We are shocked to discover from Jan Mayman that the current life expectancy of Australian Aborigines is fifty years. And heartened by the mix of personal and professional respect for the body after death as it is expressed in the piece called 'Embalming Father' by Thomas Lynch, an American poet and undertaker. Much of the information pertains to the adequacy or inadequacy of customary responses to death. 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.