GRIEF-SPUN WISDOM IN THE DIRT: Of Popular Death Practices

 Still from I Like Dirt. (2021) courtesy of Daniel Zox and Shannon Lee Dawdy

Jeremy (June 2022):  One of my earliest memories of you is a photo in which your feet are in dirt, I think at an archeological dig. Years later, you co-created the film I Like Dirt., about changing American death practices and beliefs, a kind of companion to your recent book, American Afterlives. Can you tell us about your relationship to dirt, where and when it began – and possibly how it has changed, or grown, over the years?

Shannon (November):  Oh, I know the photo you mean! I suppose the reason I posted that picture of my bare feet in the warm mud at the bottom of an excavation unit in New Orleans is that it said a lot about me if you knew how to read it  — that I am sensual, I improvise, I am sometimes socially inappropriate, and that I don’t mind getting dirty while pursuing the life of the mind. More simply, I am an archaeologist.

Archaeology is an embodied knowledge, probably the most so of any of the humanities or social sciences. We build up certain kinds of muscles and eye-hand techniques. And most importantly, we learn how to read dirt. There is an incredible variety to what gets called “dirt” — subtle but meaningful transitions in color and texture. A few inches of dirt can contain several chapters in a story of human and non-human co-making. When I see dirt, I see time – events and processes like abandonment, building, gardening, lazy disposal, market days, the burial of a beloved, hard labor, catastrophic destruction, creative rebuilding, and even the playful celebration of picnics and holidays. It is an oracular practice.

The dirt in New Orleans below the water table in the zone of 300 years ago is soft, soothing, orange-brown clay that smells like coffee you left in a cup and forgot for a generation. That deep level — 2 meters below the surface — is the same depth of a standard grave, something I reflected on when writing American Afterlives, a book about new American death practices. My primary method of research was filmmaking with collaborator and friend Daniel Zox. For the film, I was wrapped in a shroud and placed 6 feet down in a green cemetery in northern California. That dirt was drier and colder than New Orleans dirt. And very hard — like dried halva. It smells like grass and petroleum.

Like a lot of kids, I enjoyed making mud pies. Did you do that? I remember days of intensely focusing on this task when I was 6 or 7, doing it in the back yard of our house – a patch of ground that became muddy water, and then mud, in the perennial disaster of river plain flooding that hit my family several times. The residue of water and dirt left on and in houses made the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which I experienced in all its traumatic intimacy, feel like déjà vu all over again.

I realize, Jeremy, that I’ve answered your question backwards! Starting from the present and going backwards through time. But that’s stratigraphy for you – how archaeologists dig. And think.

Jeremy:  I did not make mud pies, but I used to love smelling the soil coming up from the grass and around trees, especially in the clearings or the woods.  My memories are more from playing soccer in the rain – times hovering in me like small eternities.

I am most interested in your comment about the messiness of the life of the mind.  But if you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you about the messiness of death, of growing, and of interpersonal relationships.  I have an intuition that these do not always sit so well with the life of the mind in academia.  Yet I hardly think that we can be philosophical without them.

What did you learn about death from your film and your book?  How do you think people in our country today are dealing with the messiness of death?  (And did you find that their relationships to death had some homespun wisdom in them?)

Shannon (December):  For many people today, death is messy.  But I see reason to hope. For a long century now, our disposition towards death has been awkward, un-articulatable. For Americans in particular, it became taboo to talk about, even for those who still proclaim a formal religion. If you talked or thought about it too much, you were labeled “morbid.”

In the 1970s, polymath Ernest Becker wrote in The Denial of Death that foreknowledge of our death is what makes us humans all a little neurotic, twisting ourselves into dangerous knots trying to deny its eventuality. He argued that Freud was right about our propensity for internal conflict, but that he focused on the wrong thing (sex). Knowledge of our mortality is what makes a mess of our psyches.

In the last few decades, it has become commonplace to claim that Americans were the supreme deniers. I went into my project ready to believe this. But what I ended up learning is that Americans don’t deny death at all. In some ways, our national culture has been built around a death cult focused on the visuals of death — from our unique embalming-and-viewing practice which dominated 20^th-century practices regardless of faith, to Hollywood’s obsession with violent endings. We confront death.

What we have massively denied is grief. In a complete reversal of Victorian practice, public mourning, and lingering melancholia over the loss of a loved one were repressed in the industrial age. They became seen as pathological. Unfortunately, this cultural belief is still with us via the psychiatric establishment. In 2022, just a few months after my book was published, a new condition called “prolonged grief disorder” was added to the DSM 5. I was amazed, dismayed, and angry.

