Movie Review; Steel Magnolias

Mom’s trying to manage the caterers, the florists, and all the other hustle and bustle that comes with a wedding reception. Dad’s shooting blanks at the birds to make them vacate the premises. Jackson, the groom, is sneaking into Shelby’s room to tell her how much he loves her. However, amidst the laughter, beauty, and romance, there are clues that Shelby might not get the happy ending she’s hoping for. Shelby and her mom head to Truvy’s beauty shop to get her hair done before here wedding. As Shelby is happily talking about skinny-dipping with her soon-to-be husband and rhapsodizing about her very pink wedding, she suffers a hypoglycemic attack and her mother forces her to drink orange juice to raise her blood sugar. She recovers quickly, but her mom tells their friends that the doctor told Shelby she shouldn’t have children. We also learn that Shelby considered ending her engagement to Jackson so that he could have children with someone else. He wouldn’t even consider it and said they could adopt kids.

We see Shelby walking down the aisle with her father, the happy reception, and then life goes on for Shelby and Jackson. We see her visiting her mamma, M’Lynn, periodically and then coming home for the Christmas festival. It’s Christmastime when Shelby tells her mother that she’s pregnant and all she wants is for her mother to be happy for her. However, M’Lynn can’t be happy because she knows the doctor told Shelby it would be dangerous to get pregnant. Shelby begs for her support and tells her mom that she wasn’t able to adopt because of her Type 1 Diabetes. She adds that “I’d rather have 30 minutes of wonderful, than a lifetime of nothing special.”

The next time we see Shelby it’s Jackson’s first birthday and family and friends are singing about him being “Born on the 3rd of July.” Shelby’s decided to get her hair cut to make it easier to manage and she heads off to Truvy’s to get her haircut. Her friends are there and amid the laughter, we see the bruises on Shelby’s arms, and she says offhandly those are from dialysis. Her friends are stunned that she is in such bad health that she needs a transplant, and sad that it could take a long time to get one. However, Shelby reveals that her mother is going to give her a kidney.

Shelby gets her kidney and she’s healthy for a while, but her world comes crashing down at Halloween. She almost collapses in the NICU where she works and she does collapse when she gets home. Jackson finds their son Jack wandering around the house alone and the food burning on the stove. He finds Shelby, and she is rushed to the hospital in a coma. Despite the best efforts of her family, especially her mom who never leaves her side, and the doctors, Shelby’s condition is irreversible and they remove live support.

At Shelby’s funeral, her mother holds it together until almost everyone is gone, and then she lets her rage, her sadness, and her anger flow freely. Her friends support her by making her laugh and by Annelle, who worked with Truvy, telling M’Lynn that, boy or girl, she’s going to name her child after Shelby. The movie ends with Annelle being rushed to the hospital to give birth surrounded by her friends.

Although on the surface, much of this movie is a lighthearted romp about love and female friendship, grief is woven through it from the opening scene. We first encounter grief over the loss of a dream when we find out that Shelby shouldn’t have children and we realize she and Jackson are losing their dream of having their own child. Then we encounter M’Lynn’s grief over her daughter’s decision to risk her life to have a child. It is clear from the movie that M’Lynn was the one that managed Shelby’s medical life and that she understands, perhaps better than Shelby herself, how risky it is for Shelby to have a child.

M’Lynn’s hope and grief are palpable when she is in the hospital with Shelby almost willing her to open her eyes and when Shelby dies, M’Lynn remains strong for her family, until she is left standing alone at her daughter’s graveside looking at the spray of flowers on her casket. Then her raw emotion comes out, the anger, the grief, the sadness, and the hopelessness. I found her emotional outburst so realistic. And I am so glad that they did not have M’Lynn singing to the ground in tears. Instead she raged and she cried. And she rightfully got mad when Annelle told her that Shelby was in a better place.

If you haven’t seen this 35-year-old movie, take some time to watch it. Despite a few things that are out of date like smoking indoors and asking a woman if she was going to quit her job because she was getting married, it has aged very well.

