Mourning Customs

Much of the following transcription comes from an earlier broadcast of this episode – our interview with Kate Sweeney was a new segment for this 2014 broadcast, and is newly transcribed.

NARRATOR: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory, with the American Backstory hosts.

BRIAN: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh and I’m here with Peter Onuf.

PETER: Hey Brian.

BRIAN: And Ed Ayers is with us.

ED: Hi Brian.

BRIAN: So I’m looking at a few pages here from the kind of book that I think you guys really could have benefited from had you been alive when it was published. It was from the year 1881. And it’s called, hold your breath, Our Deportment: or The Manners, Conduct, And Dress Of The Most Refined Society; including forms for letters, invitations, et cetera, et cetera, also, valuable suggestions on home culture, and training.

ED: I’m sorry Brian, could you repeat that?

BRIAN: Right. Who needs to read the book when you finish the title? Anyway, this was basically a guide book for etiquette. A genre that proliferated in the late 19th century, when the middle and upper classes in the US became well, kind of obsessed with manners. They prescribed a whole range of behaviors for social decorum, including what to do when people close to you die.

So for instance, if your husband dies, you’re supposed to wear mourning clothes for at least two years. The first of those years going heavy in the black wool department. And in the second year, moving to a little more silky with a somewhat shorter veil.

It goes on to describe in incredible detail mourning rules for parents, siblings, even friends who leave you an inheritance.

KATE SWEENEY: There were rules for every one. In one place, I saw rules for the second wife of a man whose first wife’s parents had died.

BRIAN: This is Kate Sweeney, a reporter in Atlanta who got very interested, as you can tell, a few years ago in death.

KATE SWEENEY: I’m a pretty cheerful person, I’m not really the sort who hangs out in cemeteries wearing crushed Velvet and smoking clove cigarettes.

BRIAN: But she did notice how little people around her seem willing to talk about the inevitable fact of life’s end, until it was too late. She ended up writing a book about death and mourning. One thing she discovered in her research was how different things looked back in that earlier era when grieving was the fact of everyday life and didn’t need to be hidden from the people around you.

KATE SWEENEY: Maybe if you acted a little wacko or a little off, it was sort of the one time you were excused from it. I mean, you were in mourning, and you were in this sort of special time in your life. But you weren’t really a part from society, you were still part of it.

BRIAN: And what surprised Kate was how suddenly all that changed.

KATE SWEENEY: One etiquette guide that I found by this woman named Lillian Eisler from 1923, really struck me especially because it said the rules now emphasize a lack of dramatic demonstration of grief, as if grief is just another fashion. And grieving 20 years ago looked like this, but today we’re not doing that anymore because we are sophisticated.

BRIAN: That’s so 19th century.

KATE SWEENEY: So 19th century. This book went so far as to urge people who couldn’t quote “control their grief” to avoid their friends for fear of making those friends uncomfortable. And even maybe to avoid the funeral if you thought you were going to have sort of this emotional outpouring that was inappropriate now.

NARRATOR: With the growing taste for privacy and simplicity, many of the foolish demonstrations of grief expressed in outward display have been eliminated. For people are beginning to realize that it is not so much a manifestation of grief, as a display of vanity.

BRIAN: I asked Kate what accounted for this dramatic shift? One reason was that by the 20th century, people were simply living a lot longer. Germ theory and other advances in medicine were making common diseases a lot less deadly. And the staggering carnage of the Civil War was fading from people’s memories.

What had been impossible to avoid 50 years earlier, was increasingly becoming well, avoidable. Especially because more and more people were spending their final days in the hospital. Death was leaving the home.

KATE SWEENEY: One example that I think reflects this change in a really major way centers around a room in the home called the parlor. It was a room for all stages of life. So you might court your sweetheart in the parlor, you might get married in the parlor. And then you could expect to have your funeral in the parlor once life was over.

BRIAN: Sweeney told me that standalone funeral businesses, which were starting to emerge in this period, made this savvy move of calling their businesses funeral parlors to gain the trust of people used to watching their loved ones die at home. And at the very same time, real parlors were beginning to seem a little outdated, maybe even gloomy.

KATE SWEENEY: And so at one point in the 19-teens, homemaking magazines actually decried this gloomy room and said, we’re going to rename the parlor the living room. We’re going to declare this new room–

BRIAN: As in not dying.

KATE SWEENEY: As in not dying. Like, could you please be any more crystal clear about what you’re trying to say here.

BRIAN: That is amazing. That is just amazing.

KATE SWEENEY: We’re going to move away from this idea of this Victorian Age of everybody having bric-a-brac everywhere and these airless rooms with no light in them, we’re going to have the living room. And what I think is kind of interesting is that funeral businesses themselves kind of followed suit. You don’t see very many funeral parlors anymore.

They became funeral homes.

BRIAN: Right. Why have a parlor when you can have an entire home.

KATE SWEENEY: You could have the whole home. And then now-a-days, you’re likely to see funeral services. So it’s ever more distant from this idea of being home. And sort of more professional and buttoned up, and we’re pro’s, we’re going to take care of it and we’re going to take it out of your life.

Brian: That’s Kate Sweeney, she’s the author of American Afterlife: Encounters in the Customs of Mourning.