In the days before my dad died, the hospital was already asking me to make major financial decisions. What funeral home or crematorium do you want to use? Do you really want the basic package? Was your beloved father basic? Funeral homes aren't even required to list prices on their websites — though that may be changing thanks to the Federal Trade Commission. While Dad was on his deathbed, I was Googling customer reviews and checking my credit card limit.

Since then, my life has been consumed by settling my parents' estate. Executor and Successor Trustee is my new part-time job — one I never asked for, and one I'm technically not being paid to do, though I suppose the inheritance counts. Over the past few months, I've learned about death certificates (you will need an absurd number of copies), the difference between having something notarized and getting a Medallion Signature Guarantee (the latter is essentially a fancier version of the former), and how you should respond when your dead parent receives a jury summons (depends on the state, but you usually have to contact the County Clerk to have the aforementioned dead parent removed from their lists). I've had to sell a condo, a boat and a car. Real estate: every Millennial's expertise!

On top of the complicated stuff that might get me in trouble with the law if I mess up, there's also the weird, sad stuff. In their Florida condo, my mom had 34 decorative fish. What am I supposed to do with those? What's the best way to transfer my dad's ashes from the basic urn to the nicer, Frank Lloyd Wright-esque urn I purchased for his eternal rest? The answer, as it turns out, is a Solo cup.

And then there's the memorial, which is like planning a depressing wedding, both in logistics and in cost. According to the National Funeral Directors Association, the average cost of a funeral in 2021 was $7,848 — a little less if the guest of honor is cremated. But that's what the life insurance money is for, right? Assuming your parents had a life insurance policy.

Fortunately, ours did — a few, in fact. We held my mom's memorial at a local bar-restaurant and catered it with her favorite pizza. We held my dad's at the golf course near our childhood home — he designed the clubhouse. It was easier the second time around: we already had easels to display the pictures, and we were able to import the invites from Mom's big day over to Dad's.

No one is truly prepared for their parents to die. When I asked my aunts and uncles and friends' parents for advice, they didn't have much to spare—all they could remember was the horrible grief of it. And many of them had hired lawyers and accountants to deal with the bureaucracy for them; unlike my generation, their generation had already built the financial security to afford such luxuries.

In Boomers' defense, those luxuries can sometimes become necessities. Though my dad had a living trust — which should have saved my sister and me from probate court — he failed to update one life insurance policy, so it does have to go through probate, and we've hired a lawyer in Florida accordingly. We'll be more than able to cover her fees with the money we're paying her to get for us.

But I'd argue that Millennials are particularly ill-equipped to navigate the obstacle course of estate law. I'm extraordinarily privileged in that I have no student loans to pay off and my parents weren't carrying loads of debt. The vast majority of my friends — and the vast majority of my generation — are not in my position. Many Millennials are barely scraping by as it is. And while for some of them, an inheritance may help, for others there will be no inheritance — only more creditors to deal with.

Even as a privileged Millennial, this process is by no means easy. Every day, whether I'm trying to untangle my parents' TD Ameritrade account (how does the stock market work?) or correct my dad's death certificate (did you know a death certificate can be wrong?), I'm confronted with the reality that I have no idea what I'm doing. It's terrifying.

Death wasn't a taboo in our household, but it wasn't a common dinner table conversation, either. I knew both my parents wanted to be cremated. My mom sometimes joked that we should "just shoot her" if she became very ill, and though my dad had plenty of guns (which I also had to figure out how to sell), none of us wanted to call her bluff during her last days. After I broke the news that he wasn't going to get out of the hospital this time, my dad told me the name of his lawyer. "He won't screw you," were his exact words.

I wish death had been a common dinner table conversation. Money, too. Don't spend more than you have is about the extent of my financial literacy. I wish my parents had talked to me about their assets instead of leaving me a cardboard box full of paperwork to comb through next to the Christmas decorations. At least I'm old enough to know how a checkbook works.

People keep telling me how sad it is that I lost both parents at such a young age. Here's what I want to tell them: I'm at the bottom of a bell curve. The Boomers are starting to die — my parents just went early. Over the next decade or two, more and more of my peers are going to join the dead parents club. The time to get cozy with the Grim Reaper is now, before he comes uninvited.

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The report by two nonprofits, the Funeral Consumers Alliance and the Consumer Federation of America, focuses on California and illustrates the huge pricing gulf for the same services among 120 mortuaries in the state. For instance, the cost of a simple cremation ranged from $525 to $4,115, while the cost of burial without a casket ranged from $495 to $4,715.

“If you don’t take control by comparing prices, it’s very easy to pay four, five, six times what we consider to be a reasonable rate,” said Josh Slocum, executive director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance. “I do not think $4,000 is a reasonable price for cremation.”

Nationally, wide pricing disparities for funeral services have prompted consumer advocates and regulators for years to push for greater transparency.

In 2013, California became the first and only state to require some form of online pricing disclosures. Under the law, a funeral home is required to either post a complete general price list on its website, or list 16 kinds of services and merchandise, along with a note saying the price list is “available upon request.”

Advocates like Slocum see the latter requirement as a “loophole.”  The newly released report surveyed 120 funeral homes in California and found that 34 of them did not list their prices online. And homes with prices disclosed online “tended to charge much lower prices than did those who used a loophole in the state law to hide their prices.”

According to the report, the median price of an immediate burial among homes that did not post their prices online is 37 percent higher than the median price of homes that do display their charges.

“To their credit, most of the funeral homes decided to post their prices,” said Stephen Brobeck, a senior fellow at the Consumer Federation of America. “But about a third chose to use the loophole to hide their prices.”

Bob Achermann, the executive director of the California Funeral Directors Association, objects to that characterization.

“It’s not a loophole, it’s the way the law is written,” he said. He defended the right not to post prices online, saying, “We believe in offering funeral homes flexibility.”

A survey conducted by the National Funeral Directors Association last year found that only 17 percent of customers visited or called more than one funeral home when planning a funeral. Of those, more than half – 58 percent – said it was either “easy” or “very easy” to obtain pricing information.

“People with a little bit of patience can look around and make decisions,” said Achermann. “What someone wants to pay is really a matter of preference.”

Most of the funeral homes without posted prices are part of Dignity Memorial, the largest chain in the U.S. with more than 1,500 homes. The company is owned by Service Corporation International, a publicly traded company based in Houston. According to the report, the cost for basic services at Dignity Memorial homes in California is 48 percent higher than the average home that does post its prices.

Dignity Memorial did not respond to requests for comment.

Slocum noted that funerals are not like other purchases for consumers. They’re something that a person typically only pays for once or twice in a lifetime. And shopping for one is not exactly a happy occasion.

“There’s a reason why funeral homes are regulated,” said Slocum. “Their customers are grieving people that are buying something for a dead person. This is an emotion that is not duplicated in any other transaction. Grief compromises your rational frame of mind.”

The federal government is considering its own changes to pricing disclosure requirements for funeral homes.

In 1984, the Federal Trade Commission passed the “funeral rule,” which among other things mandates that mortuaries offer customers the ability to purchase separate services a la carte, as opposed to a package-only deal. The rule also states that funeral homes must hand over a price list to any customer. But the law hasn’t been updated since 1994, which means it says nothing about price disclosure online.

Earlier this month, the FTC announced  it will seek public comment and consider making changes to the funeral rule. The Funeral Consumers Alliance has urged the FTC to make funeral homes disclose their prices on their websites. Two commissioners released statements saying they would like to see the rule updated. Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter said, in her statement, “I worry that the rule is now showing its age, and I look forward to hearing from commenters about what a funeral rule for the twenty-first century should look like.”

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Your immediate family and friends would visit your house over the course of the next week, few needing to travel very far, paying their respects at your bedside. Before the body’s putrefaction advanced too far, the local carpenter would make a simple pine casket, and everyone would gather at the cemetery (or your own backyard, if you were a landowner) for a few words before returning you to the earth.

You would be interred without any preservative chemicals, without being cosmetized with touch-ups like skin dyes, mouth formers or eye caps. No headstone, flowers or any of the other items we relate to a modern funeral. In essence, your demise would be respectful but without pomp.

Things have changed pretty substantially since America’s early days as funeral rites have moved out of the house and into the funeral home. How did we get here and how do American traditions compare with typical practices in other countries?

In doing research for “Memory Picture,” an interactive website I’m building that explains the pros and cons of our interment options, I’ve discovered many intriguing details about how we memorialize death. One of the most fascinating is how the founding of the modern funeral industry can essentially be traced back to President Abraham Lincoln and his embrace of embalming.

Embalming’s beginning

The simple home funeral described above was the standard since the founding of the Republic, but the U.S. Civil War upended this tradition.

During the war, most bodies were left where they fell, decomposing in fields and trenches all over the South, or rolled into mass graves. Some wealthy northern families were willing to pay to have the bodies of deceased soldiers returned to them. But before the invention of refrigeration, this often became a mess, as the heat and humidity would cause the body to decompose in a matter of a couple of days.

Updating an ancient preservation technique to solve this problem led to a seismic change in how we mourn the dead in America. Ancient Egyptian embalmings removed all internal organs and blood, leaving the body cavity to be filled with natural materials.

In 1838, the Frenchman Jean Gannal published “Histoire des Embaumements,” describing a process that kept the body more or less intact but replaced the body’s blood with a preservative – a technique now known as “arterial embalming.” The book was translated into English in 1840 and quickly became popular in America.

Catching wind of these medical advances, opportunistic Americans began performing rudimentary embalmings on the corpses of northern soldiers to preserve them for the train ride home. The most common technique involved replacing the body’s blood with arsenic and mercury (embalming eventually evolved to using variants of formaldehyde, which is still considered a carcinogen).

Results improved, but not on a grand scale. These were “field embalmings,” performed by nonprofessionals in makeshift tents set up next to the battlefield. Results were unpredictable, with issues involving circulation, length of preservation and overall consistency. It is estimated that of the 600,000 that died in the war, 40,000 were embalmed.

Business was doing so well that the War Department was forced to issue General Order 39 to ensure only properly licensed embalmers could offer their services to mourners. But the technique was limited to the war – to make embalming part of a traditional American funeral would require Abraham Lincoln, who you might say was an early adopter.

