Summary Of Brandy Schillace's Death Summer Coat

Throughout Brandy Schillace’s Death Summer Coat she has been bringing up very interesting facts or questions that really make us Westerners question our rituals or ideals towards death. The one that caught my attention the most was in chapter 3: Through a Glass, Darkly. In its subsection The Four-Century Lesson she states, “The wealthy even paid to use that caustic, bacteria-laden soil from mass burials in their own vaults or coffins, as the ability to quickly reduce the body to a skeleton became fashionable… grave-dirt becomes a commodity…” (HHHHH), which just fascinates me because it shows a dramatic shift in ideology. In the beginning of this book and class we talked about how in some ancient cultures the dead were mummified or treated in a way to preserve the body for as long as possible. Then we have this time period in which people specifically chose the dirt they were buried in to lessen the body to bones in considerably less time than normal. In such degree that it literally became a market or industry. In today’s culture, or more specifically our Western culture, we have a drastically different viewpoint. We have gone back to the more ‘ancient’ practices of preserving the body through embalming. We strive to keep our dead in the best
The most apparent is because a change in our ideology. The body is used as a symbol of the memory of the person. This causes us to want to preserve it in order to preserve the memory. We as a culture believe that as long as we have something that can represent the memory of that being we can still have the person in some way. So our first thought is to preserve the corpse, the most personal and apparent symbol of the person. This causes all kinds of methods to keep the body as life like as possible because no one looks at a person and memorizes how their skeleton would