasted time on both our parts. if he or any of his colleagues had thought to ask me about my mental health or diet or why i was still going on 5 miles runs when i was so completely calorie deficient i think he may have been able to help me.

but he didn’t, and i couldn’t admit the truth to myself anyway, and so i spent months in bed, in pain, having to be steps away from a toilet at pretty much all times. i thought constantly about death. in fact i daydreamed about it, all the ways i could go, all the things in my own house that could kill me. how fast or slow it would be. my children were young enough that they wouldn’t even have memories of me, so really, no harm no foul (obviously this isn’t objectively true, but it’s how it felt then - sorry for disrupting the flow but i did feel like i had to interject that. okay, back to business).

i still wouldn’t have called that depression or even suicidal ideation. it wasn’t until i went to my routine physical that i was forced to refer to it at all. i had gone this far thinking everyone felt like i did and that it was normal to feel fondly about the very sharp knives in your home.

my doctor gave me a very standard depression screener. i failed, by which i mean i scored the highest possible depression score you could achieve. top of the class, a plus, 100%, baby!

she looked at me for a moment and then said ‘i’m so sorry you’ve been struggling’ and i remember staring at her for a full moment before realising i was crying. it took my brain that long to catch up with what the rest of my body had known - we were in very bad shape.

she diagnosed me with depression - to my teenage self’s utter shock - and told me it was a medical condition for which there was help. she gave me a prescription and a few names of good therapists.

i sat in my car in silence for a long time after that office visit. i felt underwater, like my limbs couldn’t move against the weight of their environment.

the first month on my depression medication was the hardest of my life. i don’t remember a time before that that every day, every hour, was a struggle to keep going. i had to admit to my partner i could no longer be left alone. i wrote notes for my children, just in case, to tell them i was sorry that i’d lost my battle but that it didn’t mean they weren’t enough, it meant that i wasn’t.

but i kept doing it. ‘just one more’ became my bedtime ritual and my morning mantra. ‘you can do just one more’. one more breath, one more hour, one more step, one more time, one more anything. and then it grew from little things to bigger ones. one more day, one more week, one more month. and then, suddenly, one day it just … didn’t feel bad. my skin didn’t hurt, and my body just moved, and i slept, actually slept. every day after that got a little better. i started looking forward to things. the air in new england started changing, too - spring was there, almost overnight, like it awoke with me.

i’ve been medicated for a little over a year now, and most of my takeaway on that is that i cannot believe how long i denied myself the right to feel better. all it took was owning the words as they applied to me. but i couldn’t do it, so i didn’t, and so i wasted all that time and my own health - in the end, the lack of eating and the stress and anxiety left me with hashimoto’s disease and fibromyalgia- feeling like i wasn’t good enough to have depression at all. if i wasn’t sad enough, like the girl in my high school, then that was that. she had depression but i was just a bad person, and those were different. one was special, and the other one was me.

once i got better, though, i had the unpleasant task of discovering existential dread. for the first time in my life, the thought of my own death made me scared and uncomfortable instead of feeling relief, or at least, numb. but even though fear is hard and i hate it, i found myself in awe of those moments. they showed me just how far i’d travelled - and how much i must have missed.

this is another reason i don’t like ‘death positive’ terminology. i’m better in the realism camp. i’m not going to be positive about death, or spiritual, or even all that comfortable with it, because being there brings back The Bad Feelings (tm). i’m delighted to be afraid and uncertain. i’m content to be anxious about it. it means i’m still here and i still want to be.

it does mean death and i are in a rather complicated situationship. we’ve been friends for a long time, and then things got too serious, and now we’re mildly uncoupled. we’re still on the lease together and we haven’t left, and things aren’t completely tense but they aren’t easygoing either. he’s not good at loading the dishwasher, and i always forget to put the sock on the door handle when i have company, that sort of thing. he is comforting in some ways because i know he will always be there, and he is helpful in that way to give context for the storyline. but also he’s going to kill me one day (that part is no longer in the metaphor).

