{"id":14892,"date":"2014-02-08T17:21:07","date_gmt":"2014-02-08T23:21:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/?p=14892"},"modified":"2015-03-13T15:00:39","modified_gmt":"2015-03-13T21:00:39","slug":"looking-the-dead-in-the-face","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/2014\/02\/looking-the-dead-in-the-face\/","title":{"rendered":"Looking the Dead in the Face"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

In December, 1960, a detachment of French Foreign Legion paratroopers killed three FLN rebels thought to be former harkis,<\/em> or colonial soldiers, who had deserted to the enemy. To help military intelligence identify the dead men, Legionnaires beheaded the corpses \u2014 with a pen knife \u2014 and presented the heads to an officer, who photographed them. Once emptied of strategic value, the heads were thrown into the bushes. <\/p>\n

During lunch that day, Simon Murray, one of the two assigned to decapitation detail, witnessed \u201ca scene that I will recall to my dying day with a shudder\u201d:<\/p>\n

\u2026one of the Spaniards, with a mighty guffaw, reached into the cauldron and pulled out by the hair one of the heads, which he had retrieved from the bushes\u2026the Spaniard stood there with the ghastly head dripping soup, dangling by the hair from his outstretched hand, while the German, standing aghast and white as a sheet, froze for a second and promptly turned and threw up.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cI must confess,\u201d Murray adds, \u201cI laughed like hell.\u201d<\/p>\n

A certain senior from Limestone County, Alabama\u2019s Clements High School would probably have laughed, too.<\/a> On a field trip to the University of Alabama Birmingham\u2019s biology department, the student posed, smiling, next to a cadaver slated for dissection, snapped a selfie, and posted the photo on Snapchat. For this breach of common decency \u2014 not to mention UAB rules against bringing recording devices on the tour and removing sheets from cadavers \u2014 she now faces punishment.<\/p>\n

Punishing the student is only right and just. But should we be surprised? Macabre humor is as old as death itself. Much as the dead deserve our respect, they have a way of scaring us to the point where we\u2019ll shirk that obligation in order to reassure ourselves that we\u2019re us, and they\u2019re them. This isn\u2019t to suggest that the sight of mortal human remains can turn anyone into a fifth-rate prop comic, but it does seem to have that effect with a certain regularity. <\/p>\n

Stories abound of medical students who play pranks with cadavers, or in many cases with disembodied parts thereof. The most lurid among these tales are probably urban legends, but some must be true. In The Dressing Station: A Chronicle of War and Medicine,<\/a><\/em> surgeon Jonathan Kaplan recalls that his training at the University of Cape Town included laughing \u201cat the old practical jokes involving cadaver fingers slipped into the lunchboxes of the unsuspecting.\u201d In After We Die: The Life and Times of the Human Cadaver,\u201d<\/em><\/a> Norman Cantor writes: \u201cHumorous photos, cartoons, and jokes about anatomy labs appeared in medical school yearbooks until the mid-1970s.\u201d For \u201cskittish\u201d medical students, says The Encyclopedia of Death and Dying,<\/em><\/a> even trading apocryphal stories of pranks serves as a \u201ctest of one another\u2019s proper emotional preparation\u201d for the task of dissecting a dead human body. <\/p>\n

One student in a gross anatomy class at Indiana University School of Medicine Northwest is said to have named his cadaver \u201cMercedes,\u201d because, in his words, \u201cshe\u2019s going to enable me to purchase a bunch of Mercedes.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the dead, then, we living are a tough room to play. On one end the spectrum, you have the Legionnaires, made into callous clowns by overexposure (and imminent danger); on the other, you have the Alabama high-schooler, and even some future healers, reduced to defensive japery by the awful exoticism of it all. <\/p>\n

If anyone represents the golden mean, where reverence balances comfort, it\u2019s people like Reshma Memon Yaqub,<\/a> who describes the experience of helping to wash the body of a distant relative. It is her first washing, and Yaqub confesses to feeling, during the preliminaries, \u201ctrapped in one of those old \u201cI Love Lucy\u201d episodes, where Lucille Ball finds herself stomping grapes or smuggling cheese.\u201d But she ghazis<\/em> up, taking charge of the feet. Even as she participates, Yaqub finds herself able to step back and observe, remarking, \u201cThere is so much gentleness, so much privacy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Along with character, Yaqub has culture on her side. In Islamic tradition, washing the dead is held in high esteem, and comes with a great reward \u2014 the remission of 40 \u201cgreat sins.\u201d Etiquette is spelled out with foolproof precision: \u201cNot only is [the body] to stay covered at all times, but the washers are to remain forever silent about anything negative or unusual they may witness \u2014 for example, if there is an unexpected scar, or deformity, or tattoo.\u201d From death till burial, the body is never unattended.<\/p>\n

But this goes against the general drift of Western funerary practice. Home wakes and home viewings are out, along with mourning jewelry and postmortem keepsake photographs. We now prefer to entrust the disposal of our dearly departed to professionals, who live up that title by being competent and obliging \u2014 but finally impersonal. When it emerged that Rick and Karen Santorum had brought home the body of their prematurely-born son, Gabriel, as a memento mori<\/em> for their living children, Alan Colmes found it inexplicable. Maybe Rilke wasn\u2019t afraid to look the dead in the face, but plenty of people these days are, and proud to say so. <\/p>\n

I can\u2019t think of that high schooler\u2019s vicious joke without recalling my own reaction to the news that my father\u2019s body had gotten a proper tahara,<\/em> or Jewish ritual purification, thanks to some Chabad members who happened, providentially, to be vacationing nearby. It was this: Better them than me.<\/em> Between my shudder and her smirk there may be ground, but it ain\u2019t much. <\/p>\n

But the student\u2019s punishment might mark a new priority in medical education: to turn out the most respectful body-handlers our country\u2019s ever seen. Medical school faculties now hold ceremonies honoring the people<\/a> who have donated their bodies to science. Some meet the donors\u2019 families. Yale students are encouraged to prepare for the closing festivities by creating \u201cprose, poetry and other art reflecting on their dissection experience.\u201d Given the alternatives, who says a little sensitivity training is a bad thing? <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In December, 1960, a detachment of French Foreign Legion paratroopers killed three FLN rebels thought to be former harkis, or colonial soldiers, who had deserted to the enemy. To help military intelligence identify the dead men, Legionnaires beheaded the corpses \u2014 with a pen knife \u2014 and presented the heads to an officer, who photographed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":192,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1011,1007,361,1010,119,1017,132,1016,863,952,1013,1006,1012,300,1009,1015,1005,224],"class_list":["post-14892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-alan-colmes","tag-algerian-war","tag-death","tag-gabriel-santorum","tag-islam","tag-jonathan-kaplan","tag-judaism","tag-karen-santorum","tag-medicine","tag-military","tag-norman-cantor","tag-rainer-maria-rilke","tag-reshma-memon-yaqub","tag-rick-santorum","tag-santorum","tag-simon-murray","tag-snapchat","tag-technology"],"yoast_head":"\nLooking the Dead in the Face<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" 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