Transcription:
The Ethics of Corpse Care

Dawn Hood-Patterson, PhD, MDiv (Host): Welcome to the Pediatric Ethics Podcast with the Bioethics Center at Children's Mercy, Kansas City. My name is Dawn Hood-Patterson, and I will be your host. Today, we welcome Reverend Cody Sanders, PhD. Dr. Sanders is currently the pastor to Old Cambridge Baptist Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He also serves as the American Baptist Chaplain to Harvard University and President of the Harvard Chaplains. Cody is the advisor for LGBTQ+ affairs in the Office of Religious, Spiritual, and Ethical Life at MIT and Affiliated Assistant Professor of Pastoral Theology and Chaplaincy Studies at Chicago Theological Seminary. This summer, Cody will become the Associate Professor of Congregational and Community Care Leadership at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. Dr. Sanders is the author of several books and articles, including a brief guide to ministry with LGBTQIA youth from Westminster, John Knox, published in 2017 and the article, Moral Remains Pastoral Theology and Corpse Care Out in 2019. He is also the co-author of Corpse Care Ethics for Tending the Dead. This is from Fortress Press and it was released earlier this year, and that's going to be where we focus a lot of our conversation today. Originally from South Carolina, he currently lives in Boston with his partner, also named Cody and their two dogs, Buddy and Susie, welcome Cody. Thanks for being with us today.

Cody Sanders, PhD: Thanks, Dawn. Thanks for having me. I'm really glad to have this conversation together.

Host: Me too. I want to start out by thinking through what relationships tell us. So you acknowledge that a lot has been written about how we take care of the dying, those who are in the process of dying or the grieving. You keenly point out that less attention is paid to the corpse. One aspect of consideration you raise is how the human body is in relationship with a web of existence, an interhuman existence. But also, you talk about kind of a more than human web. I think of death as an invitation to relate in a new way. I am prone, however, to think of this in terms of my own relationship with memory or the legacy of those who have died. Why should we care about our relationship with the corpse?

Cody Sanders, PhD: Yeah, it's a good question and one that we have to ask because we have so sort of systematically over the course of the last century or so, divorced ourself from relationships with the bodies of our dead. And I think partially this is because we have ideas about the essence of our humanity, not residing in our flesh, the sort of, uh, flesh and spirit, or soul dualism. But if you are in a clinical setting and you observe the context of a patient death, as I did when I was working as a hospital chaplain; it is evident that there is a desire to relate to the body that has died. And even if your theology or your philosophy of life suggests something about the essence of that person no longer being present or something of that sort, as many hold; there is something really important the mortal remains, the fleshly existence of our loved ones. This is the person, if it was a parent or grandparent who held us in their laps, picked us up when we fell as children, or if this is our child or grandchild or brother or sister, this is the person that we've cared for.

The body that we have been in relationship to, and for most of human history in most cultural settings, caring for that body, has been an important part of caring for our loved one, even in their death. It's really only in recent history that we almost stopped doing that and given that over to a professionalized chain of events that takes place with the corpse.

Host: And you dive into that a little bit in your book, I shouldn't say a little bit, you, you do a really nice historical review of how we tend to the bodies of the dead. Can you give us, a few of the climaxes of these experiences that you've uncovered in your work?

Cody Sanders, PhD: Sure. A lot of the historical part of the book focuses on several key shifts in our relationship with the dead and also how we would place the dead in relationship to the living, moving from the city center burying grounds; they weren't thought of as cemeteries or as resting places yet, to more rural landscapes and the rise of the garden cemetery movement and things of that nature. But I think for the particularity of this conversation, it's important to note one specific traumatic shift in our relationship to the dead that changed how we treated the dead.

And that was with the Civil War. Prior to the Civil War, dying typically occurred, at or near the home, at or near our family, where we got to be at the bedside of the dying and hear last words and make religious and relational meaning of that experience. And for the first time, tens of thousands of people were dying really far away from their homes.

And this was a traumatic thing for people in the US and a group of industrious, inventive men, invented a process of arterial embalming, very similar to the same process that's used today in embalming. And that process, I think is what really began the solidification of a funeral profession. There were certainly other things that families hired others to do, like build coffins or carry bodies to the cemetery on wagons and things of that nature before. But this began to solidify this notion that there were professionals that would come and do things for us that we couldn't do for ourselves.

And in the context of the Civil War, that was true. We couldn't retrieve those bodies very easily. Although there were families from union soldiers who died on the battlefield that would go down to Confederate Battlegrounds and wade through dead bodies to try to find the body of their loved one. It was that important to them to be able to care for that body. And what embalming did was allowed for about 40,000 people who could afford it; so these were mostly union officers to be returned to their families in the north when they died on the battlefield. That process of embalming was a really horrific for people to think about.

They didn't want the body to be invasively, intervened in that way. But when Abraham Lincoln died, and was assassinated, you know, his body was embalmed. He was taken from DC to Springfield, and a along the way was viewed by people; that began to solidify the notion of embalming in people's minds in a way that led to a comfortability with the practice.