i still have relapses. i’m in one right now, and that’s partly the reason i’m writing this (not everything is about you, invisible audience). but mainly i try to refer to them as though they are annoying little pets, like ferrets, whichever everyone knows are just long cats and why would you want one of those? they are called my ‘reflexes’. i try to think of them like that. my brain has been producing that content for so long it forgot to stop. i am fine, i am happy to be here, but my brain has connected those pathways of self-destruction for so long that sometimes they just do it out of habit. but it’s a voice i try not to take seriously anymore. it’s toxic but kind of cute in a real demeaning way. like: aw, buddy. look at how hard you’re trying.

all this is to say if you’re anywhere on the path where i was/am, all you have to do is one more. of anything at all. just one, and then you’re safe. something someday will come take us and everyone we know, but right now it’s not you or me, and so we gotta do one more.

i have a tattoo on my wrist of a crocus flower. it’s probably my most ladylike tattoo and people are usually like ‘aw that’s pretty’. but it’s not there because it’s pretty, even though it is and it’s a good tattoo; my guy is talented. but it’s there because in new england, where winters suck kind of a lot and you can spend months forgetting what the colour green looks like, crocuses pop before anything else. late february or early march at the latest and there they are, bright green little sprouts that come up so suddenly it’s like a jack in the box. they can even tolerate a little snow.

please feel justified about rolling your eyes at that and being like ‘okay. katniss we get it, flowers are good metaphors’. but just as i was turning the corner for the first time, the first morning i noticed my own front yard, there they were, waiting for me. (i don’t even think we ever planted them. they just showed up). so i got the tattoo, as a reminder: as suddenly as things can be bad, they can be good, too. i’m positive about that. (do you get it? did you guys ge-

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when the separatists (/colonisers) landed in plymouth in 1620, 102 people disembarked from the mayflower in order to make a new life for themselves in an unknown land. they knew there must be natives in the area, and so they cling to the shore. they were many months later than they’d planned to be, and much farther north, and particularly after months at sea, they were unsuited for what a new england winter was going to have in store for them. before spring, half of them would be dead.

the first death is the only one not catalogued in detail by the company’s would-be historian, william bradford. it’s also the most curious. only a few days after landing, dorothy bradford, william’s first wife (foreshadowing!), stepped off the mayflower and drowned. or maybe she slipped. or maybe she was pushed. 

we don’t know an enormous amount about her, personally. that’s not incredibly unusual for a woman in the 17th century, but you’d think while will was busy writing down the history of the colony, his wife’s death would at least make some headlines. some historians have ventured that his grief was too strong to write about her, but i’d argue right back that he immediately wrote to her best friend, alice, whom they had left in holland, and had her on the next ship to the new world so he could marry her. in his of Plymouth Plantation, his only note on this is “of william bradford: his wife died, and he married again” so, you know, do what you want with that. 

dorothy had been forced to her leave her 3 year old son behind in holland to be cared for by her parents. by accounts, she had a difficult time making that decision, though she understood months at sea and setting up a new colony was probably not the best environment for a toddler. 

critics of the dorothy suicide narrative point to a story written by jane austin (not that one) which has no historical facts behind it. they also point out, fairly, that it was cold and slippery and she was probably suffering from sea sickness and scurvy and malnutrition. all those things are valid points. they usually go on to say that if she had killed herself, it would have been very bad for the colony press and used as a weapon against them. i think, personally, they hit something here that they don’t realise: that doesn’t mean she didn’t kill herself, not at all. in fact, that’s exactly what would happen if she had - the folks onboard know what it would mean. they’ve been ostracised from their own communities, both in england and in holland. their investors (ah, capitalism) might pull back on this deal if it goes badly, and the wife of the governor killing herself a few days after arriving is pretty much the top shelf of bad press. 

later, cotton mather (yep, that one) would write that she “accidentally drowned after slipping”, which historians usually take at face value. but to that i say: cotton was a pretty huge drama queen and also he wasn’t there, either. maybe no one was. no one has ever claimed to be. maybe they merely discovered her body floating in the late morning and assumed she slipped. maybe they watched her step off the side and decided right then and there it was better to have not seen what they saw. 

