Cremation

Thursday

Stuart Jeffries

The architects redesigning death

Unesco doesn’t hand out world-heritage status to absences, but if it did, there would be memorials all over the western world to our genius in erasing death from our consciousness. We have airbrushed the deceased from our lives with a ruthless efficiency, banishing them to suburban cemeteries where they can spend eternity unvisited. Burials and cremations are today spiritless, functional affairs, death rituals perfunctory, public grieving rare, graves unworthily negligible or unspeakably vulgar, our wakes pretexts to get drunk and obliterate the memory of what just happened. I exaggerate, but not much. The Maltese architect Anthony Bonnici wants to change all that.

Tuesday

Genevieve Gaunt

A cremation caper: Stealing Dad, by Sofka Zinovieff, reviewed

Sophocles’s Antigone is a battle over the burial of a body and the war between law and divinity. What rules – the decree of a king or conscience? This is the crux of Sofka Zinovieff’s Stealing Dad. When Alekos, a Greek sculptor, is struck down in 2018 by a heart attack and drowns in a London canal, he leaves behind not just a spiky widow, Heather, but seven children and five colourful ex-wives. The children find it hard to imagine that his death could be so mundane: more fitting would have been ‘swimming the Hellespont or shredded by sharks’. Alekos is a ‘Zorba-like figure’ whose selfishness has caused chaos: ‘the human collateral damage consisted of furious women, abandoned offspring and wounded spirits’.

Wednesday

Teresa Mull

The problem facing US cemeteries

From our US edition

On a hillside on the outskirts of my town is an expansive cemetery where more than 20,000 of Philipsburg’s ancestors have been laid to rest since 1869. For decades, its thirty or so acres have been cared for by three dedicated men who dig and fill graves, mow and trim the grass, repair equipment, patch and plow roads, maintain old headstones and gather leaves “for next to nothing,” as Paul Springer puts it. This work must “go on constantly,” says Paul, but changes in the mores surrounding death mean “generating the income necessary to support these activities is becoming impossible.” Paul is my friend and one of those indispensable do-ers small towns across the country rely on to keep things ticking.

cemeteries