Funeral Rights
Q We’ve been taking some flak: Is an open-casket funeral sorta hillbilly?
A Death is a many-horned beast that should be given due regard, in the sense of celebrating the life that preceded. But it seems you’ve raised two questions. First, what is , in your parlance? Not to put too fine a blade on this, but even a glance at the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century deluge of Scotch-Irish, English, and. As for an open casket drawing opprobrium, it’s true that any president’s lying in state in the Capitol rotunda is a closed-casket affair, but the ancient tradition of “laying in” the postmortem body is a rigorously open-top thing. I don’t have a dog in that fight, except to say that our pondering Death as attached to a human face is most apt, since the gorgeous weathering and demise of humans is such a part of the natural order. To bring your point home, please tell your critics to redirect their open-casket complaint with two letters. The first should go to the Vatican, urging the College of Cardinals to stop laying the dead popes out in their vestments and to do the decent thing by displaying the pontiffs in caskets. The second letter should go to the Kremlin, because those panes of glass over Lenin are the height of crudeness, and, when you come down to it, celebrating your embalming techniques is such a hillbilly thing to do.