other historians have argued that saying dorothy’s death was a possible suicide is keeping apace with the idea of feminine weakness. here is where we diverge in thinking - i think it’s the height of misogyny to not allow women the same authority and agency as men when it comes to offing ourselves. i am nothing if not a pragmatic equalist. 

does it matter if dorothy stepped off that ship herself or if she fell by accident? she’s still dead. her child is motherless, even if he doesn’t know it. would it matter more if she was pushed off? the 17th century was not unknown for that kind of cruelty, just like any other century. 

these are the lessons that the dead can teach us: some things we aren’t meant to know. against unanswerable questions, we can only keep moving and keep building, to keep the terrible winter at bay. 

my first not-fun life lesson from dead people happened when i was 17. my mother’s brother was one of the only adults in my life that i trusted, and the only person i felt that really understood me. obviously i was wrong on that last part, but as a very weird teenager, that was one of the primary ways i related to adults - they were fine, as long as they “got” me. 

here’s the thing: i’ll never know if he meant to. for a long, long time, that bothered me the most, wondering whether he went out there knowing. whether he packed his things, carefully deciding what was important enough to carry on his final voyage, or whether the universe, whatever holds it together, decided for him, regardless of what he did or did not carry. 

it doesn’t bother me anymore - or at least, i don’t wonder at it. his demons are mine - those good old family genetics - and though i’d like to think i’m a better fighter than he was, i know now: maybe he planned it, maybe he didn’t, maybe he asked the sea to decide, and she gave her ruling with thunder and rain. i hope he saw that distant green light one last time, and i hope when he was floating at peace, his consciousness on a different shore, that his eyes got to see the stars, endlessly reflecting in the current. 

i remember waking in a cold sweat in the basement. i don’t even remember why i was sleeping there, but i remember it was damp and my mother was crying already, and in the darkest, most twisted part of my gut (i have an IBD so it’s pretty dark and twisted in there) i already knew as she was telling me: michael was dead. they pulled his body from the sea that afternoon. 

but michael’s story does not end with the ocean - in some ways, i wish it had. whatever brought him out on the brisk morning of january 20 none of us will ever know, but death brought him back in the late afternoon of january 21, cold and grey, and laid him on the table in a dark mortuary for an official autopsy, and with it, something darker.

i was 17 when he died. i’d thought of myself as an adult, and i pretended to be one, or what i thought adults were like. i thought i’d understood him, understood all of us. but though michael wasn’t even a constant presence in our family lives, his death fractured us, like a rock that puts a small crack in your windshield and then suddenly, inside a few hours, you can’t even see through the glass properly anymore. everything happened in whispers, tiny snippets of conversation at the doors or the stairs - all the transitory places in the house. we were all coming or going from nowhere, waiting, waiting all the time for the funeral, and then the burial, and then all the other times that death haunts - first holidays, anniversaries, birthdays. 

at 17 i knew michael. after we buried him, though, i was forced to mourn two deaths: the man i thought he was, and the man who really existed and now did not. the body we put in the ground was unburdened by both of those realities, and so i carried the weight of them, the weight of learning - he was an alcoholic, and a mean one.

i thought discovering the horrible things about him would be my undoing. i remember the pain of it, of listening to my father describe some events in detail - in part, i think, only because he was angry at all the pain it caused my mother, and to watch the good man i believed my uncle to be to be washed away in equal measure. in the aftermath, i thought i understood the way death creates a life - whatever michael had done, or hadn’t done, it was over. he couldn’t hurt or help anyone else. and all of us were left to keep the memories we’d had of him, free to build whatever narrative suited us and those memories. 

in the aftermath, i found myself wondering about dorothy a lot. whether she and my uncle shared the same dark things in different measures. whether the sun was in the same cold place it was for her as it was for him, and whether the ocean waves met greeted them with the same measures before it ushered the parts of them that could care away to someplace safe, leaving behind only the hollow evidence. 