Lincoln’s ‘lifelike’ death

Many prominent Civil War officers were embalmed, including the first casualty of the war, Colonel Elmer Elsworth, who was laid in state in the East Room of the White House at Lincoln’s request.

Upon the death of Lincoln’s 11-year-old son Willie in 1862, he had the boy’s body embalmed. When the president was assassinated three years later, the same doctor embalmed Lincoln in preparation for a “funeral train” that paraded his body back to his final resting place in Springfield, Illinois. Nothing like this had happened for any president previously, or since, and the funeral procession left an indelible effect on those who attended it. Most visitors waited in line for hours to parade by Lincoln’s open casket, usually set up in a State House or rotunda after being unloaded from the train.

Lincoln’s appearance early in the trip was apparently so lifelike that mourners often reached out to touch his face, but the quality of the preservation faded over the length of the three-week journey. William Cullen Bryant, editor of The New York Evening Post, remarked that after a lengthy viewing in Manhattan, “the genial, kindly face of Abraham Lincoln” became “a ghastly shadow.”

This was the first time most Americans saw an embalmed body, and it quickly became a national sensation.

Death becomes professionalized

The public was painfully aware of death, with an average life expectancy of around 45 years (almost entirely due to an infant mortality rate higher than anywhere on Earth today). Seeing a corpse that exhibited lifelike color and less rigid features made a strong impression.

While we do not have statistics on the increase in embalmings during this time, there is ample evidence that the Civil War had a profound effect on how Americans treated death. Victorian mourning traditions gave way to funeral homes and hearses. Local carpenters and taxi services began offering funerary services, and undertakers earned “certificates of training” from embalming fluid salesmen. Eventually, every American could be embalmed, as most are today.

There was one potent caveat: Families could no longer bury their own. More was needed than the assistance of friends and family to inter a corpse. Death was becoming professionalized, its mechanisms increasingly out of the hands of typical Americans. And as a result, the cost of burying the dead soared. The median cost of a funeral and burial, including a vault to enclose the casket, reached US$8,508 in 2014, up from about $2,700 three decades ago.

Thus was born the American funeral industry, with embalming as its cornerstone, as families ceded control of their loved ones’ bodies to a funeral director.

Differences with other cultures

When people talk of a “traditional” American funeral today, they usually refer to a cosmetized, embalmed body, presented in a viewing before being interred in a cemetery.

This unique approach to interment is unlike death rites anywhere else in the world, and no other country in the world embalms their dead at a rate even approaching that of the U.S. Funeral tradition involves the intersection of culture, law and religion, a recipe that makes for very different outcomes across the globe.

In Japan, nearly everyone is cremated. The cultural traditions bound to the ceremony, which include family members passing cremated bone remains to each other using chopsticks, predate the Civil War.

In Germany, where cremations are also increasingly popular, the law requires that bodies be interred in the ground – even cremated remains –including the purchase of a coffin and a land plot. This has led to “corpse tourism,” in which cremation is outsourced to a neighboring country and the body shipped back to Germany.

Other European countries struggle to deal with limited land resources for burial, with countries such as Greece requiring that graves are “recycled” every three years.

In Tunisia, as with all majority Muslim countries, nearly everyone is interred in the ground within 24 hours, in a cloth shroud and without chemical embalming. This is in accordance with Islamic scripture. It also bears close resemblance to the original interment of Americans before the Civil War.

Time to make plans

While American funerals are typically more expensive than in other countries, U.S. citizens enjoy many more options – and can even choose a simple Muslim-style interment. The key thing is to plan ahead by thinking critically about how you want yourself or your loved ones interred.

If you were to die in 2017, chances are you would meet your demise at the hospital. Your family would be asked if they had an “advanced directive” regarding “disposition of remains.” In the absence of clear guidelines, your next of kin would most likely sign away the rights to your body to a local funeral parlor that will encourage them to have the body embalmed for a viewing and burial.

You would be interred with the blood and organs of your body replaced with carcinogenic preservative liquids, heavily cosmetized to hide the signs of the the embalming surgery that rendered you this way. Your embalmed body would be placed in an airtight casket, itself placed inside a concrete vault in the ground.

And you may wish for it to be that way. But if you prefer anything else, you must make your wishes known. To say “I don’t care, I’ll be dead” places an undue burden on your family, which is already mourning your loss.

Brian Walsh, Assistant Professor of Communications, Elon University

The post How Abraham Lincoln created a funeral industry appeared first on Salon.com.

Here is another way to bring mourners together: Hire strippers for the funeral.

This is not a practice with which I have much (read: any) personal experience, but it is, apparently, one that’s become quite common in China — or, at least, common enough for the Chinese government to demand that people stop doing it. On Thursday, the nation’s Ministry of Culture issued a statement announcing a police crackdown on funerary stripper performances, which the government has reportedly been trying to eradicate for some time. According to the Wall Street Journal, strippers are generally hired with the intent of attracting more mourners to a funeral, to increase the deceased’s good fortune in the afterlife.

More from WSJ:

Pictures of a funeral in the city of Handan in northern Hebei province last month showed a dancer removing her bra as assembled parents and children watched. They were widely circulated online, prompting much opprobrium. In its Thursday statement, the Ministry of Culture cited “obscene” performances in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu, as well as in Handan, and pledged to crack down on such lascivious last rites.

In the Handan incident earlier this year, the ministry said, six performers had arrived to offer an erotic dance at the funeral of an elderly resident. Investigators were dispatched and the performance was found to have violated public security regulations, with the person responsible for the performing troupe in question detained administratively for 15 days and fined 70,000 yuan (about $11,300), the statement said. The government condemned such performances for corrupting the social atmosphere.

The government has been trying to fight the country’s funereal stripper scourge for some time now. In 2006, the state-run broadcaster China Central Television’s leading investigative news show Jiaodian Fangtan aired an exposé on the practice of scantily clad women making appearances at memorial services in Donghai in eastern China’s Jiangsu province. […]

CCTV found about a dozen funeral performance troupes offering such services in every village in the county, putting on as many as 20 shows a month at a rate of 2,000 yuan ($322) a pop.

An AFP report notes that some funeral strippers have drawn crowds of up to 500 “mourners,” so it’s possible Chinese law enforcement won’t have a particularly difficult time finding the performances if and when they happen.

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Every week, around 1,000 New York residents die, meaning cemeteries have almost run out of room in Manhattan, allowing Brooklyn and outer-borough properties to charge exorbitant amounts. Sure, you could leave the five boroughs, but as in life, New Yorkers don’t seem to be all that eager to schlep to New Jersey for a stay that will last for approximately forever. (For example, former Mayor Ed Koch paid $20,000 to be buried in the uptown Manhattan Trinity Church Cemetery, telling the Associated Press, “I don’t want to leave Manhattan, even when I’m gone. The thought of having to go to New Jersey was so distressing to me.”)

There are a few options for those who are priced out of a city cemetery, the first of which is pretty obvious: move to the suburbs. Numerous cemeteries upstate will sell you a plot for only $500. Or, you can opt for cremation, a trend that has grown exponentially in the past 50 years: in 2012, 43 percent of Americans chose it, 70 percent of Londoners, and almost 100 percent of Tokyo residents (there isn’t really another option).

Elsewhere in the world, you either have to build up or dig down into the earth to make way for new bodies.

Bloomberg’s Flavia Krause-Jackson wrote a great overview of different postmortem trends:

Green burials are a draw for eco-friendly urbanites: There’s no embalming and no metal casket. These no-frill alternatives are cheaper, too: about $3,000 compared with $10,000 for a traditional interment, Cunningham said.

Claiming to be the greenest of them all is Promessa Organic AB, based in Nosund, Sweden. It is developing a procedure that would freeze-dry bodies in a tank of liquid nitrogen and pulverize them. Unlike cremation, the process doesn’t release toxins, such as mercury, into the air…

To tackle the shortage in burial grounds, London passed a 2007 law allowing authorities to dig up graves at least 75 years old to make way for new ones. Problem is, boroughs have been reluctant to use their powers, according to the University of York’s Cemetery Research Group.

In Asia, the dead, like the living, are moving into high-rises.

The wait time for a sought-after slot in a public Hong Kong columbarium — a building containing urns — can be as long as five years. One private development approved earlier this year will convert an abandoned leather factory into an 11-story columbarium that can hold 23,000 niches.

There are other options for the particularly adventurous, like a floating cemetery on the South China Sea, and a company that will launch your remains into space. Regardless, we’re all going to have to get used to the rise of nontraditional plans. “The problem is pressing, now more than ever before,” said Christopher Coutts, an associate professor of urban planning at Florida State University and co-author of a 2013 paper, “Planning for the Deceased.” “Right now we’re not being efficient, or environmental.”

The post What will we do when city cemeteries fill up? appeared first on Salon.com.

“Against the wall!” a voice behind one of the pistols commanded.

And though my mind was shouting I’m the owner! I’m the owner! I merely stumbled up against the wall as the wave swept past me, less one officer, who gave me a pat down.

From the parking lot, I could hear the screams of a man overshadowed by an officer yelling, “Stop resisting! Stop resisting!”

In retrospect, the day hadn’t started out so bad, and if I had known it would have ended with BioTech—a crime scene remediation service—scrubbing blood out of the carpet and off the walls, I never would’ve gotten out of bed that morning. No funeral is worth that kind of aggravation, not to mention being frisked like a teenage girl on prom night.

It was a Saturday, deceptively sunny and warm for what grief the day would bring. I arrived at my place, McKenzie Mortuary, located in Belmont Heights, Long Beach, early, made coffee and took messages off the answering service, and then took Ruthless, my goldendoodle, for a walk around the block before locking him in my office. My morning routine complete, I went into the chapel to get everything ready for the Revis service. I had dressed and casketed Mrs. Revis the day before, and sometime during the evening the hairdresser had come and done her hair and makeup. I checked the makeup and, satisfied, set about transferring all the flowers from the flower room to the chapel and setting them up around the casket.