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Movie Review: Terms of Endearment

Terms of Endearment begins with a mother’s fear that her daughter has died and ends with the reality of her daughter’s death. Love and grief are intertwined in this story that tells the story of the complicated relationship between Emma and her mother Aurora. Wikipedia does a good job explaining the story, but doesn’t recap the elements of grief and death from a thanatological perspective.

The movie starts with Aurora coming out from an evening out and going in to see her infant daughter still in the crib. She shakes her and when Emma starts crying she realizes she is still alive so she turns the lights out and leaves.

A few scenes later, we learn that Aurora’s husband, and Emma’s father, has died. Although we had not gotten to know him, in a way his death hangs over the entire film as Aurora is terrified of connecting with another man and even when her daughter dies decades later, she is still wearing her wedding ring. She continues to push men away until she finally takes a chance and lets the playboy astronaut Garrett into her bed and her heart. And although he is unable to tell her he loves her, he shows her by showing up when Emma is in the hospital dying of cancer. And he shows up for Emma’s children at her memorial service.

The love and grief of marriage and betrayal is also showcased in the film as Flap, Emma’s husband, has a relationship with a grad student that has him following her to Nebraska. Emma also seeks out love and tenderness elsewhere when she begins an affair with a banker who is kind to her and is in his own tormented marriage. She has to leave her lover behind when Flap decides the family is moving to Nebraska.

Despite the mutual affairs, there is still a deep love between Flap and Emma that is evidenced by the tender scenes in the hospital when Emma is dying. They are both still wearing their wedding rings when they embrace and share how much they still love each other, despite the pain they’ve caused each other.

The anticipatory grief is payable in the last part of the movie, when it becomes evident that Emma will die of her cancer. The saddest scene is when she tells her sons how much she loves them and tells her oldest not to beat himself up for not being able to tell her that he loves her. Her son is the only one who truly expresses anger over her death, as he lashes out and pushes her away.

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Memorials: Find a Grave

I’ve been sidelined from visiting physical cemeteries due to knee issues, but I’ve been exploring online memorials as part of my PhD work, so I thought I would share some of what I’m learning.

FindaGrave.com is unique in the online memorial space as it isn’t just a memorial site, it isn’t just an online site, and it isn’t just tied to one cemetery. Instead, it is a tool that allows you to find graves across the world, to contribute photos of graves and ancestors, and to memorialize the dead. Founded in 1995 by Jim Tipton to record his hobby of visiting the graves of famous people. It quickly became a place where people could share information about the graves of famous and non-famous (I hate the term ordinary) people. Even though the site was purchased by Ancestry.com in 2013, it is very much a crowdsourced site as contributors can post information about cemeteries, upload pictures of tombstones, and create memorials for loved ones. The site also makes it easy to find all this information.

FindaGrave.com’s titular feature lets you search through the 238 records on the site to locate the grave site of a particular person by name, date born, date died, cemetery location, and other fields. It also provides a bunch of other filters such as memorials without pictures of gravestones, without plot information, and more. The page for each gravesite, or memorial in FindaGrave parlance, contains whatever information is known about the person including birthdate, death date, and photos. As the site is owned by Ancestry.com, it also includes information about relatives. However, I learned from exploring my grandfather’s page that family members are only included if there is a memorial for the person. When I visited his page, I was a little hurt to see that my father wasn’t included, but digging in, I realized that I could add my father’s grave information and quickly connect him.

In addition to the basic information, users can include additional information, such as an obituary. Users can also leave flowers with notes. However, unlike other online cemeteries or memorial sites, users cannot leave stories or messages for their loved ones. What is pretty cool about this site is the ability to add links to parents and spouses. Adding a memorial is super easy as I added my father’s information in a few minutes and once added, he showed up on the pages for his parents and siblings.