this was the thing about death: i picked at it for years, and years, before i began to understand what it was that drew me to it. because it seemed that death was so final, that it was a door closed. But it’s not. death is the open window - not everything gets through, but with the right breeze, the air inside changes. i was 34, and sitting next to my grandfather in the hospital while he was beginning to leave the world, when my mother, joining in on the deathside conversations of my grandfather’s life, told a story of going through michael’s things after his autopsy, and finding a wedge of cheese in his jacket pocket, intact still from the water - his final homage to wallace and gromit, frozen in time. and suddenly, just like that, the man i’d known my whole childhood - silly and persistent and always ready to make a joke - was right there like we’d summoned him, like he’d always been.

of course, the cheese kind of answers the question, doesn’t it? who brings cheese on a final voyage and doesn’t eat it? not dorothy, certainly. so maybe that’s all the difference between meaning to and leaving it up to the universe: a bit of cheese.

but by my first semester of education courses i knew i was in trouble. it was so, so, so boring, and i was 18 and living on my own for the first time. the last thing i wanted was boredom.

i dropped it very quickly and embraced the other thing i was good at, which was writing. it seemed both Important and something on which i could coast, since i was already good at it and it didn’t require much effort. so i declared an english major, and assumed i’d be poor for the rest of my life. 

i wasn’t an exceptionally dedicated student, or even a very bright one, but somehow by my junior year i had finished all of my major and general education requirements, except for the final components of my thesis work, which i couldn’t begin until my senior year. and so i did what any other liberal arts student with a seemingly asexually replicating student loan does: i studied abroad.

i’m a half breed, split right down the middle: my mother’s entire family is irish, pretty much as far back as ireland goes, with the exception of a few brits mucking up an otherwise quality family tree. my great-grandmother came to the US in the late 1920s. on my father’s side we are italian, as far back as italy goes, no exceptions, and my great-grandparents came here in the 1930s. it was a very boring, very expected 23 & me result. 

in 2008, i was leaning more into my italian side, and so in august i flew to florence, italy. i had planned to do an entire immersion in the italian language, but when we arrived and confirmed classes, something else entirely caught my eye: we could take archaeological studies. 

the archaeological survey lab was run by a pair of italian archaeologists. truly i remember nothing about the man, except for noticing immediately that he was in love with the other professor, a woman called simone, who our entire class called archaeology barbie behind her back.

archaeology barbie was an utterly perfect human specimen. she was petite, and thin, with shimmery blonde hair and naturally straight, little white teeth. her eyes were beautiful and grey and she was sharp and quick witted. but the best thing about her was that somehow she always had a bit of dirt or dust right on her tits, which was the furthest thing that stuck out from her. it was that minute detail that earned her the nickname, because, as a classmate pointed out, that would be the exact detail that barbie makers would give her to show she worked in the field. a little bit of dirt in an interesting place. we all secretly thought that she put it there in the morning as part of her routine, as it was always there, even on her non-field days and this was further supported by empirical evidence: i ran into her once outside a cafe on the weekend, and she was done up for a date and missing her tit dust; i checked. 

in that class i was sat next to a friend who was also my roommate; our friendship wouldn’t survive the ordeal but that’s neither here nor there. in any case, for our final for the course, we were given a piece from barbie’s recent etruscan grave dig in its in situ packaging (meaning it was wrapped at the site and preserved in the earth it was encased in). our project was to stabilise it - get it out of the dirt, clean it up, carefully glue it back together if it was broken. follow the steps of museum curators with about 1/100 of the experience, classic italian education stuff. 

my friend opened hers and immediately groaned. she had been quick to take one and rip the paper open, and found it was a glazed piece, which she didn’t want to do. (there was glazed pottery and clay pottery, and on the whole, clay was easier - no delicate paintwork to accidentally ruin and fail the course for). she begged me to switch with her, and i hadn’t opened mine yet, and even though she was a pain in the ass, she was also cute, so i agreed. 

unfortunately for her, the piece she’d given me was perfect: an entirely intact bowl made for a child with little drawings on the side and, underneath, under the fluted bottom: a 2,000 year old fingerprint from the person who dipped the bowl into the glaze. it was perfectly formed, with all the little swirls on their finger visible in the paint. i remember lining it up with mine, seeing if they had bigger hands than me (yes, everyone does. well. everyone except donald trump) and how they must have been holding the bowl when they did it. even archaeology barbie was surprised and delighted. 

