Death’s Summer Coat

There are many different death and mourning rituals the world over and those rituals have even changed over time within various societies. There are also societies and cultures who lost their usual ritual and made up a new one. In this book, Brandy Schillace covers the historically changing and culturally diverse ways that human beings deal with death, talk about death, regard death, fight with death, and just about everything that humans have done related to death. She mostly addresses the changing commerce with death through our western history, but also uses examples from other cultures to inform how we view this most taboo of topics. In the West, we maintain a sanitized interaction with death and our modern medical practices tend to keep death at arms length and view it as the bad guy, the thing to be avoided at all costs. The author weaves some of her personal history into the narrative, using herself as an example of both what to do and perhaps what not to do. The reader learns how death was treated completely differently in Victorian times and earlier. We hear about things that we would consider gross in out modern society, such as the Victorian tradition of posing with a dead body made up to look alive - Memento Mori photography. Schillace covers an astonishing number of topics related to death. She devotes a whole section to the treatment of dead bodies. Among the topics are embalming, the funeral parlor industry, medical cadaver disection, grave robbing, and how much bodies are made a part of every day life in some cultures, and more. This book is a fun and easy read that will familiarize you with death culture through the ages and across continents. I learned quite a bit and I appreciate how well the author approaches a tender topic.