Arranging floral tributes is a tricky art. We always set the family pieces closest to the deceased, the closer the degree of kinship, the closer to the casket, followed by coordinating colors and styles. Therefore, what might look best isn’t necessarily what is set up because of how close or far from the casket the piece has to sit due to kinship. Mrs. Revis had a large family; I filled the entire front chapel wall around her casket with flowers.

I tinkered and fussed with all the floral arrangements and, finally satisfied, I set out the memorial folders and guest book in the lobby, and set up the Casio keyboard that one of the family members would play during the service at the front of the chapel. I spent the remaining time until the family arrived with a cloth and bottle of Windex shining up glass, mirrors, and furniture — nervous energy, really.

Mrs. Revis’s son, Charles, and daughter, Jeanette, arrived shortly after 9 A.M. with their families, and went in and viewed their mother. As is my usual modus operandi, I waited a few minutes, heard some muffled weeping, and then swept into the room with a box of tissues. “Is everything all right . . . as far as her appearance is concerned?” I inquired.

Charles, tears in his eyes, replied, “She looks wonderful.” “Twenty years younger,” Jeanette chimed in.

I beamed inwardly and simply nodded, “Good. If you need anything, I’ll be in the lobby greeting your guests.”

Charles took that opportunity to pull me aside. He had that look in his eye. “Look, Ken,” he spoke in a whisper, “there’s some . . . tension in the family.”

“Oh?” I replied. There usually is. Combine the emotions surrounding the death of a family member with the impending estate settlement (i.e., money) and you can have a tense situation. “Yeah, my two younger brothers didn’t have much to do with my mother.”

I nodded. I knew he had two brothers because they had been mentioned in the death notice.

“I don’t know if they’ll come or not. I hope they don’t, but if they do they might cause trouble.”

Oh great! I thought. I wished he had let me in on this little tidbit of knowledge days ago when we had made the arrangements. I have in the past hired off duty police officers to sit in for funerals where trouble was expected. Instead, I reassured him, “Don’t worry. I deal with this all too frequently. I’m sure it ’ll be fine.”

Famous last words: It’ll be fine. It wouldn’t be.

It ’s amazing how calming the presence of a uniformed officer merely sitting in a lobby can be. In two instances, I have had them spring into action to prevent a disaster. But getting an off duty officer with no notice on a Saturday was out of the question. I’d have an easier time conjuring a genie from one of the urns in my showroom. I knew I’d just have to grin and bear it and hope.

As it turns out hope wasn’t enough. Not by a long shot.

I knew them as soon as I laid eyes on them. They slunk in like two wolves, all easy strides and furtive glances behind Wayfarer shades they didn’t take off, even in the dimness of the mortuary.

I extended the sleeve of my newly pressed suit to point at the guest book. “Sign the book, please.”

Not a glance in my direction. They just glided by.

There they are, I thought, the prodigal sons have arrived. And I was correct. The wolves set up camp at the foot end of the casket, opposite Charles and Jeanette.

When a guest arrived they would greet either the camp at the head end of the casket or the foot end. Never both. There was a clear division in the family.

Thankfully, everyone behaved during the visitation, and if it was half as uncomfortable for them as it was for me witnessing it, then it was a pretty painful hour for the family members. I was glad to get all the guests seated and get the service started. My chapel has pew seating with a center aisle, and I was guessing by who sat on what side which camp they sided with.

I went into the deserted lobby and let out a sigh of relief. Everyone would behave during the service because it was structured. Whenever there has been a problem in the past it has been during the visitation. That is the unstructured part, when people can find ways to get into trouble. But people sit in silence and listen during a service and generally behave. I didn’t know it, but this was going to be a first.

The service sailed along smoothly until it came time for people to offer testimony. This is when members of the audience get up and share thoughts and memories about the deceased. Each of the children, even the wolves, got up in turn and read a little something they had pre-written about their mother. It was very touching.

“Anyone else care to testify?” the considerably sized clergywoman asked.

A man in a three-piece suit sitting on the side of Charles and Jeanette stood up and walked up to the microphone. He identified himself as Earl, Mrs. Revis’s brother. Without preamble, Earl started right in. “Ray and Sam,” he said, pointing to the wolves, “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.” He jabbed a finger at them. “You treated your mother poorly. A God-fearing woman, she didn’t deserve that. It ’s shameful, just shame—”

One of the wolf brothers stood up and yelled, “You’d wouldn’t visit her either if she had cut you out of the will while your siblings stood by and took your share! Besides, who are you to stand and give judgment?”

Charles, red-faced, stood up and said loudly, “Maybe if you hadn’t been stealing from her, she wouldn’t have cut you off !”

A wolf, I wasn’t sure which, stepped from his pew.

I was in the back, frantically motioning for the clergywoman to step in and take control by making a cutting motion across my throat.

“Stealing?” the wolf said. “Is that what you call it? Guess you didn’t tell Earl what you—”

Charles cut him off, while advancing toward him, “Don’t you say it, you no-good, thieving liar!”

They met at the center aisle, where the casket sat. I was running down the aisle yelling, “Stop!” when the wolf yelled, “You lousy sonofabitch!” as his fist connected with Charles’s face. There was an audible, stomach-turning crunch as Charles’s nose broke. I stopped as I saw an arc of blood spray across the interior cap panel (the inside portion of the lid) and Charles slump against the casket, pushing it into the wall with a loud bam! The force of the casket toppled several floral pieces.

It was totally silent for a second, and then the place erupted like a powder keg. It was like a fight out of an old Western. Men began leaping over pews and going at it, grabbing the giant marble pedestals from under the flower arrangements and throwing them. Even the women were setting into it, clawing and scratching and swinging their purses around.

I turned tail and ran to the lobby and grabbed the phone on the receptionist ’s desk and dialed.

“9-1-1, what ’s your emergency?” The voice on the line asked. “I’m calling from McKenzie Mortuary, there’s a”—I racked my brain for exactly what this situation was—“riot going on!” “A fight?”

“No, many people fighting. A riot! Send police! Fast!”

I heard her say “Stay on the line” as I dropped the receiver and yelled at a man grabbing a big heavy brass sign that said SIGN GUEST BOOK, PLEASE.

“Hey!” I yelled.

The man with the sign ignored me.

Another man emerged from the chapel and the man armed with the sign took a mighty swing. Thankfully, the unarmed man ducked because the sign drove into the drywall with a thud and stuck. As the man tried to free the sign the man who ducked decked him, kicked over the guest book stand, and fled out the front door.

The man who had been the aggressor lay on the floor, blood leaking from his head. I started to venture over to him, but he suddenly sat up and shook his head as if to clear the cobwebs, and I jumped back behind the receptionist desk as if the faux-granite-laminate peninsula was some kind of substantial barrier.

The man freed the sign from the wall and ran into the melee in the chapel.

I should have stayed in my little safety zone behind the receptionist ’s desk, but I had a visceral urge to see what was happening. I ventured toward the chapel doors.

Several clients, who were making funeral arrangements, poked their heads out of one the small offices. I could tell by the puzzled looks on their faces they weren’t sure if they should be scared of the ruckus or not. I made a frantic motioning with my hands. “Get back! Get back!” I whisper-yelled. “Police are on the way.” The puzzled faces quickly disappeared and the door closed.

As I approached the chapel, several people fled the scene, and each time I jumped over to the far wall as if to hide. Luckily, they were too intent on fleeing to bother me. Emboldened, I ducked into the rear of the chapel, and what I saw shocked me. The casket was toppled over and everything that wasn’t bolted down had been tossed everywhere, ostensibly used as weapons. All my precious antiques were mostly shattered. Flower petals and blossoms poured from the sky like a ticker tape parade—the floral arrangements had been thrown and re-thrown and re-thrown. And of course the blood—it was everywhere. The walls. The carpets. The pews. I wanted to cry, but instead I shouted at the top of my lungs, “Police! The police are coming!”

Nobody paid a lick of attention to me, and then a wooden tissue box cover hit me in the face.

Really, it just grazed my jaw, but I was disoriented for a few moments. When I got my bearings, one of the rioters, a scrappy little guy with a ripped shirt, was screaming, “Police, police are here!”

The mob listened to him.

The place emptied out like somebody had fired a gun.

In mere seconds I was alone in the wreckage of my chapel. It was deathly silent compared to the screams and shouts of a few moments prior. I swooned, not from the minute pain in my jaw, but from the destruction done to my chapel.

I returned to the lobby to make sure the rioters had left the building and that ’s when I came face-to-face with the boys in blue and a couple of nasty-looking weapons.

They moved quickly through the building, a neat little train of shields and tactical gear. I heard “Police! Police! Open this door!” as they moved through the building, then frantic calling from behind the door: “Hold on! We have to move some furniture!”

There was muted scraping and thumping as furniture was moved and the door opened. The officers did a quick once over and, seeing there wasn’t a threat, moved on through the building. I heard distant pounding followed by, “Police! Police! Open up!” I winced when I heard the crunch of a splintering door jamb.

I was still being corralled against a lobby wall when the officers that had searched the building came back. The apparent team leader flipped the visor up on his helmet and reported to a man in sergeant ’s stripes who pushed his way into the lobby, “Nobody here, Sarge, but a few people in this office”—he motioned to the office where the people had barricaded themselves in—“and a terrified dog.”

“No gun?” “No.”

The sergeant looked at me hard for a moment and then went and peeked into the chapel, then came back and asked the officer with the visor on his helmet, “Any other ways out?”

“Plenty. Could’ve gone out any of them; we just know he’s not hiding in here. We searched every square inch.”

Sarge turned his attention to me. “What ’s going on here?” he demanded.

“You tell me!” I said a bit too shrilly. “I called you because there’s a riot going on in my building.”

He inspected what I saw to be my wallet that had been taken from me during the search. He looked ay my ID, then me, then back at my ID. “You’re Kenneth McKenzie,” he finally said.

“Yes! That ’s what I was trying to tell you when you had the guns pointed at me.”

He twitched his mustache and squinted at me hard before saying, “Let him go.”

The officer guarding me stepped aside as if to tacitly acknowledge my newfound freedom.

Sarge flipped my wallet at me. Of course I missed.