of course, about ten minutes later i chipped off quite a bit of glaze by accident and then severely messed up how old the object was in my presentation about the artefact, so all in all, i somehow managed a lackluster day in archaeological preservation. 

when i got back to the US, i added an ancient art history major and took an internship with the city’s archaeology department. i emailed back and forth with its director, a woman called dr. ellen [surname redacted by the government]. i couldn’t believe she’d accepted my application and that i’d be allowed to help her catalogue the entire city’s collection. i got extra indiana-jonsed up for my first day and - this is an unfortunate carbon dating of myself here - printed directions to get to the lab. (okay, look. i’m not that old but cell phone internet was still not really a thing in 2009.)

the lab was in the basement of the old, derelict police building at the corner of the city’s north end - not the nice corner. the basement flooded semi-annually and there was mould on the walls in the entryway. everything was cold all the time, with seeming disregard of the temperature outside. there was no one else in the building, no other tenants or offices, but ellen was only ever given access to the basement, so the entire scene felt a lot like a weird british sitcom about a group of haphazard ghosts from across time that become unlikely friends. 

i wasn’t the only intern - there were a few others - and like our british sitcom versions we were all over the place. the oldest of us was a graduate student who took everything incredibly seriously. i don’t remember too much about her, except that i’d realised at some point about halfway through my internship that i’d never seen her smile at all. that trend held up the entire semester. it wasn’t until she got drunk in ellen’s kitchen in the summer that i even ever saw her teeth. there was also a girl who didn’t go to school for archaeology but who just showed up at the lab randomly. she didn’t talk much, and we never knew much about her - not even ellen did - but she did pretty good work, and she always had really neat, bright coloured socks that never matched, so she was pretty ok in my book. 

my favourite part of the lab was the back corner of the archive, where we stored - and i use this term very, very loosely - old gravestones and gravestone pieces that had been lost from their in situ position. mainly it was just a pile of stone pieces on shelving, but it felt very Important for me, a weirdo, to sit back there and do my journaling while i thought about my future career as a museums expert. i remember asking ellen once why we didn’t try to put the gravestones back, why we didn’t do more restoration work, and she said “i am the only person in my entire department and i make 60k a year”. i loved ellen, but i pouted for days at that reply, in part because i was a self-absorbed 20 year old who didn’t understand the world, and in part because to me 60k sounded like quite a lot of money, especially for someone who had a cool single adult life like ellen.

ellen wasn’t chastising me, by the way. that’s just how she was. she had a blunt-ness that i grew to adore, because she could see things exactly how they were, and she was confident about it. she also didn’t care if it offended other people - the facts were the facts. i interviewed her for my college paper as part of my practicum, and i remember being very excited about it. i asked her what the future of archaeology looked like, thinking about how it would play into that Very Important Ideaology. but ellen barely looked up from the artefact she was cleaning in the lab. she snorted before asking me if i’d ever seen the inside of a christmas tree shop. when i said yes, she said: “the future of archaeology is going to look exactly like that.” 

anyway, that’s why i became a historian, and not an archaeologist. you can lead a horse to a grant-funded dig site, but you can’t make them care about all the trash you find and have to catalogue there. because while i don’t feel like spending my summers baking in the sun and wearing very uncool hats, i was completely unable to shake my affection for gravestones. what can i say? you always remember your first real love.

that being said, we all get to die. that part is true, and maybe that’s all the saying means. no matter what you have, you’re mortal just like everyone else. but even in that, it’s not equal - if it were, everyone would die peacefully in their sleep at 99 years old after eating an entire box of mac and cheese for dinner.

so why does the saying persist? i imagine it’s mainly because of modernity’s death anxiety. we’re really, really bad at death. we don’t like looking at it, or experiencing it, or talking about it. when your 83 year old grandma starts talking about when she’s gone, everyone in the house exchanges a worried look and says things like ‘oh grandma june. you’ve got 20 years left at least! you’re gonna be around forever!’

