Why Jessica Mitford was wrong

Theology Today, Jan 1999 by Long, Thomas G

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Readers of The American Way of Death were left with the impression that there were only two choices. One could have the funeral-home style ceremony, a plastic, costly funeral with "beautiful memory pictures," slumber rooms, Cadillac coaches, Ever-Last burial vaults, floral tributes, and cosmetically treated, embalmed corpses lying in polished copper caskets. Or one could have the Mitford-style funeral: sane, commonsensical, spare, and economical. No fuss about the body, no floral perfume clogging up the olfactories, no sentimental myths choking the intellect, just a few warm and straightforward remarks from friends at a brief memorial service and a dignified retreat to the normal rhythms of life. If these were indeed the only choices, what sentient, frugal, reasonable, ethical person would not choose Mitford's way?

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But these are not, in fact, the only two options. Indeed, what is often missing in the tug of war between the funeral-home-style service and the Mitford style is a thoughtful consideration of what a funeral-particularly a Christian funeral-could and should be. Obviously, a genuinely Christian funeral is not about the evils that Mitford found so easy to satirize-the vulgar, conspicuous consumption, the mawkish sentiment-but, strangely a Christian funeral is also not primarily about many of the good things that its friends claim for it: the facilitation of grief, helping people to hold on to memories of the deceased, or even to supply pastoral care and comfort to the bereaved. A Christian funeral often provides these things, of course, but none of these is its central purpose. A Christian funeral is nothing less than a bold and dramatic worship of the living God done attentive to and in the face of an apparent victory at the hands of the last enemy. Though the liturgy may be gently worded, there is no hiding the fact that, in a funeral, Christians raise a fist at death; recount the story of the Christ who suffered death, battled death, and triumphed over it; offer laments and thanksgivings to the God who raised Jesus from the grave; sing hymns of defiance; and honor the body and life of the saint who has died.

Thus, one measure of the veracity of a funeral is its capacity to face, without euphemistic smoke and mirrors, the reality of death. Death is, of course, the brute fact that occasions a funeral. Astonishingly, for all her talk about the funerals and the funeral industry, Mitford hardly mentions death at all, not real death. In Mitford's world, people do not die painfully or peacefully, well or poorly, blessedly or tragically, in despair or in trust, nor do those left behind have seasons of grief, memories to be cherished or forgiven, or faithful meaning to be wrested from sorrow, just a series of consumer choices. The American Way of Death and The American Way of Death Revisited cover many topics, but, ironically, death as a human experience, death as a force that robs life, death as a knife that severs bonds of love is not one of them. Mitford jibes and smirks and hurls sarcastic witticisms at the blowhards among the morticians, and some of them, like clowns at a carnival pie-throwing booth, make themselves into easy targets, but one cannot help but see, lurking over her shoulder, the immense and terrifying mortal reality she will not turn to confront. To produce two books about death that do not actually speak of death is so strange, so inexplicable, that the sheer fact of it seems clear confirmation of William May's conviction that the unwillingness to name death betrays a repressed acknowledgment of its fearsome sacral potency. Contemporary people, he argues, "find it difficult to bring the word death to our lips in the presence of its power. This is so because we are at a loss as to how to proceed on the far side of this word. Our philosophies and our moralities desert us. They retreat and leave us wordless."10

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Why Jessica Mitford was wrong

Theology Today, Jan 1999 by Long, Thomas G

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