Go to Every Funeral

The Mandate

In a small cafe in Newark, New Jersey, about twenty-five years ago, a mother pointed at her college-age daughter, tapped the table with her finger, and said: "Go to every funeral. Even if you don't want to. Even if you don't know them. If you know the people around them, you go." The daughter nodded the nod designed to end a conversation rather than affirm its content. The mother was not finished. She said funerals are not for the dead. They are for the living. You do not go for yourself. You go for the people who are suffering. It will be remembered. You will be thanked.

That was it. Ninety seconds. Six words that contained everything. And the question they produced has not stopped: Why did nobody ever say that to me? Why did a stranger in a Newark cafe know something about grief that my entire education and upbringing and culture had failed to teach me? This book is the result of twenty-five years of carrying those words through the deaths of the people I loved and trying to understand why they were true.

The Structure

The book unfolds in six parts and seventeen chapters, with a Prologue and Epilogue. Part One, The Biology of Grief, begins in the body, where grief activates the same neural circuitry as physical pain, and moves through the animal kingdom, where elephants stand vigil over their dead and crows gather in formations that researchers can only call funerals. Part Two, The History of Grief, traces how death moved from the domestic parlor to the corporate funeral home and how grief was managed, suppressed, and overwhelmed by mass death from the 1918 pandemic to COVID-19. Part Three, The Culture of Grief, examines mourning practices across the globe, from Irish keening to Torajan ma'nene' to Ghanaian fantasy coffins to the jazz funerals of New Orleans.

Part Four, The Economy of Grief, follows the money through the American funeral industry, the weaponization of grief by media and the state, and the ancient commerce of immortality from the pyramids to the modern cemetery. Part Five, The Permission of Grief, asks who is allowed to grieve and who is told to stop, examining the suppression of children's grief, gendered grief, bereavement leave, the DSM-5-TR's pathologization of prolonged grief, disenfranchised grief, and parasocial mourning. Part Six, The Weight of the World, is the most personal: the death of Jack the Cat, my closest working companion for fifteen years, and the anticipatory grief of loving someone who is still alive and who will one day not be here.

Table of Contents

Part One: The Biology of Grief — What the Body Already Knows · The Elephant at the Bones · The Dry Eye

Part Two: The History of Grief — The Viewing Room · The Uncountable Dead · The Afterlife of Grief

Part Three: The Culture of Grief — The Whole World Mourns · The Grammar of Mourning

Part Four: The Economy of Grief — The Price of the Casket · Grief as Weapon · The Purchase of Immortality

Part Five: The Permission of Grief — Cry Later · Allow Her to Have Her Grief · The Ringing Telephone · Disenfranchised

Part Six: The Weight of the World — The Writing Partner · The Grammar Holds

Prologue: The Mandate · Epilogue: The Visitor Book · Acknowledgments · Selected Bibliography · About the Author

The Epigraphs

"We lost a good man. My father was a good man."

"Howard, there are not enough of them."

— Howard Stein and Mark Van Doren, Columbia University

"Go to every funeral. Even if you don't want to. Even if you don't know them. If you know the people around them, you go."

— Overheard in a cafe in Newark, New Jersey

"EYES+FOR+FOR?" — American Sign Language: If you have eyes, you can use them to look.

A Note on the Free PDF

A book about the obligation to show up should be available to anyone willing to show up for it. The free PDF is a fully formatted US Letter reading edition with embedded fonts and the complete text. Download it, read it, share it. If the argument holds, it should circulate freely. If it does not hold, it should be freely available to be contested.

Dedication

For Janna, who taught me what grief looks like in the hands.

And for Marshall, who made the call.