“Sorry about that, Mr. McKenzie.” I wasn’t sure if he was referring to having weapons pointed at me or the premature toss of my wallet. He was about to say something else when an officer stepped inside and whispered something in his ear. “Uh, Mr. McKenzie,” Sarge said, seemingly embarrassed, “The members of the Revis family would like to know if they can view their mother one last time.”

I bristled, but then remembered my professional obligation. “Fine,” I said. “Your men can escort them in, ” I said, shaking my finger at him, “one by one for a last look. And then you can tell them if they want any further information about their mother they can contact the medical examiner’s office. I am turning their mother over to the state.”

Minutes later, I stood in the lobby, holding a paper towel full of ice to my jaw, and glowered at the family members as they were escorted in in shackles. The officer escorting one of the wolves muttered to me on the way out, “They really did a number on your place.”

Sarge later told me that as the first-responding officers arrived family members from the mob told them there were people in the building with guns. He thinks they tried using that as a ruse so they could slip away.

Their plan didn’t succeed. The officers tased several of the more unruly funeral-goers in the parking lot. Hence, the screams I had heard.

All they found was me, some bereaved people hiding in an office with furniture piled in front of and door, an employee or two . . . and Ruthless, hiding under my desk.

Needless to say, I now boycott the phrase “It ’ll be fine” because I’ve learned the hard way that sometimes it won’t be. No matter what you do or plan for, sometimes you find yourself literally (and figuratively) at gunpoint.

Though this story is outlandish, the point of it is: no two days are the same. This is one of the reasons why I chose the profession. Most days have a more positive outcome than having their facilities trashed and guns pointed at them, but I wouldn’t trade this job for any other job in the world.

In fact, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

Excerpted from “Over Our Dead Bodies: Undertakers Lift the Lid” by Ken McKenzie and Todd Harra. Copyright © 2014 by Ken McKenzie and Todd Hara. Reprinted by arrangement with Citadel Press, a division of Kensington Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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The people of Oregon have found another way. In the state whose slogan is “We Love Dreamers,” America’s imagineers have discovered a source of energy that’s all upshot. On April 23, 2014, the State of Oregon admitted to burning fetuses for fuel.

The news had broken two days before. On April 21, a startling claim came to light in the BC Catholic, Vancouver’s godliest gazette, a paper not renowned for its penny dreadfuls. “The remains of British Columbia’s aborted and miscarried children are ending up in an Oregon waste-to-power plant,” the article read. The body parts are “likely mixed with everyday trash, incinerated to provide electricity to the people of Marion County.” That’s a strident complaint for any newspaper, especially a Canadian one.

But grand indictments demand a grand amount of proof, and the bullhorns of the pro-life crusade have a yen for elaborate yarns. The BC Catholic delivered, with some testimony from the top. According to British Columbia’s health ministry, “biomedical waste” is “disposed of” through “appropriate” “contracted providers” that routinely ship it to Oregon, all for profit. There, factories torch “fetal tissue” along with tumors and “amputated limbs,” helping power the homes of the Pacific Northwest. Waste not, want not.

A wave of terror rippled across the Web. In forums, on blogs, fear and loathing played their plaintive notes. Fists in mouths, bug-eyed with panic, Canucks fretted that Yankees were raking Canadian babies on coals. They worried that we Americans, with our high-octane lives full of smartphones and flat-screens, laptops and subwoofers, microwaves and electrical wheelchairs, ten apiece per household, were running on an economy of literal baby oil.

It seemed a stretch. To those against abortion as much as those in favor of it, consuming human remains for power appeared an uncivilized undertaking. The tale sounded too Swiftian, like a page ripped out of “A Modest Proposal.” (That story, in which Swift suggests a society reap its unwanted offspring for food, is a satire, not an instruction manual.)

But America was doing just that. In an emergency press conference on April 23, Sam Brentano and Janet Carlson, commissioners for Oregon’s Marion County, confirmed the rumors. The corpses were not a canard. According to USA Today, Brentano and Carlson were “shocked by reports in the Canadian media that aborted fetuses from Vancouver, British Columbia, were being sent to [an energy] facility in Brooks, Oregon.”

Carlson told the National Post they “did not know this practice was occurring until today,” even though Brentano admitted, in USA Today, to being aware that “county ordinances didn’t specifically exclude fetuses from materials that could be burned at the facility.” Yet there the truth was, as rank as barbecued flesh. The state was shoveling cadavers into the furnaces of the Covanta Marion plant. The plant has been open since 1987.

They wrung their hands and mumbled their mea culpas. They shook their heads and reiterated their ignorance. “We are outraged and disgusted,” Carlson told CBS News. In the same interview, however, Brentano offered a defense: “We provide an important service to the people of this state, and it would be a travesty if this program is jeopardized due to this find.” Indeed, Covanta Marion, which lies 10 minutes from the state capital of Salem and less than an hour from Portland, supplies power to hundreds of thousands of homes. So they halted the reception of “medical waste” to allow for an inquiry. All the while, the smokestacks wisp away.

* * * 

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, we’re clods of carbon from womb to tomb. We roam the earth until we don’t again, the same before as after. It’s the way of all flesh.

“Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life,” wrote Nietzsche. “The living being is only a species of the dead.” In the screw and the spasm, the birth and the cradle, the days and the acts, the fall and the croak and the casket, we sprint headlong to what we always were: a feast for worms and toadstools. Nothing begets nothing, with a short breath of air between.

To some the backlash against the smokehouses is madness. Some greet the bone stoves of Oregon, the corpse steam and the embryo engines, with a shrug and a yawn. Creasing their foreheads in the way of maligned progressives, they cite the fact that what’s dead is done. The earth will grind them to muck anyway; we’re only speeding it along. Nothing lost, something gained.

Their argument compels, but it does not compel many. Not in America, that safehouse of antique morals, and not in Europe, that vanguard of revisionist ideas. In March, a report revealed that British hospitals were burning fetuses for heat. “Aborted babies [were] incinerated to heat UK hospitals,” a piece in the Telegraph proclaimed. “At least 15,500 fetal remains were incinerated by 27 [hospitals] over the last two years alone.” Outrage rankled the limey land. The papers dripped with venom, and Channel 4 ran an irate special. Dowdy-hattted dames across the Isles, green with horror, spewed their crumpets during teatime. Amid all the hubbub, the state intervened. The British minister of health, Dan Poulter, called the practice “totally unacceptable.” He told the hospitals to abort it immediately.

Yet it is not clear why. Put aside the fact that the law doesn’t consider fetuses human. For the sake of argument, say that they are. Raise the wager. Say that not only “amputated limbs” but the intact corpses of adult humans entered the mix in Britain and Marion County. It seems that nothing changes.

Rites of repose do not please the dead. They comfort only the living. A mark of our humanity, burial has dogged our morals since the age of Neanderthals. So it should. Mourning takes time, requires a body to make sense of the incomprehensible. But when the body is discarded, when the relatives wish it away, we might as well make the most of it.

One reason for the anger in Britain was that hospital workers had cooked some miscarriages without parents’ permission. The parents might have hoped to dispose of their dead babies in style, burying them in shoebox coffins. But that was a small quirk in the trend, a freak feature, a thrill for the tabloid rags. It was not at all the case in Oregon.

Oregon traded taboo for treasure. In America, the land of promise and land of plenty, the hallowed foundry of Ford and Edison, we augured again the future of industry. Our superfluous corpses cared not a whit for formaldehyde infusions and requiems with frankincense. Funerals are for families. Convert the rest to coal. As Jefferson, that firebrand of American ingenuity, once wrote, “I am increasingly persuaded that the earth belongs exclusively to the living.”

* * *

According to Covanta Marion’s website, the plant “processes approximately 550 tons of garbage each day” and generates “13.1 megawatts of electricity each hour,” enough to power a small city. Among all that trash, amid dumpsters of rotting food and vats of industrial sewage, the plant roasts some 1,900 tons of “medical waste” each year — a fuming mountain of chucked organs, severed hands, and fetal remains that weighs more than ten blue whales.

Marion County boasts of this modern wonder on its website, recording the daily scene in an encomium of doting detail. “Each day, about 130 loaded refuse trucks arrive at the facility,” the report begins, cinematically, as though the lede in a high-gloss brochure from the Convention and Visitors’ Bureau. “Once there, they are weighed by truck scales,” to assure the county it is getting the full amount of fuel it has paid for. “The truck then proceeds to the tippling floor, where the garbage is dumped into a 34-foot-deep pit. Nearly 3,000 tons of refuse can be held in the pit at a time. An overhead crane mixes the garbage in the pit,” whisking it into a uniform mousse to be “burned at temperatures reaching 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit,” a process whose steam “drives turbines which generate electrical power.” Weekend vacationists will want to premeditate their enthusiasm, the county warns: “Public tours are held by appointment only.”

An ambitious franchise, Covanta has exported its methods beyond the state’s borders. Covanta now operates “over 40 energy-from-waste facilities” throughout North America. Soon the fog of cadaver kilns may fill the air of all 50 states.

In its map for the future, Covanta shows a visionary flair. It hopes to facilitate the use of organic waste, perhaps some of it medical, in “Department of Transportation (DOT) Roadside/Median Work,” in “Food/Ornamentals Production at Farms/Greenhouses,” in “Golf Course Applications,” in “Rooftop Gardens,” in “Athletic Fields and Parks,” in “Landscaping.”

The possibilities astound the imagination.

* * *

While a certain logic prevails, the stomach fails, and the fumes of Covanta Marion can make a man sick. At times the belly knows what the brain discounts, and a man should make like the ancients and read the entrails. Revulsion can reveal un-obvious truths, here as elsewhere. As the ethicist Leon Kass writes, there is wisdom in repugnance.

To some, the affair reeks of Slough Crematorium, the plant in Huxley’s novel “Brave New World” where the dead are converted into fertilizer. Slough evokes a capitalist state at its nauseous extreme — a society that reduces every person, or thing, to a resource. As economics supplant ethics, whatever was, whoever was, ultimately whoever is, fades to a figure on the bottom line. Left unchecked, the machine of consumerism hollows everything into the shell of a commodity.

