The seventeen-year-old daughter of a professor of languages suddenly takes ill and dies within three days of a mysterious brain disease.
Unable to get over his grief, her father seeks relief in an extraordinary way: in a blank volume of 120 pages, he enters in exquisite penmanship passages of consolation from the Bible, each page containing a passage rendered in six or seven languages from among English, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Pharsee, German, Arabic, French, Spanish, and Old English.
The volume was one of the remarkable discoveries made by Robert V. Wells, the Chauncey H. Winters Professor of History, who spent more than ten years exploring death in a single community. Now, after visiting hundreds of cemetery plots and combing through thousands of pages of diaries, letters and death certificates, Wells has finished his book, Facing the King of Terrors: Death and Society in an American Community, 1750 to 1990 (Cambridge University Press).
The community that Wells explored is Schenectady, and when he began his research on changing roles and perceptions of death, he expected the project to take only three or four years.
“It ended up that death was more prevalent in the local records than I had expected,” Wells says. “I went to Special Collections in Schaffer Library when I was just getting started, and said, 'Do you have anything here on this topic?' Ruth Ann Evans (associate librarian emerita) suggested the Jonathan Pearson diaries. I ended up taking 137 pages of notes.
“This was symbolic of what I discovered,” he continues. “Expecting to find a little bit, I found a lot, and it took me quite a while to extract it all and make sense of it.”
In the preface to his book, Wells writes, “Most historians … are curiously uninterested in attitudes and practices regarding death. Yet there can be little that is more central to the human condition or that gives greater insight into the central values of any culture than attitudes and behavior when confronted with the most impressive of all transitions: death.”
Although surveys tell us that Americans in large majorities believe in God and an afterlife, one would not guess that from the tenor of scholarly writings about America's ways with death. To historian Geoffrey Gorer, for example, death has replaced sex as the country's great unmentionable subject.
Wells concludes that Americans are not quite the death-deniers they have been made out to be. “We have a vicarious relationship with death,” he says, experiencing it at a distance through television shows, movies, and the news. But, he says, “when the distance is crossed and strikes close to home, we are … frequently at a loss to know how to speak of death in any but the most superficial terms.”
He offers examples of the dwindling over the decades of the feelings and language evoked by death:
When Aaron Mynderse, a pharmacist, loses his first wife in 1824, he writes an anguished series of rhymed couplets, each beginning with a word of despair — “gone!” or “cold!” or “dead!” But when his granddaughter loses her husband exactly a century later, her comments, grief-stricken though she is, have to do mainly with superficial aspects of the death and funeral and are couched in such words as sweet, nice, or peaceful. She and other family members, Wells writes, “had lost the interest or capacity to respond to this most awesome event in anything but a brief and constricted fashion.”
When Herald Tribune reporter Lewis Sebring, who covered the Pacific theater for a while during World War II, writes his parents in Schenectady about the death of Ernie Pyle, he calls it “tough luck but no worse than thousands of others have gone through.” Eighty-one years earlier, on the eve of a Civil War battle, Charles Lewis writes about the arbitrary nature of death on the battlefield yet adds, “But the weaver knows the threads that have done their work and are to be snapped and cut tomorrow.”
When Charles's father, Tayler Lewis, a professor at Union, loses his seventeen-year-old daughter, he produces the volume mentioned above, a combination of elegance, scholarship, faith, and grief nearly unimaginable in the modern world.
Wells is careful not to claim that the diarists and correspondents he found constitute any kind of representative sampling. Still, a reader is struck by how the dwindling in thought and feeling about death seen in the writings seems to reflect the world — a world that has seen a growing dominance of science and medicine relative to religion and the increasing roles of professionals in the death process — doctors, morticians, and social workers.
Wells disagrees that mass violence in this century — particularly the Holocaust and the atomic bomb — has had much effect on the American way of death. The evidence from Schenectady suggests “that American culture was changing in the way it lived with death well before the 1940s. Moreover, it is hard to believe that anxieties about the atomic bomb were dramatically different from those generated by reports of the approach of cholera in 1832.”
Wells, whose earlier research focused on marriage and childbearing, jokes that it was inevitable that he would come to study death. In fact, he says, his own attraction to the topic can be traced to his graduate education at Princeton. “While studying formal demography, I found the demographic and sociological analysis of mortality to combine a mathematical precision regarding the overall patterns of mortality with an equally impressive uncertainty about the moment of death and how it will occur,” he writes in the preface to his book.
For his dissertation topic, however, he turned to a demographic analysis of Quaker records, and he has spent much of his career exploring the cultural and social significance of demographic patterns. Finally, he decided to return to his study of death. The immediate stimulus to study death in Schenectady came from Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle. Vonnegut used the city and its residents as models for the story, and he clearly refers to Vale Cemetery when he describes a cemetery surrounded by the city.
“I began to wonder why so large a piece of land lying in the middle of Schenectady had been devoted to the dead,” Wells writes. (The city expanded to surround what was once a rural cemetery.) “At the time, I simply became curious about the location of Vale and gradually about other aspects of how a community lives with death.”
Besides geographical convenience, Wells found Schenectady an ideal city to study because it had a community dating back to the seventeenth century, an interesting geography that encouraged commerce and settlement, and diverse populations that included French, English, Dutch, Native Americans, and African Americans.
With industrialization, the community's population grew and became more diverse ethnically and religiously. As a result, death and funerals shifted from being public events to being private ones. In 1858, for example, one family displayed the body of a child on their front lawn for some 3,000 mourners, an act that would have been unthinkable only fifty years later. By the turn of the century, death had become private; more people died away from the community, in hospitals, and arrangements were handled by funeral directors in funeral homes.
Wells used public records like death certificates and eight personal diaries to provide insight into attitudes and customs about death. Among the most valuable diaries were those from the Mynderse and Sebring families, which provided insights into individual and family responses to death in the twentieth century. His most exciting discovery? The diary of Civil War veteran Charles Lewis (Tayler's son), who was in Ford's Theatre only a few feet from where Lincoln was shot and who witnessed it all.
Robert V.Wells is the Chauncey H. Winters Professor of History. He has been a fellow at the Charles Warren Center, Harvard, and of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is the author of five previous books, including Revolutions in Americans' Lives: A Demographic Perspective on the History of Americans, Their Families, and Their Society.