Letters to the Deaditor

Dear Mr. Blackwood, You are defending an artifact of grief at its most honest and most human. Victorian hair art — known as "hairwork" — reached its zenith between 1840 and 1900, driven in part by Queen Victoria's own forty-year mourning for Prince Albert. Hair was considered the most intimate and imperishable part of a person: it outlasted the flesh, retained its color and texture for decades, and could be held, braided, and woven into forms that gave grief something tangible to do. The wreath you describe represents not morbidity but extraordinary maternal love expressed through extraordinary labor. Your great-great-grandmother spent weeks, perhaps months, weaving the hair of her dead children into a form that would outlast her own grief. It is, in the truest sense, a monument. What you are defending is the right of grief to leave a physical record. Tell your cousins that the Victoria and Albert Museum holds an entire gallery of such objects, and that scholars travel from three continents to study them. Yours in perpetual curiosity, Mortimer A. Grimshaw III

Dear Miss Fontenot, Not only common — it is one of the oldest burial practices in human history. The practice of interring the dead with the objects that defined their living identity stretches back at least 40,000 years. Neanderthal burial sites show evidence of grave goods including tools and pigments. Egyptian pharaohs were buried with everything they might need in the afterlife, from sandals to entire boats. Viking warriors went to their pyres with their swords. Medieval monks were buried with their quill pens. The logic is consistent across cultures and millennia: the objects that constituted a person's identity in life should accompany them into whatever comes next. Your grandmother's recipe box was not merely a collection of instructions — it was the physical record of forty years of feeding people she loved, of adjusting her gumbo until it was exactly right, of being the person her family gathered around. Your aunt called it wasteful. I call it theologically precise. Yours in perpetual curiosity, Mortimer A. Grimshaw III

Dear Mr. Crane, You are, in fact, practicing the original and correct use of a cemetery. The word "cemetery" derives from the Greek koimeterion — a sleeping place — and the earliest Christian burial grounds were explicitly designed as spaces for the living as well as the dead. Medieval churchyards served as markets, meeting places, and playgrounds. The great Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, opened in 1804, was designed as a public garden and was immediately popular as a promenade destination for Parisians who had no deceased relatives there whatsoever. The idea that cemeteries should be solemn, exclusive spaces for grief is largely a 19th-century American invention, driven by the Rural Cemetery Movement and its romantic notion of death as something to be sequestered from daily life. Savannah, with its characteristic disregard for Northern fashions, simply never adopted this convention. Your ancestors were right. Eat your lunch. Pet the dogs. The 18th-century residents of Colonial Park Cemetery would have found nothing strange about it. Yours in perpetual curiosity, Mortimer A. Grimshaw III

Dear Mr. Finch, You have independently discovered what the Death Café movement's founder, Jon Underwood, discovered in 2011: that the appetite for honest conversation about mortality is enormous, and almost entirely unsatisfied by modern culture. The historical answer to your question is that death became difficult to discuss in the 20th century for a confluence of reasons: the medicalization of dying (which moved death from the home to the hospital, making it invisible), the rise of the funeral industry (which professionalized grief and removed it from the community), and the post-war optimism that treated death as a problem to be solved rather than a fact to be accepted. For most of human history, death was a domestic event. People died at home, were washed and laid out by family members, and were mourned in communal rituals that lasted days or weeks. The knowledge of death was distributed throughout the community, not sequestered in hospitals and funeral homes. What you have done, Mr. Finch, is restore a very old practice: the community gathering to speak plainly about the thing that awaits all of us. The fact that sixty people show up monthly suggests the hunger has not diminished — only the permission to feed it. Yours in perpetual curiosity, Mortimer A. Grimshaw III

Dear Miss Hartwell, Strange? On the contrary — you have stumbled upon one of the most psychologically sophisticated mourning traditions in the Western hemisphere. The New Orleans jazz funeral traces its roots to the African mutual aid societies of the 19th century, which organized both the practicalities of burial and the communal processing of loss. The "second line" — the procession of non-family mourners who follow the band — was never meant to be exclusive to the bereaved. It was always a civic act, an assertion that death concerns the whole community, not merely those who share blood with the deceased. Your instinct to attend as a stranger is, in fact, historically correct. The jazz funeral was designed precisely for people like you: those who need to grieve something — anything — in the company of others who understand that grief requires movement, sound, and the particular comfort of a stranger's hand on your shoulder. Go to as many as you like. The trumpet players would approve. Yours in perpetual curiosity, Mortimer A. Grimshaw III