The dead may no longer be human, but it is inextricably human to think of them as such. And if we defile our fly-eaten kin as a matter of course, we’re bound to corrupt the way we think of our peers with a pulse. Society arose from the dignified removal of the decaying. The habit is dyed in the fabric of every national flag, from Sumer to the States. Graves kept us in a single place and laid the fundament for sedentary society. In binding us to our past, reverence for the dead — not only for deceased individuals but for the departed as a class and a category — gave us a past. In so doing, it formed the basis of cultural memory and civilization. Trashing the passed-on means junking the past. Do that, and you repackage a society’s history as its detritus. A society that constantly recycles itself — here in the most literal, the most vulgar way possible — is ultimately unaccountable to moral commitments across time. It is a society without values, answering to appetite alone — what Wyndham Lewis calls a “moronic inferno.”

This is the domain of late-stage capitalism. It is a society that eats everything — including, as is the case in Marion County, its own excrement.

Look on our dynamos of stiffs, with their tinder tots and amputation embers, and you’ll get a vision of a hellhole. The scene is a live-action Hieronymus Bosch through a filter of red, white and blue. What’s worse is its picture of the future. When the next one arises, hope they’ll pull the plug and cool the fires. Mind the dead. The dead will haunt the living.

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This effort to destroy the religious liberty of the Westboro Baptist Church comes on the heels of Arizona Governor Jan Brewer’s recent decision to (according to some) destroy the religious liberty of business owners by vetoing a law that would endorse their ability to discriminate against gay people. Conservatives cried oceans of tears at the prospect of enforcing economic anti-discrimination against bigot bakers, citing their abstract commitment to content-neutral religious liberty. Yet, here we are presented with exactly the same situation, and conservatives are strangely quiet.

Their quiet is particularly odd because the Missouri law targeting the WBC is a much greater infringement on religious liberty than economic anti-discrimination laws are.

In the case of economic anti-discrimination, the law neither forbids individuals from doing things required by their religious beliefs nor forces individuals to do things that are prohibited by their religious beliefs. Individuals with religious objections to operating discrimination-free businesses are free not to operate a business. Nobody forces them to do so. Insofar as religions don’t require individuals to open businesses, anti-discrimination regulations that dissuade them from doing so do not keep them from adhering to their religion either.

In the case of the funeral rules though, the law is forbidding the WBC from doing things required by their religious beliefs. From their voluminous TV interviews, it is clear that their deeply held religious beliefs command them to witness at funerals in the manner that they do. It is an article of their faith that they must spread the truth of God’s condemnation of America’s embrace of homosexuality and worship of the military at funerals, especially those of dead American soldiers whose deaths they regard as a function of God’s punishment of America. But now Missouri law forbids them from doing so.

So the funeral anti-picketing law actually forbids people from doing things that are specifically required by their religious beliefs while economic anti-discrimination law does not. The anti-picketing law generates a world where the WBC must necessarily violate the commandments of their religion while the anti-discrimination law does not. If you seriously believed in the principle of content-neutral religious liberty, the WBC case would be far more troubling and elicit far more outrage. Yet somehow it doesn’t.

The reason why it doesn’t is not mysterious. As I wrote earlier about the gay-bashing Duck Dynasty kerfuffle last December, arguments that proceed by appealing to content-neutral procedural justice are almost universally disingenuous and non-serious. In actual reality, people side with those with whom they sympathize substantively, and then temporarily adopt whatever content-neutral procedural rules generate their preferred conclusion. This is as true of the justness of firing people for saying unpopular things as it is for the justness of laws that might restrict religious liberty.

Here, conservatives can eject gallons of spittle from their mouths when it comes to discriminating business-owners because they sympathize with those owners. They can imagine either themselves, people they know, or people in their political tribe wanting to run a business without having to service gay people or gay weddings. And it makes them feel bad that those people won’t be able to carry on like that, that those people will either have to find another way to make an income or reluctantly comply with anti-discrimination rules. Because they find such people with those particular beliefs and commitments sympathetic (beliefs they also hold, or once held, or that are held by people they know), they mobilize any number of largely disingenuous abstract appeals to content-neutral religious liberty in support of those people.

Conservatives cannot sympathize with the Westboro Baptist Church, however. If anything, it is conservatives that seem most disturbed by WBC’s form of witnessing about God, probably because it is so disrespectful to the dead soldiers that conservative cultural circles hold up as demigods. Naturally, then, the pretended respect for content-neutral religious liberty fails to mobilize for WBC. Their message and their form of delivering it does not garner the necessary sympathy among conservatives for that to happen.

The fact that content-neutral appeals to specific processes are shell arguments that mask the real motivation of those making them is important to keep in mind as we progress. Anti-gay bigots are still sympathetic enough to conservatives that they can mobilize pretend shell arguments in their favor. As with racism, however, that will fade. The religious objections to racial integration no longer carry enough sympathy for pretend arguments about procedural liberty to gain that much currency among conservatives. The same will be true of anti-gay bigotry soon enough, and the hand-waving about procedural justice (which is not even violated in the case of anti-discrimination for reasons explained above) will fall away.

The post Westboro Baptist Church’s massive setback — that no one’s talking about appeared first on Salon.com.

Our classroom had a long window overlooking the old part of town where the divey restaurants, turquoise pawn shops, and Indian trading posts existed in a faraway galaxy. I put my finger to the window: E.T. phone home. There were few Native kids at my school, no silver, coral or bright beadwork designs. The only color in that space was Sister’s anger.

The questions continued. When was the funeral? What would it be like?

She paced like a caged cat in front of her desk. Then she told us to put our arms down and launched into a story about her own first funeral: “Suddenly my little sister was on fire, she shot out the back door and ran into the yard and it was windy and I yelled at her to stop but she wouldn’t stop and the flames grew bigger and bigger.”

Sister had been heating metal tongs on a gas burner to curl the little girl’s hair. The tongs smoldered against her thin cotton collar and the fabric burst into flames. Sister emphasized the word “thin” as if the gossamer quality of the fabric was the most important detail, the one her family had used to assuage her guilt after the funeral: “The baby’s pajamas were paper thin — if she’d been wearing a better pair they wouldn’t have caught fire so easily.”

Despite being tiny, Sister Benedict had muscle and spunk. Her hugs were a vice. She used a windmill pitch to strike us out in softball. I’d shot up over winter break — a stocking full of candy, tamales and green chile stew — by the time I returned my forehead had reached her nose. Yet her presence remained gigantic. She spoke with fervor; her conviction made her grand.

Her childhood story crept over me like ice. At first it was the gore that unsettled me — the way she described the charred skin that slid off her sister’s body — but in the end it was the way Sister Benedict had tried to save her. “I tackled my sister with a blanket and rolled her around in the grass to smother the flames but her hair had melted against her head and she looked unrecognizable.”

Sister Benedict’s face, glacier pale, receded into her black habit as she paced. Her breath came jagged and uneven.

She’d often spoken of her childhood: some grassy Midwestern place that felt geographically vague. My life, tucked into the far northwestern corner of nowhere New Mexico, was limited yet Sister Benedict managed to conjure solid images. I could see her in an old car’s rumble seat, walking to the “picture show,” shining silverware for gentleman callers who failed to arrive. She claimed that God spoke to her, more than once, in moments of great despair — “Quit shining silverware for suitors and start shining your soul for Jesus” — his voice blasting down the chimney like he was on the roof with a bullhorn.

Now Sister stared at us with a pitiless gaze. “There was nothing the doctors could do for Sissy and they sent her home to die,” she said.

I dug my fingernails into my palms and waited. I could hear some of the girls start sniffling but didn’t dare to look around.

“It took her a week to die and I was sitting right next to her when she saw the angels come. Stop sniffling!” She rapped her desk with her knuckles. “There is nothing simpler than death, no reason to hide it from children, and you will open your mouths wide when you sing at the funeral.”

My eyes were dry bones. Sister sat down at her desk and seemed suddenly aware of me appraising her.

“Let’s get out our math books,” she said pleasantly, speaking directly to me. Refusing to blink, I saw her eyes narrow.

That night when I brushed my teeth for bed I looked in the mirror, frightened that Sister had seen the divide, the two halves of me, the way the left side of my face was lower than the right. I was a feral child and the left side of my face contained evidence of the fact. The wilderness, the howling, the dry heat and exposed white bones picked of their meat, blanched by the sun and crawling with ants in the desert, everything we fear — the animal in us — lived in this half of my body.

Of course, certain parents complained about the curling iron story as well as the upcoming choir performance at the funeral. The following week the principal, Sister Michael Ann, a young nun with gentle eyes, came to visit our classroom. Several kids, including Robert, didn’t show up on the day of the funeral and Sister Benedict was peeved but she gave us orders like it was up to us, the brave ones willing to join the archangel army, to march over to the church and sing like fierce celestial warriors.

“You’ll have to come down from the choir loft to receive Communion and I have to warn you, the casket may be open.” Most of us had never seen a dead body. “If it is — don’t stare — but don’t avoid looking either. A polite glance as you walk by, his family will be there watching you. Remember, this is an important businessman who was loved by many people.”

We lined up at the door single file and walked across the school grounds to the church. It was a windy day and I shivered in my hand-me-down school uniform. We curled up the spiral stairs to the choir loft, genuflected alongside the pews, and scooted our way down the bench until we arrived at our assigned places. My seatmates and I, in unison, pulled the kneelers down to the floor and knelt on their hard wood. We said a prayer before sitting, as Sister had taught us to do. I had a spot in the front row from which I could gaze down over the congregation and easily see everything.

The old brick church had long stained-glass windows that filtered drowsy light. The building always made me calm. There was something about the vaulted ceilings, the buttressed arches, the altar out in front with burning candles and incense. Today I saw the mourners dressed in black. They sat in the front two rows. I imagined their suffering, remembered our catechism’s claim that there was an eternal value in it. I examined the paintings we called the Stations of the Cross: Jesus being crowned with thorns, Jesus being scourged at the pillar, Jesus falling to the ground with the cross on his shoulder in a puddle of blood. The paintings hung along the wall at eye level, closer than usual since we were upstairs in the loft.

