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 Essay sampler / The dead
My father died midway through 2002
after a long illness. I was told he died alone. When I think of my father I
picture a shadow, something that is dark and elusive. I was two and a half
years old when he left his family on a hot February day in 1974 and apart
from one brief encounter with him when I was thirteen I never saw him again.
A few years before he died I was told of a place called Hart Island and since
then this island that bears our name has come to symbolise not only my father
but also my relationship with him – both in life and in death.
Hart Island stands inside Long Island Sound and is officially sanctioned
within the Borough of Bronx in New York. Situated near Eastchester Bay and
Orchard Beach, it is nestled away from the eyes of curious New Yorkers by the
expansive Pelham Bay Park and its neighbour, City Island. It is the shape of
an odd-looking fragment of bone chipped away from an ancient skull or
pterodactyl. It is a small strip of land barely reaching two kilometres at
its widest point.
Its name is thought to have originated from a New York patrolman, Peter Hart,
who is believed to have saved the Union flag from the first hostilities of
the American Civil War at Fort Sumter. Other accounts suggest that the
island’s name refers to hart or male deer, as deer were once abundant
on the island.
Although I do not claim to have any personal connection to Hart Island it
seems somehow fitting to have an emotional claim to it because it’s
where New York buries its unclaimed dead: by current accounts, about 170
bodies a week (mostly paupers). This grisly task is reserved for prisoners
from nearby Riker’s Island, who are paid less than a dollar an hour to
sweat and shuffle in the muddy ground. Hart Island is a place of strangers.
It is a place where the unwanted are laid to rest and where the forgotten are
buried under forgetfulness. It’s where mistakes and regrets hold equal
weight with obscurity.
First purchased by the government for $75,000 from the Hunter family in 1869,
Hart Island’s history has been significantly austere. Not only has it
served as a graveyard for 140 years but it has also incarcerated Confederate
prisoners and the crew of a U-boat. It has housed hospital and medical units
for yellow fever victims, women with tuberculosis, a home for impoverished
old men and male derelicts, as well as being a narcotics rehabilitation
centre. The island has also been home to an insane asylum, a reformatory, a
disciplinary barracks for the navy and coastguard, and a US army missile
base. Today you need special permission to visit Hart Island and the
Department of Corrections ferry is the only means of transport.
When I think of Hart Island since my father’s death I am reminded of
the intrinsic relationship humans have with the earth and in turn how
language strengthens this relationship. We describe people as being down to earth, the salt of the earth or scum
of the earth. We unearth things from places that are hard to find or from
less readily accessible information. We dig deep for charity or dig to poke
at or tease. We dig up dirt on someone. We bury the hatchet for resolution
and bury thoughts in the backs of our minds.
Death is an uncomfortable topic and our society has a habit of hiding it
under a veil of politeness. We focus on the living and on grief and loss but
the explicitness of death is largely unspoken despite the fact that death is
universal. Death is perhaps the only thing we can be sure of, what happens to
our bodies after death is less certain.
Over the last 140 years more than 830,000 bodies have been buried on Hart Island
and it has the dubious honour of being the most tightly packed cemetery in
North America. It is also one of the few burial grounds in the world that is
kept exclusively for the nameless dead. Each plot resembles something more
like a pit as pine box coffins are buried three across. Each plot holds up to
100 adult coffins or 1000 infant ones that are the size of pillows. Plots are
re-excavated every twenty-five years to make room for more dead. Such
statistics are confronting and cannot sit comfortably among our sanitised
notions of death. To read of Hart Island is to face death head on and come
away perplexed at the futility of it. To be reminded of just how sharp and
hard the world is.
When a business or an idea fails we describe it as being dead and buried. There is a process of moving on and therefore
forgetting about it. We presume that through the act of symbolic burial we
are able to forget, but in turn we fear for ourselves because being buried
within the earth is to be truly lost without remembrance.
Sometimes, however, through burial there is discovery. The Hungarian poet
Miklós Radnóti was shot dead in 1944 on a forced march after
being held as a Jew in various forced labour battalions. When his body was
exhumed in 1945 a notebook of poems was found in his raincoat that detailed
his life during the war and these poems now stand as powerful testaments to
the conditions he and his fellow prisoners endured while deconstructing the
Bor–Belgrade railway line:
Among
false rumours and worms, we live here: with Frenchmen, Poles,
Heretic Serbs, loud Italians, nostalgic Jews, in the
mountains.
This feverish body – dismembered, but still
living one life – waits
For good news, for women’s sweet words, for a
life both free and human,
And the end plunged into obscurity, and miracles.