In addition to being able to find graves (aka memorials), FindaGrave.com also lets you search for and get basic information about the 576,766 cemeteries in 249 listed on its site. You can search for cemeteries by name or by location. If you search by location, you can view cemeteries in a list view or on the map. The list view provides basic information about the cemetery including location, number of memorials, and other information.

The page for each cemetery includes available information. As the site is crowdsourced, the information varies by cemetery as for some it is just the basics such as address and number of burials, but for others it includes write ups on the cemetery and other information. The best feature on the cemetery pages is the ability to search for a grave on the page. While this is definitely useful for searching for loved ones, it can also help you find the graves of original settlers to an area or find the first folks buried in the cemetery.

I found the coolest features of the site by accident when I was searching for cemeteries. Next to the map are options to favorite cemeteries so you can easily find your way back to them and to create a virtual cemetery with graves you may want to revisit. For cemeteries, you can just click to favorite them from the cemetery page. For memorials, you want to save, you’ll first need to create a virtual cemetery, then from the memorial page, you can click to save.

Another buried feature of FindaGrave.com is the News and Announcements section. I often ignore news and announcements sections unless I’m looking for some corporate announcement or need help with a feature. However, as I was poking around the site, I clicked on News and Announcements and found that instead of just boring corporate stuff, there were some pretty cool articles including one on recipe tombstones, another about the ghost army of WWII, and others about cool gravestones or people. There were also volunteer spotlights and tips and tricks for finding people on the site.

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Weekly Wrap Up: 07/20/2023

If you’ve missed what’s happening at Death and Crackers, check out the articles below for content posted this week and for some interesting posts from around the Web.

  • Movie Review; Steel Magnolias

    Mom’s trying to manage the caterers, the florists, and all the other hustle and bustle that comes with a wedding reception. Dad’s shooting blanks at the birds to make them vacate the premises. Jackson, the groom, is sneaking into Shelby’s … Continue reading →


  • Movie Review: Terms of Endearment

    Terms of Endearment begins with a mother’s fear that her daughter has died and ends with the reality of her daughter’s death. Love and grief are intertwined in this story that tells the story of the complicated relationship between Emma … Continue reading →


  • Memorials: Find a Grave

    I’ve been sidelined from visiting physical cemeteries due to knee issues, but I’ve been exploring online memorials as part of my PhD work, so I thought I would share some of what I’m learning. Date Visited for Review: July 20, … Continue reading →


Death and Sorry Business

For First Nations people, overcoming grief is a unique and complex process. It seeks to ensure that as a community we can move past death and commemorate those we have lost with consideration and celebration. Death and Sorry Business provides insights into aboriginal death practices. —Read More

Woman Highlights the Text Messages That Brought Her Comfort After Her Mother’s Death

When Imogen Carn lost her mother, it was not big grand gestures that brought her the most comfort, it was small texts from friends checking in on her. It was regular texts messages from her friends reaching out to let her know they cared. —Read More

What Deathbed Visions Teach Us About Living

Deathbed visions are often depicted as the delusions of the dying, but Doctor Chris Kerr has sat by the sides of multiple dying patients, including his own father, and he believes taht these death bed visions are real. –Read More–

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Movie Review: Wit

WIT is a movie that tells the story of Vivian, a brilliant professor who is diagnosed with cancer. Throughout the movie we see how her life has been lonely as her constant companion is only literature. Her only visitor is her old mentor, who finds out by accident she is in the hospital and sits and reads her a children’s story. In her final moments, despite her DNR, her doctor undertakes aggressive resuscitation efforts and we see the sadness of her almost lifeless body undergoing poking and prodding.

This is a movie that affected me profoundly. I was assigned to watch it in one of my thanantology classes and was immediately captivated by Vivian’s stoic portrayal of a cancer patient, but also how her cancer caused her to be introspective and think about the times she was less than kind to her students. It is also, perhaps unintentionally, a cautionary tail about pursuing career above all else and having no time in one’s life for friends or hobbies. It is also a tail about the dangers of modern medicine and how in a pursuit of a cure we sometimes forget what true healing is.

