There's discussion of the Mexican concern for giving the dead a 'good send-off', the Australian Aborigines' Sorry Time, taxidermy, relics, repression, and the role of the media. Inga Clendinnen is a prize-winning historian and an enticing essayist. Intimacy is an important aspect of the discourse. There was a beautiful dead parrot on our lawn and I was going to ask a bolder member of the family to bury it. Reading The Penguin Book of Death with its many instances of bravely looking death in the eye encouraged me to be less squeamish and do it myself.
Death is a dare, many of the authors suggest, a test of physical proximity.
And even if the reasons are different, wearing someone else's skin is of the same order of 'feeling' death as the New York confessionalist Kathryn Harrison's rummaging through her grandmother's ashes. She licks the 'fine grey dust' off her fingers. And Gabrielle Carey has great fun describing the menu for the Mexican ritual of the Day of the Dead, which includes corpse-shaped bread rolls sprinkled with pink sugar. This reminds me of my own venture into a Verdun confectionery to buy a Mars bar, only to be confronted with an enormous selection of chocolate grenades and other edible weaponry. Eating death gives new meaning to the idea of near-death experiences.