– ‘The Seventh Eclogue’, trans. C.
Wilmer & G. Gömön, in D. Graham (ed.),
Poetry of the Second World War: An International Anthology (London,
1995),
pp. 144–5.
Burial can also mean alleviation of emotional pain for the grieving. Ancient
Greeks, Romans and Hebrews would cry into small vials, or lachrymatories,
that would then be sealed and buried with the dead. Left distraught by his
wife’s suicide in 1862, the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti
buried his manuscripts with her. When my own cousin committed suicide her
family and friends wrote letters to her and placed them in her coffin,
allowing their expressions of love to be buried beside her.
I don’t know how my father’s funeral was conducted as I was told
of his death six weeks after the event. I can’t give an account of the
people who attended or of the words spoken at the service. I do not know what
type of flowers perfumed the air or what the messages of condolence said on
each of the bouquets or wreaths. I can’t imagine the choice of music
played when the pallbearers picked up my father’s coffin and moved
slowly through the church and past the mourners. I do not know what kind of
day it was in Perth or at what time the funeral was held. I imagine it was a
sunny day, although I could be wrong. Before my father died I did not
understand how some people can use their death and their dying as a final
punishment.
It is conventionally taboo to speak ill of the dead, and it is customary to
praise the recently departed. For some it is even seen as fitting to glorify
them excessively. The death notices that appeared in the West Australian for my father included words like inspirational,
wonderful, one of nature’s gentlemen, one of life’s super human
beings, a great guy, a truly lovely man, loyal, loving and an outstanding
father – a man who lived for his family. My mother’s family,
needless to say, came to have a completely different picture of him.
In the death notices his two children from a second marriage thanked him for
always being there for them. Both my sister and I were not mentioned in any
notice, despite having contact with his brother and sister. The words used
distorted history and censored us. My father, already a stranger to me,
became even more of one.
When we think of death in nature we often think of renewal. New Age
practitioners prefer burial for environmental reasons so that bodies can go
back to the earth to nurture new life. In the United Kingdom woodland burial
is becoming a popular choice and it is now quite common for these burials to
dispense with the conventional coffin and use biodegradable body bags or
boxes. Body bags are decorated by the mourners with ribbons, sequins and
messages. They become a unique cocoon for the dead and this allows the
mourners to be physically closer to the dead. When the funeral ends it is
customary to plant a young tree over the body, not only as a reminder of the
loved one but as a secondary gift to the earth.
In India, the Zoroastrians believe the body to be a shell and after death the
corpse is arranged in an open tower where vultures come to feed. Similarly,
the biologist William Donald Hamilton organised for his body at his passing
to be shipped off to the Amazon and placed inside a specially made cage to
allow the giant horned Brazilian beetle to eat through his dead flesh.
‘I will leave a sum in my last will,’ began Hamilton’s
request, ‘for my body to be carried to Brazil and to these forests. It
will be laid out in a manner secure against the possums and the vultures just
as we make our chickens secure; and this great Coprophanaeus beetle will bury
me. They will enter, will bury, will live on my flesh; and in the shape of
their children and mine.’
Hamilton’s wish is not so dissimilar to what goes on underground. Human
decomposition depends largely on the environmental conditions a corpse finds
itself in. Our bodies naturally start to break down from the moment death
occurs and decomposition is well under way by the time burial or cremation
takes place. Decomposition on land occurs twice as fast as when a body is
under water and four times as fast as underground. Corpses are generally
preserved longer in deeper graves.
The body’s own breakdown begins with the intestines that are packed
with micro-organisms that don’t die with the person. They start to
break down the dead cells of the intestines, while some, especially bacteria
called clostridia and coliforms, begin invading other parts of the body.
While this is happening the rest of the body undergoes change through the
action of enzymes. The pancreas, for example, which is filled with digestive
enzymes, begins rapidly to digest itself.
The decaying tissues release green substances and gases that make the
body’s skin green-blue in appearance. Blistering begins at the abdomen
and steadily moves over the body’s contours. The front of the body
swells and the tongue may protrude. Fluid from the lungs begins to seep from
the mouth and nostrils. This unpleasant sight is accompanied by a terrible
smell as gases such as hydrogen sulphide, methane and traces of mercaptans
are released. Hair, nails and teeth become detached within weeks and after a
month or so tissues liquefy.
