Gallows
The fun end. Where we stop being useful and start being ridiculous, which is its own kind of useful.
Every other section here is load-bearing. This one is where we admit that the reason any of it works is that death is also, frequently, hilarious — and that essentially every culture in human history figured that out before we did and built a party around it.
Modern Western death culture is roughly 150 years old, was largely invented by the American funeral industry to sell embalming after the Civil War, and is a historical aberration. The hushed room, the special voice, the euphemism, the professional stranger handling the body — none of that is ancient and solemn tradition. It is a business model with good branding.
Meanwhile: New Orleans jazz funerals. Irish wakes. Día de Muertos and marigolds so bright they hurt. The Torajan people of Sulawesi, who keep the dead at home for years and treat it as completely normal because it is. Victorian families keeping a lock of hair woven into a brooch. All of it louder, weirder and considerably healthier than a beige room in a strip mall.
This section is the argument that the tiny hat on the urn is not disrespect. It is the oldest thing we do.
In the works
Nothing published here yet. Coming:
- Urnest's wardrobe: the full seasonal lookbook, and how to make the hats
- Victorian post-mortem photography was not creepy, it was the only photo they had
- The Irish wake, and why every culture that laughs at funerals is doing better than we are
- Memento mori: skulls on clocks, worms on tombs, and the last time the West was honest about this
- Famous wills that were pure spite, ranked
- Sky burial, jazz funerals, Día de Muertos, and Toraja — the places where death is a party
Photographs of your own dressed urn are, genuinely, the thing we most want in the inbox: contact@oventoheaven.com. Urnest would like the competition.