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Grief at Work: Overview

Work is a place dedicated to stated goals and objectives, commerce, and duties, but workplaces are also human places and are not immune from death, grief, and mourning.  Every year in the United States, millions of people at work are grieving.  Grief at work comes in many ways from the deaths of colleagues, the deaths of loved ones, and the deaths of colleagues’ loved ones.  Some companies have robust programs in place to help grieving employees, but others do not. Key facts about grief at work for you to think about and share.

GRIEF TAKES A TOLL

Grief takes its toll in the workplace not only in the human costs of sadness and emotional pain, but also financially.  Grief’s economic toll on the economy is estimated to be as high as $125 billion annually.   These corporate costs came from not only the costs of bereavement leave, but also from hidden costs related to errors in judgement which can lead to mistakes, injuries, and accidents.

GRIEF IS INDIVIDUAL

Most of us have heard of Elisabeth Kubler=Ross’s Five Stages of Grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance); however, what most people do not realize is that these stages were developed based on the stages that people who are terminally ill go through and not what people grieving for others go-through.  The truth is that everyone grieves individually and grief can include sadness, anger, and a host of other emotions.  Bottom line, there is no right way to grieve and it’s harmful to judge people’s grief or tell them to move on to the next stage.

CULTURAL CONSIDERATIONS

We all grieve individually, but mourning and grief practices also differ by culture.  For instance in the Dine (or Navajo) tradition, talking about the deceased can keep the deceased’s spirit from moving on and physically impact their loved ones.  African Americans believe that death does not sever the bonds between the living and the dead and their Homegoing celebrations are both a time to grieve the loved one and celebrate their life.  Jews believe that a person’s soul returns to God immediately after death so the body should be buried within 24 hours.  All cultures have different beliefs and knowing and understanding them all is impossible, but the important thing is to be culturally curious and understand that not everyone shares the same death rituals.

ORGANIZATIONAL SUPPORT

Every work place in the United States will be impacted by grief and it is important for organizations to support grieving employees with generous bereavement policies, death education for managers and employees, and flexibility. Death education for managers should focus on flexibility and on how to support employees within existing corporate policies.

SUPPORTING COLLEGUES

The bottom line about supporting colleagues is to be kind and follow the grieving person’s lead.  Some people want to talk about their loved one and others don’t.  It’s also important to think carefully about what you say as some people are not comforted by being told their loved one is “in a better place” or “with the angels.”    

WHAT YOU CAN DO TODAY

I’ll be sharing additional articles on grief at work and will include resources to help you assess your bereavement policies and how you can help employees through the grieving process.  In the meantime, share this article with your management team and ask them for insights as to what they think you could be doing better to support grieving employees.

This is the first in a series of articles about grief at work.  In future articles, I’ll write about bereavement leave, support groups, and how to help managers and coworkers support grieving colleagues.  Please let me know if there’s anything specific you’d like to learn about.

#grief

#griefatwork

#bekind

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Memorials: Mount Auburn Cemetery

Mount Auburn Cemetery, which was founded in 1831, is one of the original garden or rural cemeteries in the country. It was designed both to provide a more rural space to bury Boston residents, but also as a tranquil place where people could escape the hustle and bustle of Boston. Mount Auburn has open spaces for animals and for people to relax.

Buried within the boundaries of Mount Auburn are a variety of people who have made their mark on American history, including Dorthea Dix, who fought for more humane treatment of the mentally ill; chef and cookbook author Fannie Farmer; and architect Charles Bullfinch. The grounds of Mount Auburn include unique gravestones, mausoleums, and two chapels. The Bigelow Chapel, pictured above, was constructed in the 1840s and the Story Chapel and Administration building was built int he 1890s.