If we choose burial a coffin slows this process and the body generally
remains identifiable for many months. Tissues such as tendons and ligaments
are more resistant to decay, while the uterus and prostate glands last even
longer. But within a year all that is usually left is the skeleton and teeth,
with traces of the tissues on them. This does depend largely on the type of
soil the body is buried in. Remains generally last considerably longer in
clay, where the lack of air slows the breakdown of the body. In stony ground,
however, rapid disintegration occurs, not only for the body in question but
for the coffin as well, which has been known to completely disintegrate
within two years.
It can take forty to fifty years for bones to become dry and brittle inside a
coffin and they can last for hundreds of years depending on the type of soil.
Remains believed to be those of the East Anglian king, Raedwald, excavated in
1939 at Sutton Hoo, are almost 1400 years old. Raedwald was buried inside a
27-metre-long ship in approximately 625 AD and its imprint still remains although
the wood has since disintegrated. The Sutton Hoo archaeological site has
recently uncovered a warrior from the same period who was buried in full
armour with his faithful horse beside him. The horse, fully harnessed, was
stretched out almost into a gallop. Many other creatures inhabit the earth
with our bodies. Not all of them are sacrificed like the warrior’s
horse and not all of them are menacing, but rather they live alongside human
remains without harm or hindrance.
On a journey to south-western Victoria I visited the small cemetery at Tower
Hill. The Tower Hill Cemetery is located on the highway between Warrnambool
and Port Fairy against the gentle slope of an extinct volcano. All awash with
faded headstones and Celtic crosses, this historic cemetery is home to
numerous rabbits and there are many rabbit holes situated at the older
graves. When I meandered through the untidy avenues of graves I imagined
these shy and unseen animals burrowing past and living with the brittle old
bones of my maternal ancestors.
Wombats also have dealings with skeletons, although their associations are
strictly with their own kind. If a wombat takes possession of a burrow in
which the previous owner has died, it stubbornly buries or pushes out the
remains during its ‘renovations’. My father is buried in the
Roman Catholic lawn area at Karrakatta Cemetery in Perth, having converted to
Catholicism to marry my mother. I imagine no rabbits or wombats, only the
quiet earth.
Up until the middle of the twentieth century the vast majority of people in
Western societies were buried but a steep rise in the popularity of cremation
during the 1960s and 1970s dramatically reduced this figure. Cremation became
a preferred choice because of fears of possible overcrowding in cemeteries
but its efficiency also supported our ever increasing need to sanitise death
and the disposal of the dead. In many ways the Western style of cremation
assists in our disentanglement from nature. Unless a person’s ashes are
scattered this type of disposal removes the remains from nature’s
equation.
The attractiveness of cremation during the last forty years may be reflected
by the fact that I have only been to one burial in my lifetime. I found this
experience very different from witnessing cremation. There is something more
brazen about a coffin being lowered into the earth instead of being swept
behind a velvet curtain or lowered into a shallow platform of fabric. Burial
is more confronting and appears more eternal. The earth looks cold and
uninviting and the standard “six feet under” measurement appears
a lot deeper than I had imagined it would be. When the coffin does finally
stop its trudge down into the earth there seems to be something final about
it.
Karrakatta Cemetery is a long way from Hart Island but the symbolism still
exists for me. It reconfirms that we all die alone but some of us are lucky
enough to be remembered. It reminds me that some things in life are
unbendable. It clarifies obstinacy in human nature. It confirms that life
likes untidy endings. Because I have never been to Hart Island, my imagined
island is more desolate and wind-swept than the real island. It is barren
except for what lies underneath. The Hart Island of my mind lives in a
perpetually chilled Dickensian day.
For a time after my father’s death I favoured descriptions like
‘laying to rest’ and ‘burying the past’. One of the
numerous white witch spells that have floated into modern sensibilities
involves writing a wish on a piece of paper and burying it in the earth to
allow this seed to take hold and be realised. Some months later I planted an
ornamental weeping birch in a new garden bed I had made a small distance from
my kitchen window and during the New Year festivities I buried my own note in
it. It was a symbolic gesture of burying the past to enable me to move on. It
was a simple note to myself and to my confessor, the earth, which decomposed
my words and my meanings into renewal for both the tree’s future and
for mine. Even so, the earth will go on holding the knowledge of my
intentions. We have an understanding.
There are other similar practices associated with the earth, such as an old
remedy to alleviate anxiety that requires sufferers to carry a small pouch of
soil on their person. The earth nurtures as well as nourishes, and the earth
takes back. An endless state of birth, death and rebirth goes on beneath our
feet.
Published as
‘Human Remains’ in Meanjin
(Issue 1, 2004).
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Last updated: 10 September 2009
Copyright ©
Libby Hart
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