This professional pathologizing is so out of step with the death innovators I interviewed and the people who are flocking to them. They recognize that it is our alienation from death that is the problem, not a “fixation.” The fast-growing at-home funeral movement is one of the most dramatic and heartening developments in an explosion of new heterodox practices. It brings the dead back into the home. Like a home birth, the idea is that this important rite of passage needs to proceed surrounded by family love and a sense of the naturalness of the transition, not clinical coldness or a sense of crisis. This reborn intimacy with death — the ability to touch, bath, and dress your person, and to talk to them until you are ready to say goodbye – that to me is profoundly progressive. Or rather, a profound return to where we used to be.

I’m not sure I clarified the way in which death messes with our relationships, but I think it is the at-a-lossness that is more the problem than the loss itself: not knowing what to say, what to do, or what to think around death.  Due to the death taboo, there’s a lot of blocked communication between the living and the dying, the living and the dead, and the co-surviving. The frustration of facing something so consequential while feeling inhibited from speaking, doing, or feeling is what I think makes modern grief so very messy.

Yet, as I said, I think all that is changing quickly now through the invention and sometimes retro return of different death practices. And somehow dealing with the messiness of our bodies – and of dirt itself – is a big part of this. The fast-rising popularity of green burial and human composting is both a symptom of, and a process for, a re-calibration with death that secular types in the U.S. and beyond are undergoing right now. I think of it as a quiet revolution of the human spirit.

Ha! That might have been an oblique reference to Hegel. You seemed to wonder if what I learned in my archeological practice was philosophical in a non-academic way. I suppose it was, and that I am philosophical in my own way, though I go through long periods wallowing in immanence. I interviewed a woman for the film named Esmerelda who makes shrouds from natural fabric. She told me “I’m a bad Buddhist.” Recognizing the impossibility of perfection is pretty damn Buddhist. I want to say I’m a bad philosopher. Do you think there’s a parallel?

Jeremy:  That’s so funny.  Hegel focused on the labor of the concept and was elitist.  The Phenomenology was intended as a teaching tool for the intellectually gifted.  But what I hear in your response is philosophy of – coming from – the people.  I also hear your comfort with confusion.  These cohere with Wittgenstein’s admonition to analytic philosophers to look and see, since otherwise they risk taking language (and thinking) “on a holiday” where it no longer speaks to people, doesn’t clarify people’s lives, but instead becomes a kind of exclusive luxury.  Wittgenstein had a bad bias against holidays and was too austere.  Had he ever been to carnevale?  Still, his concern with how social alienation can affect thinking and the discipline of philosophy is important.  Philosophy doesn’t flourish when its practitioners deny their own or others’ humanity, or when people who are supposed to love wisdom end up removed from everyday practice and ordinary people.

In this community sensibility, the practice of family grief you mentioned is most striking as a form of wisdom.  It hits a chord when too many people die alone and when those who outlive them have simply to get on with work, often cut off from support and important relationships.  I wonder, how is family grief wise, and what might it teach us about how to approach life and death philosophically?

But there’s also this:  In I Love Dirt., you had yourself interred.  While that could be read as performance art to some, other folks might recall the tradition of “spiritual exercises” – philosophical ascetics – that are part of living philosophically.  What did you mean to do by being shrouded and buried?  Yet that practice seems quite solitary, too – very different than family grief.  Still, I bet a lot of people could relate to what you did, even if it seemed eerie and surprising.

Your mind seems to probe here: dirt, death, and relationships we form to the most intimate experience of this life.  I’m reminded of the mood aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that your archeology conceptualized, how a clever, unauthored, popular sensibility can help us live with chaos.

Shannon (January 2023): While I like the idea of “homespun wisdom,” I think that family relationships are also the source of our most profound and enduring confusions. Intimacy is a very hard space in which to maintain wisdom. Or at least that is my experience. Your prompt, though, does make me reflect on what I learned from my parents that has translated into my kind of dirty philosophy.

My mom has an axiom that has served me in all kinds of life situations: “keep your options open.” My dad’s version was to always be ready to improvise. I learned that when things aren’t going well, the best response might be to say, “fuck it, let’s play.”