Sister Angela Marie, Sacred Heart School’s resident organ player, appeared on my left. She was ancient. She barely lifted her feet when she walked, always moving in a shuffle, but she came to life in front of her keyboard and had taught us a gazillion hymns. We listened to the readings, followed by the gospel and the eulogy, standing and sitting and kneeling on cue while we punctuated the service with song. We opened our mouths wide. “You shall cross the barren desert but you shall not die of thirst. You shall wander far in safety though you do not know the way. You shall speak your words to foreign men and they will understand.”

I stared closely at the family of the dead as we sang, the wife, his adult children. It was impressive; they held their grief with austerity. Their suit jackets, from our vantage point above, looked perfectly pressed, without wrinkles, and when they cried they lifted their tissues up and down, cleaning their noses in a controlled manner that muffled the sound. When I went down for communion the casket was closed, a fact I had noted immediately upon entering the church. At first I’d been disappointed but now, relieved of the command to look at the body as we filed by the casket in the center aisle, I had the chance to observe the oldest woman, the man’s wife, at a close and personal proximity.

As I came toward her in her pew I could see her shoulders shimmering, almost (but not quite) trembling under the fine black cloth, as if an earthquake wanted to escape her body but she knew how to keep the rumbling deep inside so that only the faintest, smallest trace of the shuddering escaped her core and made it to the surface. I stuck out my tongue for the Eucharist, saying, “Amen,” to Father Ben and then hung a left and crossed right in front of her. I kept my face forward but could hear her choked sobs as I passed.

There was no way to get inside it. No way to see what death taught. My clothes felt scratchy. My button-up choked me. The collar was too tight, as were my French braids, and my hair was pulling at my face making it feel taut as a hardened mask.

The following week my sisters and I were lounging in front of the TV — in that sacred time on Saturday morning when no parents appeared and no nuns chased us down, when we were free to watch Hanna-Barbera cartoons and eat as many bowls of Lucky Charms as we wanted, when we were happy to have escaped the tall scratchy socks and the perfectly lined desks of our Catholic school education — when our mother appeared in the middle of our sock-strewn mess.

She had mascara smeared around her eyes like a raccoon. I looked at her mouth as she spoke, the wrinkles around her lips radiated in a pattern that reminded me of an overripe apple. I instinctively knew and reached out to grasp my little sister’s hand as she delivered the news. She said, “Your Uncle Johnny and Aunt Anita died last night. They flipped off the bridge between the reservation and Yuma and drowned in the car.”

I don’t know how long the idea sat there, obscured by the image of murky river water and inhaled algae, before I thought of our cousin Tonya, Uncle Johnny’s only child, a 4-year-old girl with glossy eyes and a helmet-like bob. Tonya collected small things from people, the people she liked most. The tinier the better, she kept the collection in an old cigar box under her bed. My sister Joan had given her a fancy bobby pin with a small glass butterfly at the tip. When we saw her during Christmas and summer break I always tried to illicit a request, thinking maybe she’d ask me for something, but she never did.

Mom had shut off the television and was sitting in a crumpled heap on the couch. She said, “I’ve already started packing. I don’t want to hear a peep from you guys. Your dad was up all night on the phone with his brothers and sisters and he barely fell asleep. When he wakes up we’re taking off.”

The car Uncle Johnny had been driving was a long, sporty bullet with electric windows that seized up and stopped working once they sank in the water. The windows trapped them in the car, refused to roll down. When Dad woke up, bloodshot and heavy, he made us help load the van with our bags. We piled inside and drove home with him bug-eyed and staring. We crossed the border from New Mexico into Arizona and started the long journey across the Navajo reservation to our grandfather’s reservation in Yuma. Dad stared out the window until it grew dark. When my sisters and Mom fell asleep I moved to my spot on the ice chest between the two captains seats, like I always did, and he started talking. He said Johnny should have waited until the water inside the car rose all the way to the ceiling and the pressure outside matched the pressure inside, maybe then they could have got out.

When the divers first went down looking for victims or bodies, it was dark and they came up saying there was no one in the car. But the day grew lighter and the sky turned pink like it does in the desert, a full half-hour before the sun actually peeks, and the divers found Uncle Johnny and Aunt Anita at sunrise, hugging each other in the back seat of the car. They were locked together—their long hair floating around them in the water like streamers.

The traditional funeral on our reservation was nothing like the one Sister Benedict had us sing for at Sacred Heart School. First there was a Mass at St. Thomas Indian Mission, a formality of sorts, and then Father Rusty looked over us and all our tribal relatives in the congregation. I saw in his eyes that he knew — of course he knew — he had been invited to attend. An old Franciscan up on the Mohave reservation had rebelled against the papacy back in the day, the story went, and submitted to a tribal cremation when cremation was still considered heresy by the Catholic Church. Before the pope had heard God say something new when he called down the chimney and therefore changed the law.

“Go your way now,” Father Rusty said grimly as we filed out and headed down to the tribal cemetery, Cry House, and cremation grounds.

We piled into the van, looking around at our cousins as they filed into their own jalopies, and drove onto the cemetery grounds in a long procession. The grounds were and are a dirt-and-rock lot with white stone graves at one end and a single building with a large ramada and attached kitchen at the other. The grounds are gated and the big iron wrought gates locked behind us after driving through. We went into the Cry House, the big room in the long building. It had pew-like benches like those at Sacred Heart. My Uncle Johnny and Aunt Anita were laid out on two long tables in the center of the room, their bodies bloated, swelled up by the water they had drowned in. We sat with their bodies all afternoon. We leaned on our parents and whispered with our cousins. It grew boring. We asked if we could go outside and play.

“If you stay away from the graves,” Dad said. “Go back behind the kitchen.”

My sisters and I went with the herd of cousins and second cousins; we had eight remaining uncles and aunts and were therefore an enormous gang. We hunted around for frogs but we were too far from the canals to find any. We looked for clouds shapes in the sky but they were rare in the desert, it wasn’t the right kind of day, and all the clouds we saw were stretched too thin to be anything. We decided to play tag. The question “Who’s going to be it?” was resolved with a game of fists in the center: one person knocked out at a time, by the song’s final word as it landed on an outstretched fist. Our favorite sing-song went like this: “My mother and your mother are hanging out clothes. My mother pops your mother right in the nose. What color was the blood?” “Purple. P-u-r-p-l-e! And you are not it!”

Then we dodged and ran. We laughed and pushed each other down and fought and made up. We had fun until it grew dark and our parents brought us back inside. The gourd rattlers, men from the bird clan, picked up their instruments. It was starting. They stood in two long lines at the far end of the drowned bodies, moving their feet and hips slightly but staying rooted to their place. They sang songs in the Yuma language about the journey after death, the three days the spirits roam, and the lives of my Uncle Johnny and Aunt Anita in particular. All night they sang.

All night the women in my family danced the clothes. Neat piles of clothing — an outfit for Uncle Johnny, an outfit for Aunt Anita, an outfit for Grandma, an outfit for Grandpa — folded and sitting on a corner table. There were outfits for other greats and one baby outfit for my dead brother. Grandma’s dress was flower-printed with a button-up breast and collar, just like she used to wear. The shoes looked like nurse’s shoes, soft rubber soles, the pantyhose were caramel, lighter-than-her-skin, the type that she preferred. Each deceased member of our family had their size, measurements and style set out with the shoes on top and bright scarves tying the bundles together. Then my aunts and female relatives picked the clothing bundles up and started dancing the clothing to the gourd rattler’s music.

They swayed side to side, lifting and lowering the clothing bundles with their feet planted in place, all night they did this movement, without setting down the bundles. After hours of this subtle dancing, the earth-bound women holding the clothes always fade. As an adult holding the clothes, I have felt myself fade. I disappear beneath the bundles as the people the clothes represent return to us. Their movements say: This is the way I ran pigeon-toed across the field, this is the way I turned at the waist and shot a grin over my shoulder. Remember how my eyes curved into crescent moons when I laughed?

They say this is the way we argued, first with arms folded determined to stay calm, and then pushing each other harder and harder.

Finally 4 a.m. arrived, that hour when the world is at its darkest, when the bodies look otherworldly and scary and I shrank against the wall afraid. Their watery appearance, the long wavy hair on their heads, the permanently closed eyes, felt like they were coming for me. Their bodies somehow ensured my own death. The other families, the ones not so close to Uncle Johnny and Aunt Anita, started to help us, started to help Dad and his brothers and sisters with their grief. They start to help by crying. The women did it mostly, their voices deep and mournful in those cries, “Ah-ah, ha!” They started crying slow and then rose in unison, their mouths wide open, their cries rising and melding together in the dimly lit room. Outside the windows, the Sonoran desert was dark as it could be.

My father’s body started to shake when he heard them cry. I could feel it trembling where I leaned on it, the earthquake rising until his heart burst open and there it was for me to see. He was open. I saw his grief, his exposed bones, and heard his howling. I saw his suffering as he got up and went down the aisle toward that numinous altar of death, where, holding his baby brother’s hand, he took off his turquoise ring and slipped it onto Uncle Johnny’s water-swollen pinky. He stumbled back. The women cried, “Ah-ah, ha,” and the floodgates opened.

Then the sun started to rise. A pink hue began to appear on the horizon out the window. The Cry House doors were unlocked and thrown open. The men grabbed the corners of the caskets and started walking slowly towards the door. The gourd singers, the bird clan, grew louder in their song as they saw the sunrise approaching. They timed the procession, 15 steps and stop, gourds rattling, voices rising, 20 steps and stop. The men carried the bodies, starting and stopping according to the procession, out the doors and across the rock-and-dirt lot toward the cemetery, 100 feet away.

I held tight to Dad’s hand and walked beside his trembling surface. A pile of cottonwood stood in the cemetery: the funeral pyre. It was directly over where Uncle Johnny’s and Aunt Anita’s cemetery plots and white tombstones would be once it all burned away. Their bodies were removed from their caskets and placed directly on top of the cottonwood. The caskets were turned upside down alongside them. People stepped forward and placed the clothes from the dance on top of the pyre. My sisters and I stepped forward and placed gift blankets on top. Then we gave the ceremonial shawls we were wearing during the service as gifts, gifts that would go with Uncle Johnny and Aunt Anita to the next world.