Mount Auburn is not only a place of nature and history, it is also a place filled with art. Artwork within the cemetery includes a Spinx carved out of a 40 10 block of Maine Granite to commemorate the end of the Civil War and the end of slavery. Other famous artwork includes a Newfoundland dog resting atop the grave of Thomas Handasyd Perkins and a touching memorial for the Atkins children, who all died young. The Mount Auburn Cemetery Website has an online book showcasing much of the art within the cemeteries boundaries. Mount Auburn is so committed to art that it sponsors an artist in residence program.

The day that I visited, I decided that I wanted to pay tribute to Maman Brigette by making an offering of rum at the grave of the oldest woman’s grave in the cemetery. I located the plot number at FindaGrave, but was struggling to find it in real life. However, a helpful turkey showed up to lead me right to her grave and I had to smile as black fowl are sacred to Maman Brigette.

Mount Auburn Cemetery is one of those places that could take a whole day to explore. I was fortunate that I had a few hours to walk its trails and the beautiful art within its boundaries. It is definitely a place I plan to go back to.

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Documentary Review: The Secret Life of Death

Walter Carter Funeral Home is a 130-year-old business in Sydney Australia that is facing the economic reality of consolidation in the funeral home business. In order to stay alive, Walter Carter joins forces with another family owned funeral home, which means that the company will survive, but it also means the close-knit team is torn apart. The Secret Life of Death tells the story a year of turmoil, change, and death.

The documentary starts out by introducing Jasmine, the funeral director who takes care of the bodies, and Amber who takes care of the bodies. The women are close, but both believes they have the best job as Jasmine has no desire to take care of the bodies and Amber flat out says that “Dead bodies are her favorite people.” When the merger is announced, the front of the house staff, including Amber and the owner Dale, stay together, but Amber is forced to move to another location an hour away, which breaks up the team and causes angst.

As this is a show about the funeral industry, it is not surprising that funerals figure prominently in the show. A celebration of life for an American musician, a more solemn ceremony for a Chinese man, and images from a Nigerian celebratory funeral are featured throughout the documentary. However, the most heartbreaking funeral of the show is that for Odette. Odette is a 46 year old woman with breast cancer who works with Richard, one of the funeral directors from Walter Carter, to plan her funerals. She wants a horse drawn hearse, doves released, and her drag queen friends to show up as themselves. And she doesn’t want the “fucking ugly” ties that Walter Carter’s personnel wear. Richard grows closer to her as he plans her funeral and at the end of the documentary we find out she has died.

Richard, along with Jasmine, pick up her body and take it to Amber to take care of. From there, it is off to the venue she personally chose for her funeral and we see her funeral play out exactly as she envisioned it, right down to her gold Christian Louboutin placed on her white coffin.

Overall this documentary perfectly captured the compassion and diligence of a modern day funeral home without being too maudlin.

💀💀💀💀💀

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Dead White Girls

I will confess upfront that I am a devotee of crime shows.  I watch NCISFBI, and the Law and Orders.  I’ve also been known to binge watch Cold Case and other shows during the summer when there are no new episodes of my favorite shows.  I listen to true crime podcasts when I’m driving.   As a feminist, I was surprised by the suggestion that crime shows were misogonystic and took away women’s voices by portraying them as silent and that they portrayed a form of gendered violence meant to erase women (Dillman, 2014, pp. 1-3).  While I did not formally tally deaths of men versus women on crime TV, I’ve never really noticed a bias towards dead women on the shows I watch as one week it’s a dead man, then a dead woman, then a kid, then a man again, etc.  However, the truth is that fictional crime shows are more likely to portray women as victims, according to a study of fictional crime dramas from 2010 to 2013. The study also found that White women were at greater risk of being fictionally murdered on TV than Black women, White men, or Black men (Parrott & Parrott, 2015).  While dead White women may sell TV shows, in the real world, White women are murdered significantly less often than other demographics.  According to true crime statistics for 2020, Black men represent 47% of all murder victims followed by White men (29%), White women (11%), and Black women (8%) with other races representing the remaining 11% (Statista, 2020). 