In the middle of a heated family argument he would suddenly pause, get down on the floor, and start rambling around on all fours, growling like a bear. That was a signal for me or my brother to hop on his back and forget about whatever felt important a moment earlier. Or when he lost another job, he’d start packing the car and tell everyone to jump in and we’d go camping. He’d have just a vague direction in mind rather than a destination.

My dad was alive to his senses while having a unique and brilliant mind (though he never went to college). He was loud, he cooked chaotically, he threw himself into labor, he rejoiced in the sights and sounds of nature. He kept the tap to his senses wide open.

This all might sound a little too homespun.  But let me explain how his wisdom matters. My dad taught me the value of improvisation. In making the film, I drove my collaborator Daniel nuts because I didn’t want to write a script or plan things out in too much detail. I wanted things to be open-ended and to be surprised by what we found and by what people had to say. And so, in terms of “philosophical practice” (which I think is a wonderful thing and want to hear what yours is!), the decision to be shrouded and placed in the open grave was one I came to in a snap moment the night before. I didn’t think it through, but I was intensely curious what it would be like.  It turned out to be a surprisingly sensual experience – the sounds, the smells, the sensations against my body were intense.

Phenomenology and existentialism have been very important to my scholarly work (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, de Beauvoir and few well-worn pages of Heidegger that I might understand). This is no accident. I learned from my dad to stay in my body. When I was in the grave, it did not trigger an “out of body” experience at all. Quite the opposite. (Ironically, the filming for the scene suggests one, as Daniel did a dramatic drone shot, pulling out from a close up of my body in the grave up into the air, until the fog swallowed the view.) While you are right that I was alone, my ‘internment’ did not trigger fear or grief for me. It was a profoundly peaceful experience. And that is exactly what happens – death is peaceful for the dead and agonizing for everyone else!

I had another thought regarding your comment on Wittgenstein and where wisdom lies: I stand by my first statement that family life is deeply confusing. As a result, most people could use a little outside help in dealing with grief. Not so much a type of expertise as someone who knows how to practice radical kindness and to firmly guide people towards recognizing their own needs.  

In the course of the death project, I met the wisest person I have ever encountered. Her name is Jerrigrace Lyons. Self-taught, Jerrigrace is a well-recognized leader of the American home funeral movement. She sees her role as coming in and slowing time down and helping families figure out what they want and need. She will provide some options, but she has no rules and invites family members to invent their own healing rituals.

She absolutely loves what she does. She gets most excited when she talks about a time that something surprising happened – an animal appeared at just the right moment in the ceremony, the corpse suddenly smiled, they found a clever way to deal with someone whose body had set into an awkward rigor mortis position, etc. She learns as she goes, she improvises.

Jerrigrace is free of dogma as far as I can tell. She refuses to say what she thinks happens after we die because she wants everyone to find out for themselves. She frequently expresses a sense of wonder and delight about this world — and the next. So, while her role is akin to what priests, ministers, and shamans perform in terms of providing comfort and wisdom in a time of extreme grief, she does it in a completely under-determined way.

Perhaps she is a bad philosopher because there is little consistency or clarity to her beliefs.  But she is also an amazing philosopher because she refuses to get trapped by language –another word for routinized experience! She doesn’t let objects get in the way of things.  

[I am referencing here Heidegger’s distinction between objects (entities we gather, genericize, use, and take for granted through that ultimate tool, language) and things (what exists before and beyond naming, classification, judgment, and routine). I’m taking a lot of liberty here, but “proper mourning” is to me an object in this sense that Jerrigrace’s quiet practice helps undo. Another way to think about it (following Pierre Bourdieau) would be that she models heterodoxy for the people she serves.]

Jerrigrace might be one of the most ethically admirable people whom I have ever met. It’s as if she has found a “right” way to be with people while having absolutely no commitment to ideas of right and wrong. If there is such a thing as relational existentialism, she practices it. It is a kind of ethics that refuses social norms and rulemaking.

I’m curious what you would say about this, Jeremy!

Jeremy:  You’re right that families can be profoundly confusing.  The life of complex attachments, spun across generations, often are.  The maladaptations build up, traumas generate reactions that become patterns travelling along in time, the limitations remain defended on the interior of the clan.  Still, families seem an important – even essential – locus for flourishing death practices because the generations turn over in them.  What I hear you doing is pointing to a place for ethical work, where “ethics” is meant in the broad sense of pursuing genuine human flourishing.

