The Cemetery Code II

AS we discussed yesterday, the Victorians were very into hidden meanings and codes. partly because they were utterly repressed and partly because they didn't have TV yet. The days were long, we communicated with each other by the way we held our fans. Directness was not a virtue.

The Victorians created a culture around death. Public mourning, elaborate funerals and huge monuments to the dead were all very popular at this time. If you wanted an enormous monument and they all did - all the better to display the piety and affluence of both the deceased and yourself - white marble was pretty but very soft and not at all weather resistant or you could go with a very hardy but also very hard to carve granite - available in expensive gray, very expensive pink and the most blingy of all, the black amex card of it's day, black granite .The Victorians didn't just have funnerals they staged events. Things got expensive.

So. Manufacturers started to create cheaper alternatives so that you didn't necessarily have to be be affluent to appear affluent. Not everyone could afford all this pomp, but because appearance was everything, cost conscience survivors could purchase a monument such as this one. What do you think this lovely stone appear to be made of?



Not made of stone, it is made of Zinc.

The woman who this remembers died in 1878, it has never had to be cleaned. These monuments don't rust, grow moss or wear down. This form of memorial didn't catch on and in some cases was banned - because many communities and cemeteries saw them as "cheap" . They fell out of favor as WWII began and the industry had to shift to the war effort.

Anyway. Modern Death.

We still die. But, instead of focusing on our deaths, today we prefer to focus on our lives - even in death.

Today's stones are smaller, more uniform and less elaborate. We prefer to spend our money differently, again, focusing more on the living - why spend thousands on a monument when there are grand children who need college funds? This is a huge change from the Victorians where the culture was much more focused on the foreverness of their deaths then on brief lives. Their stones say very little directly about the decedent and mosly quote a handful of mournful scriptures.

Today, we quote anything we want to. We quote ourselves, we quote our loved ones:



And the images and messages we chose can be anything we want



Literally.



We all have to go, maybe not yet.



But some of us will have enjoyed ourselves more than others. Would you rather have your friends stand somberly around your grave and weep or would you prefer when they visit that they remember the good times?



The Victorians did it with more pomp but we do it with more pep.