I concede the point that dead girls are over represented on crime shows and that there are crime shows, those that Bolin calls “Dead Girl Shows” that solely focus on the murder of a young pretty white girls (Bolin, 2018).  However, I disagree with the Dillman’s sentiment that women are only portrayed as negligible objects that turn up dead (Dillman, 2014).  There are a number of female crime shows, even in the early 2000’s, that had strong female characters.  Lilly Rush from Cold Case is smart, funny, and intrepid.  She is respected by her male peers and she is often the one who solves the crime. CSI:  Crime Scene Investigation, which is one of the shows that Dillman studied, also has strong female characters in Catherine Willows and Sara Sidle who are both experts at what they do.  Then there is the queen of female crime solvers:  Olivia Benson.  Benson has been a lead character in Law and Order: SVU for over 20 years and has risen through the ranks from rookie detective to Captain.  Although Dillman concedes that there are competent female characters on crime shows, she contends that producers don’t link a strong woman to the larger picture of feminism .  However, what she fails to point out is that crime shows in the early 2000s that depicted any kind of strong female character were ahead of reality as as women were rare in law enforcement in the early 2000s.  In 2007, the percentage of women in local law enforcement ranged from less than 3% in small police departments to just over 15% in larger police departments (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2010).  Even today, women represent only 12% of law enforcement officers and just 3% of leadership (Corley, 2022).

Dillman also asserted that even though CSI (one of the shows she chose to analyze) showed the deaths of both men and women, the deaths of women were depicted differently than men as their deaths were about power relationships (Dillman, 2014).  Dillman is correct that women being murdered is often about power and relationships, but this is not a creation of writers, but a mirror of reality.  Although women are killed less frequently than men, when they are killed it is more likely to be by someone they are involved with as over half of female homicide victims in the US were killed by a current or former intimate partner (Centers for Diease Control and Prevention, 2021).  Women are also targeted by involuntary celibates or Incels who misogynistically target women because of their own lack of relationships (BBC, 2018).  As Bolin pointed out, the motivating force for both domestic abusers and mass killers, such as Elliot Rogers an Incel who murdered six women (BBC, 2018), is a belief that they are victims who have been wronged by others (Bolin, 2018). 

One point that Dillman failed to mention is that, at least in the true crime genre, the stories profiled are most often those of pretty white women and girls like Natalie Holloway, Lacey Peterson, and Jon-Bonet Ramsey.  In death, the dead white girl is the perfect victim, the “highest sacrifice” and the “virgin martyr (Bolin, 2018).  There is even a name for the trend of news and true crime shows to disproportionality cover the stories of missing white women and girls:  “Missing White Woman Syndrome (MWWS)” (Datz, 2021).  Unfortunately, while the impact of showcasing dead white women on fictionalized crime stories may be minimal, MWWS has real world consequences as the less coverage that a missing person story has, the less likely it is that the person will be found.  And although Dillman speculated the reason for more female victims on TV crime shows was because men liked to portray women as disposable, one lawyer has speculated that the root cause of MWWS is financial as coverage of missing white women brings more viewers and more profits (Miranda, 2021). 

Unfortunately for women, the power differential between men and women still exists in death where women are victims, our bodies continuing to be exploited even after we are no longer breathing.

References

BBC. (2018, April 26). Elliot Rodger: How misogynist killer became ‘incel hero’. Retrieved from BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43892189

Bolin, A. (2018). Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession. New York: William Morrow.

Bureau of Justice Statistics. (2010, June). Women in Law Enforcement. Retrieved from Bureau of Justice Statistics: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/wle8708.pdf

Casey, K. (n.d.). Why we’re fascinated by crime. Retrieved from Boston Globe: https://apps.bostonglobe.com/true-crime/fascinated/

Centers for Diease Control and Prevention. (2021, November 2). Fast Facts: Preventing Intimate Partner Violence. Retrieved from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/intimatepartnerviolence/fastfact.html#:~:text=IPV%20can%20also%20result%20in,or%20former%20male%20intimate%20partner.