But that also led to an increasing distance between families who would care for their dead and put a professional buffer between the care for the dead that didn't exist prior to that.

Host: Yeah, it sounds really interesting that, you know, something that seems so commonplace to us today, there was a time in history and perhaps we need to remember that, that it was new and the uncomfortable feelings around that emerged when it was, was new, but it's really fascinating to think about how what we practice today has not always been in practice. And it seems to say something to us about, how we encounter change in our worlds.

Cody Sanders, PhD: Yeah. And that's one of the things that I think is important about the first half of this book is just putting some critical distance between us and our taken for granted death care practices. They weren't the practices that all of our ancestors in, in and from time in memorial practice, they were actually invented over time for particular reasons.

Some of those reasons don't exist anymore, yet we still practice them. And they were never inevitable. They developed along a historical trajectory that were responding to particular needs in some cases, fears in other cases. And if we want to reexamine how we relate to the bodies of our dead, I think we need to be able to see, why some of our taken for granted contemporary practices developed in the first place.

Host: Yeah. I appreciate you using this, that using the language of inevitability, that it's not an inevitable practice and that it seems like there's a lot of genesis for expanded thinking around how we do things whenever we start to recognize that things aren't just inevitable. It really makes me think in addition to you know, you lay out in the book how histories come from different sources. You spend a good bit of time helping us think about how LGBTQ+ Black and African American communities contribute importantly to our landscape of understanding, particularly around the care of loved ones, the care of bodies. You highlight those histories and traditions, of corpse care practices, and even on looking on page 82 and you say bodies, even corpses act as signifiers of moral, economic and political systems. And so here being in a pediatric facility, when I think about children, I recognize that they don't always have the same legal power or consenting opportunities as adults.

In particular, we think about experiences of powerlessness and marginalization among children as well. And these experiences of marginalization seem to correlate in some way, between children and then some of the social groups that you talk about and describe in your book. Can you help us think about the ethical, moral implications of corpse care when we see this through the lens or in light of marginalization? What does that teach us about caring for the corpse and caring for humanity and the world?

Cody Sanders, PhD: Yeah, I think that a lot of our major concerns of racism, classism, heterosexism, xenophobia, really run through the history of how we have thought about and cared for the dead over time. This certainly was a major point of interest between the colonizers who came to this land and the Native Americans who were already here, who learned one another's death care practices really quickly and oftentimes weaponized those death morays, and once they figured out what was important and sacred to the other.

We see that really palpably in contemporary settings. In fact, when we were writing this book, I was in the middle of working on this chapter with my co-author Mike Parsons, when news broke about, I think almost a thousand bodies of indigenous children in Canada, who were found in unmarked graves on the sites of two former residential schools; which is a history of course, that the US shares with Canada. And that many religious communities, mostly Christian communities, are bound up with those governments. We also wanted to think about how Black bodies have been treated particularly in death.

I mean, this was historically a really important thing for us to look at in the context of enslaved people and how they were really able to use funerary rituals and the treatment of the dead as a way of practicing care and humanization in an intensely dehumanizing situation. And in many cases it was the death care practices and rituals that allowed for autonomy in the context of slavery. Generally speaking, enslaved people were able to take care of their own dead, in those contexts. And there are few really beautiful passages written about that, and several historical documents.

And we think about that more contemporarily with for example, the death of Michael Brown. When Michael Brown was shot by the police in Ferguson, his community stayed with him and followed his body from where it lay on the asphalt all the way to the coroner's office. And that being a particular form of care for the dead and in an extreme situation of racialized violence.

And then you mentioned the AIDS epidemic, that affected LGBTQ people in the ways that HIV, AIDS corpses called into question much of the common sense ways that we had been led to believe corpses needed to be treated. And the funeral industry began to question their own practices and how good they were at doing what they said that they did, in that case. And we saw hospitals, we saw governments, we religious communities, we saw funeral directors unwilling to treat gay men dying of AIDS, and another community comes up around them, other LGBTQ people, particularly, a lot of lesbians in that era coming around gay men who are dying of AIDS often without their families, certainly without the support of the institutions that we typically rely on to support us, and practicing care in some really radical ways.

And also than, even more so in some instances using the corpse and the remains, perhaps cremated remains in some cases as activist actors, even in death, I think of one, one family who lobbed the cremated remains of their loved one who died of AIDS over the White House fence as a protest to the inattention that the government was giving to the AIDS epidemic.

Host: Yeah, that puts a whole new light on this notion of using the, the body as a form of activism for sure. That's not something that I've run across in my own research and thinking, but that's quite compelling. That even after death, even after cremation, that there's a tone of activism. You talked about care is being like radical forms of care.

Can you describe what that might look like and what you've seen in your research related to, caring for the dead, particularly among marginalized communities? You, really described beautifully, ways that community members accompany the dead through different stages of post-death or postmortem, ritual care and practice, both within, kind of a, a relational sense, but then also in, within the legal sense.

But are there other acts of radical care? Are there acts that you've seen that would help us understand more you see and what you've seen.