Within that place, though, critical work can be done and often needs to be done.  That’s where it seems Jerrigrace comes in and is so helpful.  To criticize need not be verbal, direct, or negative.  It means a sifting of what is worth keeping from what can be helpfully let go.  Families in grief sometimes need to let go of some things in order to move on and to carry productive memories of their loved ones with them.  They sometimes need help doing that.

I’m reminded of Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture where the recreation of a missing family’s make-shift death practices for largely neglected deaths makes the film itself a work of public and intergenerational mourning.  The art of filmmaking – like the introduction of a generous, wise person – allows mourning to proceed in a more effective, emotional way, one that seems to help free the filmmaker and narrator from the prison of the past and the silences that have reigned in his family system as a result of the political violence that they suffered under the Khmer Rouge.

Considering that film, too, what you say about Jerrigrace’s ethics – that it is relational and non-judgmental – strikes me as true to the spirit of the moral:  the bond of accountability between people as people.  Morality goes astray if it misplaces that it is about us being together in ways that are profoundly humanizing.  People who know how to be with others (just as filmmakers who help viewers be with some of the most uncomfortable histories on the planet), they show up as good guides in death, journeymen to the other side.  Here, it is not so much language that matters as communication, and not so much information that relates as being present with each other in a manner as intimate as breath.

[And by the way, I almost forgot to answer one of your questions. My sense of philosophical practice is to move through good relationships. The things that matter most are the things of good relationships, and philosophy ends in error to the extent that it becomes socially alienated, including in being too practical. That's the dirt!]

Shannon: That is so interesting what you say about the power of film to rewrite grief and trauma towards a new conclusion. From a conventional film criticism point of view, one of the weaknesses of our own film is that it does not tell the viewer what to think. All along I was determined to make the film be about a question, or a series of questions, rather than an answer. And all along I was told “that won’t be well received” (or more crassly, “that’ll never sell”). I’m now having the same problem working on a new book proposal on deep futurism (beyond 1000 years). I get much more excited about new questions than new answers – processes of undoing. Maybe that’s why I work on death and disaster, two topics that I find far from morbid or dystopic. It’s the undoing of the familiar that for me makes the world look fresh and exciting again, and the human role in it reassuringly small.

Thank you, Jeremy, for such a wonderfully human conversation! I am honored to be engaged with you and your readers in this way.

~

[After the interview, Sidra and Katherine sent through several constructive comments (thanks, S., thanks, K.!).  Sidra wanted the distinction between confronting death and grieving over it to be clearer, especially as pertains to social alienation.  She also wondered about how different communities in the United States might differ in their approach to death, remembering how she saw different communities in Pakistan.  Meanwhile, Katherine wondered whether the distinction between one's own death and the death of a loved one had any bearing on the matters discussed in the dialogue.  She was also surprised to see Wittgenstein's approach being applicable beyond philosophy of language.  (But ”to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life”!)

Shannon then added this:  I would like to clarify a couple of points that may have passed too quickly. The first is that there is an ambiguity between the denial of death the denial of grief. The first is denial in the sense of denying a fact of existence. The second is in the sense of denying someone something they need, or have a right to, through social control ("Indulging in grief is unhealthy / public mourning is unseemly"). 

I should also be clear that I am not myself saying that there is a morally correct way to be with death. But to be with it is, I think, much healthier than to be without it. I think that ultimately it will make us happier to allow our feelings of fear and melancholy. One of my problems with over-statements about the U.S. being a death-denying society (besides just being inaccurate) is that they usually come with snide superiority and a hint of condemnation. Anyone who has read Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One (or seen the film) will know what I mean. The death-denial thesis becomes just another way to say that Americans are dumber and more screwed up than the rest of the world. 

No society on earth is carefree about death. Death-consciousness is the most wicked problem of human existence -- perhaps that's what Heidegger was trying to say in Being and Time. But there are different cultural practices that can ease the fear of death and the pain of grief. Still, practices that confront death can deny grief, and practices that embrace grief can deny death. I have learned that there is no necessary correlation.]

~

This is an installment of Into Philosophy.

ge·ni·al | ˈjēnyəl | adjective friendly and cheerful: waved to them in genial greeting. • literary (especially of air or climate) pleasantly mild and warm. DERIVATIVES genially | ˈjēnyəlē | adverb ORIGIN mid 16th century: from Latin genialis ‘nuptial, productive.’ The Latin sense was adopted into English; hence the senses ‘mild and conducive to growth’ (mid 17th century), later ‘cheerful, kindly’ (mid 18th century).