“We’re all gonna die. And when we do, what’s it all for? You better live now before the grim reaper comes knocking on your door.” These lyrics are familiar to many from Prince’s 1984 hit, “Let’s Go Crazy” (a song that seems to presage his 2016 death in an elevator: “In this life things are much harder than in the afterworld, [and] if the elevator tries to bring you down, go crazy – punch a higher floor”). The lyrics’ sense is also familiar given the ancient tradition of “memento mori”: reminders of death’s inevitability, often issued from grave markers shaped as coffins or adorned with skulls and epitaphs that encourage the quick to live mindfully of death. Although winged death’s heads waned in popularity centuries ago in the U.S., injunctions to “remember you’ll die” persist in diverse ways, not only in pop songs but also in recent cemetery practice. My research focuses on grave markers erected during the last thirty years in Virginia and on the conversations they record between living and dead. Messages that the living inscribe to the dead on gravestones often express assurances of enduring affection (“In the still of the night we love you,” “Sweet Jake, don’t forget about Daddy and me”). The dead usually have different things to say: “To thine own self be true,” for example, or this in a Methodist cemetery: “Satan offers money, booze, sex, and fun, but you are in the shadow of the cross.” Cognizant of death, parties on both sides of the existential divide continue to advise and to assert; this paper considers what these missives imply about current salient understandings of entanglements of death and life, body and soul, matter and spirit. As Bruno Latour suggests, perhaps we are not modern, and never were.
About the presenterAlison Bell
Associate Professor of Anthropology