Corley, C. (2022, July 31). Increasing women police recruits to 30% could help change departments’ culture. Retrieved from NPR: https://www.npr.org/2022/07/31/1111714807/increasing-women-police-recruits-to-30-could-help-change-departments-culture#:~:text=Women%20make%20up%20just%2012,and%203%25%20of%20police%20leadership.

Datz, L. (2021, September 23). The Real Causes of “Missing White Woman Syndrome”. Retrieved from Syracuse University: News: https://news.syr.edu/blog/2021/09/23/the-real-causes-of-missing-white-woman-syndrome/

Dillman, J. C. (2014). Women and Death in Film, Television, and News: Dead but Not Gone. New York: Springer.

Foltyn, J. L. (2008). Dead famous and dead sexy: Popular culture,. Mortality, 153-173.

Miranda, A. (2021, Noveber 29). Missing White Woman Syndrome. Retrieved from UMKC Women’s Center: https://info.umkc.edu/womenc/2021/11/29/missing-white-woman-syndrome/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CMissing%20White%20Woman%20Syndrome%3A%20a,involving%20missing%20people%20of%20color.%E2%80%9D

Parrott, S., & Parrott, C. T. (2015). U.S. Television’s “Mean World” for White Women: The Portrayal of Gender and Race on Fictional Crime Dramas. Sex Roles, 70-82.

Statista. (2020). Number of murder victims in the United States in 2020, by race/ethnicity and gender. Retrieved from Stastista: https://www.statista.com/statistics/251877/murder-victims-in-the-us-by-race-ethnicity-and-gender/

Tercier, J. (2013). Chapter 11: The Pornography of Death. In H. Maes, Pornographic Art and the Aesthetics of Pornography (pp. 221-235). London: Palgrave Macmil

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Memorials: Smailes Cemetery

Date of Visit: June 13, 2024
Address:17102 Stanaford Road, Danese, WV 25831

One of the things that I love about traveling is finding small cemeteries along country roads and wandering through them to check out the history of a place. Unfortunately, many small country cemetaries leave me with more questions than answers and this one was no exception. It was small and very well kept and even some of the older graves had flowers on them, but I wanted to know more about the people who populated this place and who mourned the loved ones who had left too soon.

As my daughter and I visited (see her account here) not too long after Memorial Day, it wasn’t surprising to see many graves adorned with American flags as recognition of our veterans’ service to our country. A number of graves were also adorned with fresh and silk flowers, and it warmed my heart to see graves from 50 years ago that were clean and well-kept with flowers showing someone still cared.

The graves of children are also hard to visit as I imagine the horrific pain that the parents must have gone through. I cannot imagine the pain of having a child die and having to plan their funeral instead of their future. One family had lost two infants, Kathy and John, almost three years to the day apart. John was born on February 24, 1954 and died on February 25, 1954 and Kathy was born on February 24, 1957 and died on February 26, 1957. The pain their parents went through must have been incredible. And despite both infants having lived one day almost 70 years ago, both graves were well tended and had small bouquets. My mind immediately began to wonder who was placing flowers on their graves in such an act of devotion.

The other graves that tugged at my heart strings were several with hand carved gravestones. I cannot imagine the act of devotion required to carve a tombstone for a loved one. The saddest of these was one from 1935 for Andy. Based on the tombstone, it looked as if Andy was 9 when he tied and he was buried next to a relative who also died in 1935. My mind spun all kinds of questions around their deaths wondering if they were father and son, wondering who carved Andy’s tombstone, and wondering who they left behind.

A small fenced off corner of Smailes Cemetery was labeled Sovine-Zickafoose Cemetery. As with the larger cemetery, the graves here were well kept and there were flowers on a number of graves. There was no indication as to whether the Sovine-Zickafoose family was related to Smailes or if they just happened to choose to put cemeteries in adjacent plots of land.

Although I left with more questions than answers, it made me smile to know that in this corner of West Virginia, the dead were not forgotten and their families visited with them on a regular basis. I guess that’s really all any of us can ask for.

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