The Cry House groundskeeper lit the cremation fires just as the sun showed its face over the horizon. The sun’s fire and the cremation flames leaping, the water giving itself to the smoke and the smoke rising, soon any proof that they had been here was gone. That afternoon my oldest cousins went out to the black ashes where Uncle Johnny and Aunt Anita’s tombstones, once purchased, would be placed. My cousins had whitewashed a pile of softball-size rocks and they carried them out there while we watched. They shaped the rocks around the two graves in the shape of a large white heart.

When I went back to school the following week, Sister Benedict made me stand at the front of the class.

“Tell them where you’ve been,” she said, in one of her moods.

“I was at my uncle’s funeral,” I said.

“Tell them how he died, tell them who was in the car with him,” she said. She looked at me, her eyes seeking a teachable moment about the dangers of excessive drinking, of raging against the pain.

I said, “It was a party and he wrecked the car.”

“Tell them who he was with,” she said.

“It was my aunt,” I said. “It was her birthday.”

I thought of the gourd rattles and the midnight criers. I thought of how the bodies looked in the dark. I thought of my own small body, already aged, frail and dying itself. I looked at Sister Benedict and I wanted to howl. I thought of the burning sun and the smoking barren desert we had crossed on our way back inside the Cry House after the cremation. I thought of the hymns we had sung in church and the bird clan and the way these words were spoken to a classroom of foreign men.

I turned away from Sister Benedict and felt her talon-hands shoving me back toward my desk. I leaned backward into her push, dragging my feet as she urged me along. I wanted to howl and howl loud but I shoved it all down, deep in my body. I felt the rumble and tremor but I refused to let it rise to the surface. I refused to let it rise because it was beautiful. I had seen that it was beautiful — and Sister did not understand — and Sister did not deserve to see.

This piece is the latest in a series by feminists of color, curated by Roxane Gay. To submit to the series, email rgay@salon.com.

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When faced with our own mortality, we humans are notorious for desperately, and clumsily, seeking reassurance of our own vitality. It’s what’s behind so many funeral clichés, like drinking too much or falling into bed with a fellow griever. These are attempts at chasing the feeling of being fully alive. These days, selfies are how we make ourselves real, to ourselves and to the outside world. So, it’s no wonder that some of us turn to our iPhones in these moments of loss. It’s a way of saying, “I still exist.”

Just take a look at this mirror selfie of a girl pushing out her lips, along with the caption, “Cried off all my makeup so ew. But funeral.” Another shows a young woman dressed all in black above the caption, “Funeral dress from today. Goodbye great uncle John, May you rest in peace. We will never forget you.” Then there’s this image of a young woman making a sad-pout version of duck-face. Her caption: “You never appreciate what you have till its gone. R.I.P. Grandpa, you will be missed.” They may not be the most honest or vulnerable portraits of despair, but they are attempts at connection. We all want our sadness to matter, just as we want our lives to count for something.

If we’re lucky, grief is a rare and unusual event. When my mom was diagnosed with terminal cancer I took scores of photos of myself crying. I didn’t post these on Instagram, and I will likely never show them to another soul, but these moments of extreme sorrow felt like something worth documenting. Part of me knew that my grief would not feel so real even a year down the line, and I wanted to preserve it, to honor it. I knew I would forget the depth of that hurt, in the same way that we forget some of the pain of childbirth — it’s part of what allows us to continue living, or having children.

So much about death, and the grief that it inspires, is abstract. Someone is there and then they are gone — where did they go? Are they really gone or have they just gone on a really long vacation? When my mom died, I remember darkly wishing that I could have one of her bones. Not something as ethereal as her ashes; I wanted a tangible, whole piece of her to hold onto. Photos have a way of making things concrete — whether it’s of our grandma in a casket or our dazed, post-funeral face. Who is anyone to judge what helps another person make sense of the biggest question that we live, and die, with?

Of course, some of these are more defensible than others — but even the worst of Selfies at Funerals fail to inspire my outrage. The young guy posing next to a statue of a breast-feeding woman, throwing up a peace sign along with the caption, “Killin the selfie game at pop’s funeral”? Perhaps — OK, definitely — he has a lot of growing up to do, but there is nothing unusual about turning to comedy in life’s bleakest moments. Some of us are simply better at laughing than crying. The teens en route to a funeral giddily posing with tongues hanging out, as though they’re on their way to a rock concert? I can hardly blame them for wanting to deny the reality of it all. That’s not to mention the many young people who are dragged along to funerals of people they barely know — and before they’re even ready to fully grasp the concept of death.

All of this is to say: The next time you see someone taking a selfie at a funeral, consider that rather than evidence of our inhumanity, it might actually be proof of the opposite.

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I also feel you’re my brother in that we have different tastes, but there are things we both love, which was family, work, people in all their imperfection, food, alcohol, talking, rage, and a desire to bring the whole structure crashing down. We amused each other.

The image of my uncles and father reminded me of something that happened between us one time. Because these guys were such men — your father and these men from Italy. And you were going through a crisis of faith about yourself and acting, a lot of things, were very upset. I went to meet you on the banks of the Hudson River, and you told me, you said, “You know what I want to be? I want to be a man. That’s all. I want to be a man.” Now, this is so odd, because you are such a man. You’re a man in many ways many males, including myself, wish they could be a man.

The paradox about you as a man is that I always felt personally, that with you, I was seeing a young boy. A boy about Michael’s age right now. ‘Cause you were very boyish. And about the age when humankind, and life on the planet are really opening up and putting on a show, really revealing themselves in all their beautiful and horrible glory. And I saw you as a boy — as a sad boy, amazed and confused and loving and amazed by all that. And that was all in your eyes. And that was why, I think, you were a great actor: because of that boy who was inside.

Chase wrapped the speech with a nod to the show: “You know, everybody knows that we always ended an episode with a song,” he said.

“And the song, as far as I’m concerned, would be Joan Osborne’s “(What If God Was) One Of Us?”

Read the full eulogy here.

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May was National Bicycle Month.This year the Ride of Silence, a Bike Week annual event, marked its tenth anniversary. The Ride began in 2003 in Dallas following the death of cyclist Larry Schwartz; it was first organized by his friends, two weeks after his funeral. One thousand cyclists participated. What began as a one-time event turned into an international phenomenon in which millions of cyclists joined at 368 registered events in all 50 states and 26 countries on six continents—a global event. This year I participated in the local event in Fort Wayne, Indiana. What struck me most—and this may be an occupational hazard—was the religious nature of it.The participants themselves recognized the solemn nature of this event. We did not speak to one another unless communicating instructions for safe travel and directions. We tied black arm bands on our left biceps in memory of cyclists who had died in collisions with motorists. We were also told that this was a funeral procession.

This fact was quite poignant to me. This winter, I job-shadowed at a local funeral home on the weekends. I did this because my professional prospects seemed bleak, and I wanted to explore career options. I performed a number of tasks, including assisting in an embalming. Most of the time I was part of the funeral procession.

So what did the Ride of Silence have in common with funeral ritual?

Funeral processions run red lights and stop signs. Cars straddle multiple lanes and command oncoming traffic to stop out of respect for the deceased and the mourners. The unique quality of the event allows for these transgressions to occur, creating what anthropologists refer to as “liminal” spaces—threshold events, existing just at that moment when people cross from one defined space to another.

Like a funeral procession, our ride inverted all established order. Escorted by police, we rode through red lights while volunteer cyclists blocked cross-traffic lanes. We flouted traffic laws and conventions in the name of proclaiming our place on the roads.

The ride also crossed geographic and social boundaries. We started at a park downtown, rode through downtown, and then entered adjacent residential areas.

The Ride of Silence, like those rituals that break down barriers between the sacred and the mundane, brought cycling not only to the financial, business, and government buildings of Fort Wayne—we also rode through neighborhoods of varying socioeconomic status: in some neighborhoods, families of color looked on as patrol cars escorted some fifty white cyclists in front of their homes; in others, people looked on appreciatively. Our riding community may not have been reflective of all demographics but the diverse assortment of settings overlapped the many uses that cycling serves for people in the city.

The Ride of Silence served to remind us of death, while celebrating life. Each of us recognized that while we are individually at risk, we occupy the lanes collectively and look out for one other’s safety. The event affirmed our cycling community and raised awareness of groups that shared a concern for cyclists’ rights. It also served as a coping strategy for the suffering that each of must embrace. That is, we come to terms with our own vulnerabilities and frailties. We ride for the love of riding. But we are all susceptible to being clipped by a vehicle, to a tire blowout, or to sliding on loose surfaces. Cycling is dangerous, and we honor the risks we take as we ride.

While I was riding my bike the next morning, I was meditating on these things. Just as I was coming to the part about recognizing our own frailties, I slid on mud and was thrown from my bike. My clips released, and my chest and knee met the pavement with extreme prejudice. I slid about five feet and was covered in mud. After picking myself up, I continued riding. Six miles later, I slipped again and fell hard on my left shoulder and left hip. I continued again for the remaining twelve miles to get home. At one point, I was waiting for a green light at a busy intersection. A man in a truck next to me made a face that communicated that my mud-bathed, blood-soaked leg looked rough. I just shrugged my shoulder and began to pedal when the light turned green.

Unlike so many others, I get to ride another day. I am reminded every day of this fact, and I will continue to participate in rituals that recognize my own frailty and honor that of others.

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But criticism is growing of the lavish scale and cost of Thatcher’s send-off – the latter currently estimated at 10 million pounds (an estimated $15.3 million), plus a 5 million pound security operation, to be funded using public money. Politicians are increasingly breaking ranks to question the wisdom and appropriateness of laying Thatcher to rest in a manner more usually reserved for royalty, as well as the spending of quite so much money at a time of contentious enforced austerity.

The former Labour politician Lord Prescott has described the funeral as a “political propaganda exercise” for the governing Tory party, while more than one of his colleagues have called for it to be paid for by the private donations of the rich rather than by the British taxpayer. Even Buckingham Palace has apparently voiced concern over granting a ceremonial funeral with full military honors to a woman who remains such a controversial figure.

This public criticism follows a groundswell of popular discontent both at the prospect of a ceremonial funeral and over the disputed legacy of Thatcher herself. For the past week, British social media has been ablaze with indignation at the prospect of 10 million pounds being “wasted” on the funeral, when Britain is simultaneously being asked to swallow cuts to welfare and public services at a time when the cost of living is outstripping wages for increasing numbers of people. An online petition to protest at the expense of the funeral has attracted almost 30,000 signatures.