i myself have anxiety. a copious amount of it, and in lots of different categories: social, general, ecumenical, medical, culinary. so people wonder why i, the most anxious person on the earth, spend most of my time reading about death. doesn’t it make you more anxious, they usually ask me while they look uncomfortably around the room trying to pawn me off on someone else. but the answer is no. death is one of those things that actually makes me less anxious. i find it comforting, in a lot of ways, that nothing here is permanent. everyone that has ever lived, good or bad, rich or poor, significant or a member of the general populace, has died. memories of us only live so far as our grandchildren or maybe if we are lucky or unlucky our great grandchildren and then many of us are merely a stone or a drawer with a name or date some young person finds funny (personally i hope to die on june 9, 2069 and if i do, please allow my grave to become a pilgrimage place for bored teenagers to make out on. please also bury me in Nice, France. thank you in advance) 

there’s a lot we can learn from our dead relatives and forbearers about our time on earth. that’s a lesson i learn constantly, sometimes personally and other times academically. and, just like with everything, not all of those lessons are fun. but almost all of them can be pretty funny, in the right light, or at least on the right medication. 

here’s the thing i love most about history: everyone’s story is done already. you can draw whatever conclusions you like, really. with the proper application of evidence, you can tell someone’s whole existence, from birth to death, and you can pick what kind of story to tell - a love story, a sad story, a story of triumph, a story about historical best friends slash spinsters who adopted some kids, owned a cat named sappho, and just had a happy life together as bffs. whatever fits the bill, really. even as historians, we can’t make the history of anyone or anything objective. it comes with the territory. 

i struggle with telling my own story, though, even to myself, because i can’t find what kind of story it is. my best guess is that it’s one of those environmental disaster ones that i’ve never really enjoyed. i also have reason to assume i’m not the main character, but that’s neither here nor there.

but in any case, death is nice because it gives us all perspective. did i accidentally say ‘love you’ instead of ‘thank you’ to my starbucks barista this morning? i sure did. do i feel weird about it? i sure do. will it haunt me at night for many months? it sure will.

but someday i’ll be dead and so will she, so i think it comes out in the wash. maybe death isn’t the great equaliser, but it’s certainly plot-convenient. i probably won’t have a pyramid in which to store my mummified corpse, or even a wikipedia page about my greatest achievements, but there will be a day where no one is alive to remember the time i tripped and fell down an entire flight of stairs at school because i sometimes forget to actually look where i’m going. or the time i thought it was “idelation” instead of “ideation” when talking about my own experiences with suicide on not one but TWO podcasts interviews. or the fact that i posted all these things on the internet, which is immortal and will contain these stories for as long as humanity exists, or at least until the sharks at the bottom of the ocean finally eat through the cables.

i was suicidal for a rather extended time. it gave me a rather optimistic outlook on death, which i managed to hold on to even after i got better. these days, i’m finding that i get to celebrate both still being here, and bouts of existential dread. you have a different relationship with existentialism once you’ve actively wanted to die and then gotten better - it’s almost incredulous: ‘i …want to live?? oh my god I WANT TO LIVE.’ which is hard to explain to people.

for me, living meant both choosing life, the good parts and the shitty parts, and also choosing the unknown: if i’m not taking my own life, then something else gets to, at a moment i don’t get a say in. but it’s something i share with everyone else too: we’re all in this together, until biology says we’re not. i chose anxiety instead, both to see what other things my story might have, and because there were other alive people that needed me more than the dead did.

this project was born from both the living and the dead. it will explore my own experiences with both sides, from my life and from history. the dead can teach us things, even things we didn’t want to learn. and i hope it gets us all more comfortable talking about our death - and the death of grandma june. because she’s 83 years old already and she doesn’t want to live forever, okay? she just wants to know that you’re going to miss her, and also, that her funeral is bussin. we don’t all get pyramids or wikipedia pages, but we do all want people to miss us, at least for a generation or two. if we have to make the trip alone, it’s always nice to know we’ve got people on both sides. but since death is for everybody, it’s also nice to know no one, not even your least favourite cousin, is safe from the inevitable. see you in hell, susan!