Cody Sanders, PhD: Hmm. Yeah, there were a lot of really interesting stories throughout the historical narratives that we explored that I think, are really helpful to look at in that regard. But thinking contemporarily about this question; one of the, the more radical acts of care for our dead, involves treating the remains of our loved ones, not as burdens, not as something to be done away with as efficiently and easily as possible, but we're using a religious framework, something of sacred remains to care for in the context of death, to do for our family members, something that they can no longer do from them, for themselves in that case.

And it is bearing that person's burden and the literal burden of their flesh to provide care for that person. And I think about this kind of radical notion of death care also in relationship to people's relationship to the wider web of life and ecological justice concerns. And I think there's a real radical activist usage of the corpse that is becoming more and more popular, more of interest to people, uh, which is in green or natural burial.

And especially when that takes place at the conservation level where, burial in a natural way, meaning without embalming, without hardwood or metal casket, without burial vaults or anything of that sort; is being done in order to conserve attractive land from development, or in some cases, to restore attractive land that has been badly damaged.

And there are places all over the country now that are doing this in some really beautiful ways. And I think of that as an activist usage of our corpse; putting our corpse in a place to protect that place.

Host: Yeah, that really leads beautifully into kind of the next question that I had for you. I was hoping that you could kind of talk a little bit more about environmental justice issues that you raise in your book and then also in the article Moral Remains. And I was hoping that you could start or ground us perhaps in a brief discussion on the green burial pioneer and physician, Billy Campbell and I think that a lot of our audience being physicians and healthcare workers would be really interested in knowing, how a fellow physician, a fellow healthcare worker, really helped to pioneer this movement.

Cody Sanders, PhD: Yeah, Billy Campbell is a pioneer in the movement of green burial and I also want to name his wife Kimberly, who is his partner in this endeavor of conservation burial. Billy is the town physician in Westminster, South Carolina. Which just so happens to be about an hour from where I grew up.

And in college, and Billy, I don't know his age right now. I would say he's maybe in his fifties. But in college, Billy had this idea, this emerging passion, to practice green burial and to use burial to conserve land from development and from environmental degradation. So he had had this idea for a really long time, had been dreaming of it with his wife, Kimberly.

Both of them, eventually were able get attractive land in Westminster, South Carolina that's now called Ramsey Creek Preserve. And in our research, we visited Ramsey Creek and Billy and Kimberly took us around the preserve. They showed us the spot in the preserve where they each want to be buried.

They told us the history and what it meant to them. And, this is, I think, a really, beautiful way in which, kind of uniquely, Billy Campbell, this physician to his fellow townsfolk in Westminster, cares for them, kind of literally from birth through death. And even into death care and their final disposition.

And Ramsey Creek is just such a beautiful place. And the nice thing about conservation level green burial and places like Ramsey Creek or Honey Creek Woodlands in Conures, Georgia, which is run by the monastery, the of the Holy Spirit. There are a lot of other places like that; is that they're intended to be places for the living to come, to walk, to spend time in the woodlands or the prairie or where whatever the landscape is, where it has been started.

And, since there aren't any huge, you know granite monuments and things of that nature built on the landscape, everything is intended to be kept as natural as possible. The whole ecosystem becomes a memorial for the loved ones who are buried there. And when their families come to visit, they don't have to just visit that one place where their loved one is buried.

They can walk these grounds and enjoy the beauty of this place that their loved one is now very, literally physically a part of. Because we have not kept that body from returning to the earth as we do in our conventional burial practices that include embalming, that include a hardwood or metal casket, that include putting the casket into a cement or metal vault, doing everything we possibly can to cut the body off from returning to the earth.

In natural burial, the body is returned simply to the earth in a way that can nurture the earth.

Host: I feel like that really illustrates and redefines the way we think about legacy, contributing back to the earth in some really substantial ways. I mean, literally with our own bodies.

Cody Sanders, PhD: Yeah, and I want to name, you know, we wrote this book with a lot of both, Christian communities and secular communities in mind, as readers of this book. We very intentionally deal with, Jewish and Muslim burial practices because typically Jewish and Muslim communities already practice communal care for the dead and green burial.

They don't call it green burial. They just call it burial because it's just the way that it has been done returning the body to the earth in a very natural way. But I've learned a lot personally along the way through my conversations with Imams and with Rabbis who have been involved in the, you know, the Hoffer Kaisha that is the community of people in a Jewish community that is called upon to care for the bodies of the dead.

And I think looking at other religious and cultural practices also helps us to gain a little critical distance between what we believe is the common sensical thing that we must do, to begin imagining some other possibilities.

Host: Cody, you always take a topic and you help to open it up to imagining it in new ways and thinking about it more critically. And so I really appreciate the fact that you took something that is sometimes scary to us, sometimes putrid to us, and you invite us into a space to really think about the implications of what does it mean to care for our bodies and the bodies of those we love, even after death. I appreciate you taking time to be with us today and, thank you again for your critical analysis of Corpse Care.

Cody Sanders, PhD: Thanks, Dawn. I really appreciate the conversation.