My research focuses on evolving American perspectives of suicide, specifically as they are articulated through memorialization in cemeteries. Many people continue to take a traditional religious of suicide as sinful, or a western-cultural view of suicide as shameful, but others are asserting different views. Rather than hiding their loved one’s suicide, they publically acknowledge it. In this regards, some material expressions of memorialization do acknowledge suicide in ways that do not invoke a sense of sin or shame. Most notably, the grave marker of one young man in Waynesboro, Virginia includes a laser-etched copy of his suicide note. My research includes interviews with his family members to understand their decision to foreground rather than hide his decision to end his life. My paper presents this and other recent examples in western and central Virginia, based on their surprisingly high, and continually increasing, rates of suicide. In these districts, I look at the ways in which suicide victims are memorialized, in some cases consciously congruent with the growing Suicide Awareness movement as well as society’s evolving overall perception of suicide victims. Looking at cemeteries, newspaper coverage of events held in honor of suicide victims, and social media treatment of this issue facilitates understanding of diverse contemporary perspectives on the decision to end one’s life.
About the presenterKaitlyn Mae Gardner
I am a rising Junior at Washington and Lee University, where my major is Sociology and Anthropology with a Sociology emphasis.