This opposition can be glimpsed beyond the responses of government and the mainstream media, which have largely confined themselves to eulogies from politicians and public figures, allowing little deviation from a party line determined to downplay or demonize any overt criticism of Thatcher. Britain’s first female prime minister presided over perhaps the most politically divisive decade in recent British history, the economic and social effects of which are still being felt, but little of this division has been explored or even admitted to in mainstream media in the wake of her death. Financiers and businessmen who did well from Britain’s time under Thatcher have been granted airtime and column inches to be outspoken in their praise of her, while spokespeople for areas of the country devastated by the destruction of Britain’s manufacturing industry in the 1980s, and which remain blighted by long-term unemployment, poverty and lack of prospects, have been notable by their absence. In such a climate, the ensuing insistence upon an extravagant ceremonial funeral for Thatcher has been regarded by many hard-pressed citizens as an affront too far.

When news of Thatcher’s death broke in Britain at lunchtime on Monday, April 8, irreverent or actively jubilant responses were not difficult to come by, despite official efforts to give the impression of a nation united in grief. Throughout the day, spontaneous public gatherings were organized across the country, characterized more by catharsis than celebration. They were greeted nonetheless by criticism both from Thatcher’s expected defenders on the right wing of British politics – Prime Minister David Cameron branded them “disgraceful” – and from those on the left, who offered understanding but nonetheless urged any potential celebrants to behave with dignity.

These proscriptive responses from left and right appeared to willfully ignore not only the strength of feeling still inflamed by the negative effects of Thatcher’s policies, but also Britain’s time-honored tradition of popular protest, which does not shrink from being disrespectable and disruptive – even at state occasions, where the pomp of official ceremony has always been vulnerable to deflation by a populist pinprick.

At Wednesday’s funeral, however, protesters have called for opposition to be expressed in a peaceful and dignified way. Several groups intend to assemble at designated points along the route of the procession in order to symbolically express their rejection of Thatcher’s politics by turning their backs on the coffin as it passes. Rebecca Blum, one of many campaigners advocating the gesture, told the Guardian newspaper: “I don’t want to upset anyone but I feel very strongly that public money is being used to venerate a deeply controversial politician who caused huge suffering and devastated this country … I felt like it was important to let the world know that a lot of people in this country strongly disagreed with what Margaret Thatcher stood for.”

One of the least expected expressions of anti-Thatcher sentiment has been the campaign to push the “Wizard of Oz” song “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead” to the No. 1 position in the UK charts, which led to BBC Radio taking the unprecedented step of inserting a news item into its chart broadcast in order to explain the track’s sudden appearance, rather than allowing the track to be played in full. Absurd as it may have been as a method of protest, the campaign nevertheless forms part of a united front of opposition, as may any comparable actions taken during the funeral procession.

They stand alongside Britain’s spontaneous street parties on the day of Thatcher’s death, and last Saturday’s gathering of several thousand protesters in a dispiritingly rain-drenched Trafalgar Square, with attendees including anarchists, socialists and anti-capitalists of all stripes as well as unaligned Thatcher refuseniks. Also present in Trafalgar Square was a delegation of former mineworkers from northeast England, whose spokesman described Thatcher’s government as having been “a disaster” for their communities. Together, these disparate expressions of dissent reveal both the degree to which Britain remains a divided kingdom, and the extent to which the depth of these divisions is a direct result of actions taken by Thatcher herself.

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The people of Newtown weren’t yet ready to address the question just three days after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and a day after President Barack Obama pledged to seek change in memory of the children and six adults ruthlessly slain by a gunman packing a high-powered rifle.

“We’re just now getting ready to talk to our son about who was killed,” said Robert Licata, the father of a student who escaped harm during the shooting. “He’s not even there yet.”

Newtown officials couldn’t say whether Sandy Hook Elementary, where authorities said all the victims were shot at least twice, would ever reopen. State police Lt. Paul Vance said Monday at a news conference that it could be months before police turn the school back over to the district.

Monday classes were canceled and Newtown’s other schools were to reopen Tuesday. The district was making plans to send surviving Sandy Hook students to a former school building in a neighboring town, but they didn’t say when that would happen.

The gunman, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, was carrying an arsenal of hundreds of rounds of especially deadly ammunition, authorities said Sunday – enough to kill just about every student in the school if given enough time, raising the chilling possibility that the bloodbath could have been even worse.

The shooter decided to kill himself when he heard police closing in about 10 minutes into Friday’s attack, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said on ABC’s “This Week.”

At the interfaith service in Newtown on Sunday evening, Obama said he would use “whatever power this office holds” to engage with law enforcement, mental health professionals, parents and educators in an effort to prevent more tragedies like Newtown.

“What choice do we have?” Obama said on a stark stage that held only a small table covered with a black cloth, candles and the presidential podium. “Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard?”

The president first met privately with families of the victims and with the emergency personnel who responded to the shooting. Police and firefighters got hugs and standing ovations when they entered for the public vigil, as did Obama.

“We needed this,” said the Rev. Matt Crebbin, senior minister of the Newtown Congregational Church. “We need to be together here in this room. … We needed to be together to show that we are together and united.”

As Obama read some of the names of victims early in his remarks, sobs resonated throughout the hall. He closed by slowly reading the first names of each of the 20 children.

“God has called them all home,” he said. “For those of us who remain, let us find the strength to carry on and make our country worthy of their memory.”

The first funerals were planned Monday for Jack Pinto, a 6-year-old New York Giants fan who might be buried in wide receiver Victor Cruz’s jersey, and Noah Pozner, a boy of the same age who liked to figure out how things worked mechanically.

“He was just a really lively, smart kid,” said Noah’s uncle Alexis Haller, of Woodinville, Wash. “He would have become a great man, I think. He would have grown up to be a great dad.”

With more funerals planned this week, the road ahead for Newtown – which had already started purging itself of Christmas decorations in a joyful season turned mournful – was clouded.

“I feel like we have to get back to normal, but I don’t know if there is normal anymore,” said Kim Camputo, mother of two children, ages 5 and 10, who attend a different school. “I’ll definitely be dropping them off and picking them up myself for a while.”

Jim Agostine, superintendent of schools in nearby Monroe, said plans were being made for students from Sandy Hook to attend classes in his town this week.

Newtown police Lt. George Sinko said he “would find it very difficult” for students to return to the same school where they came so close to death. But, he added, “We want to keep these kids together. They need to support each other.”

Connecticut Education Commissioner Stefan Pryor said state construction employees are advising on renovating Sandy Hook, which serves grades kindergarten through four.

It wasn’t just Newtown that was concerned about the next steps for its schoolchildren. Across the country, vigilance was high. In an effort to ensure student safety and calm parents’ nerves, districts asked police departments to increase patrols and have sent messages to parents outlining safety plans they assured them are regularly reviewed and rehearsed.

Teachers girded themselves to be strong for their students and for questions and fears they would face in the classroom.

“It’s going to be a tough day,” said Richard Cantlupe, an American history teacher at Westglades Middle School in Parkland, Fla. “This was like our 9/11 for schoolteachers.”

Communities were on edge. In nearby Ridgefield, Conn., schools were locked down after a suspicious person was seen near train station.

Authorities say the gunman shot his mother, Nancy Lanza, at their home and then took her car and several of her guns to the school, where he broke in and shot his victims to death, then himself. A Connecticut official said the mother was found dead in her pajamas in bed, shot four times in the head with a .22-caliber rifle.

During his later rampage, terrified staffers at the school stayed hidden for hours, not knowing how many shooters there were.

Divorce paperwork released Monday showed that Nancy Lanza had the authority to make all decisions regarding Adam’s upbringing. The divorce was finalized in September 2009, when Adam Lanza was 17.

Federal agents have concluded that Lanza visited an area shooting range, but they do not know whether he actually practiced shooting there. Ginger Colbrun, a spokeswoman for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, would not identify the range or say how recently he was there.

Agents determined Lanza’s mother visited shooting ranges several times, but it’s not clear whether she took her son or whether he fired a weapon there, Colbrun said.

A law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said investigators are reviewing the contents of Lanza’s computer, as well as phone and credit card records, in an effort to piece together his activities leading up to the shooting. The official was not authorized to discuss the details of the case.

Lanza took classes at Western Connecticut State University when he was 16, and earned a B average, said Paul Steinmetz, spokesman for the school in Danbury. He said Monday that Lanza took his last class in the summer of 2009 and didn’t return.

Investigators have offered no motive, and police have found no letters or diaries that could shed light on it. They believe Lanza attended Sandy Hook many years ago, but they couldn’t explain why he went there Friday. Authorities said Lanza had no criminal history, and it was not clear whether he had a job.

Lanza is believed to have used a Bushmaster AR-15 rifle in the school attack, a civilian version of the military’s M-16 and a model commonly seen at marksmanship competitions. It’s similar to the weapon used in a recent shopping mall shooting in Oregon.

Versions of the AR-15 were outlawed in the United States under the 1994 assault weapons ban. That law expired in 2004, and Congress, in a nod to the political clout of the gun-rights lobby, did not renew it.

In some of the first regulatory proposals to rise out of the Newtown shooting, Democratic lawmakers and independent Sen. Joe Lieberman said Sunday that military-style assault weapons should be banned and that a national commission should be established to examine mass shootings.

“Assault weapons were developed for the U.S. military, not commercial gun manufacturers,” said Lieberman, of Connecticut, who is retiring next month. “This is a moment to start a very serious national conversation about violence in our society, particularly about these acts of mass violence.”

Gun rights activists remained largely quiet, all but one declining to appear on the Sunday talk shows. In an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Rep. Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican, defended the sale of assault weapons and said that the principal at Sandy Hook, who authorities say died trying to overtake the shooter, should herself have been armed.

—

Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers John Christoffersen, Ben Feller, Adam Geller, Jim Kuhnhenn and Michael Melia in Newtown; David Collins in Hartford, Conn.; Brian Skoloff in Phoenix; and Anne Flaherty in Washington.

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