Memento Mori

Since last week's theme was death and dying and this week we're exploring the occult, this is what I've come up with.
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Hardly anyone does mourning really stylishly anymore. Stephanie and I found a pamphlet at her church about mourning "successfully" or something, but there were no tips on doing it in style. Sadly, the decorum of death is in decline.

In my travels I have noted a couple of macabre traditions kept alive in cultures outside of North America. My favourite is the frightening stationery still used in Germany that makes life like a suspenseful and tragic film. Picture this: it's a normal sunny day, the birds are singing, and the air is fresh and clean. You're going through your daily routing with a bounce in your step, unaware of what lurks in your mailbox. When it does come time to sort your bills from your catalogues, you crumple into a trembling, sobbing, big mushy pile before you open a single envelope! Why? This.

That's the envelope that tells you someone you love is dead before you have to read anything. I watched my host mother collapse in the above manner twice. And, while she is pretty melodramatic, I think I would have freaked out, too, if I were the addressee.

Another fascinating tradition we no longer follow (unless "we" are Italian grandmothers from the old country) is mourning dress. I am not exactly sure when this went out, but it was probably sometime soon after Victoria died and the upper class in Britain were freed from the bondage of perpetual mourning. (Queen Victoria lost her husband forty years BEFORE she died. And, as far as I know, she wore her mourning garb for those forty years...and her court did, too.) We all know about the wearing black thing. It's commonly seen at funerals today, though that is changing as well. 150 years ago black extended beyond the fabric of those big poofy dresses and took over jewellery and ornament. Victoria single-handedly made a boomtown of Whitby, England, the source of most of the world's jet (an organic gemstone related to charcoal) throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. A very common design for "traditional" jewellery is still simple onyx pendants and rings, often set with a small diamond. When these designs were first popular they were commemorating the dead. Now we are just adjusted to the aesthetic.

Jet jewels and onyx with diamonds are pretty tame, though, in the realm of mourning dress. If you want to get macabre (and verge on occult), why not try earrings made of human hair? Though hair was often collected from a loved one and treasured in a locket during their lifetime, it was very fashionable -- for a time -- to make and wear entire suites of jewellery from the hair of your dead brother. Yikes. Weaving hair takes talent, but so does gluing individual strands onto an ivory disk to "paint" a commemorative picture! The Georgians were big on this and the results are quite impressive. The effect is far subtler and less itchy than that of the woven designs.

However, my favourite facet of the decorum of death is the memento mori theme that appears in jewellery, with or without some dead guy's locks. Basically, it was acceptable to decorate your body with skulls and skeletons long before goths were looking gloomy in suburban malls. The skeleton, Death, was meant as a reminder that we all die and as a memorial to someone deceased. Some of the most striking and wearable mourning jewellery involves fine enamel work of the grim reaper himself. It is imagery that has remained relevant and I am a sucker for fine enamel work.

How is this occult? It's pretty mainstream when the queen is leading the way, but mourning traditions like the scary stationery and strict uniforms of black are, I think, examples of magical thinking. "I have to follow this procedure when X dies. Otherwise, I haven't honoured him correctly." Or, worse yet: "I have to follow this procedure. Otherwise, X won't rest well in the afterlife." That's pretty straightforward. And we can examine these tokens as lasting evidence of these personalities' existence, which is the best part of all. We all know about Queen Victoria, but mourning jewellery that anyone can buy, treasure, and wear didn't ever belong to her. It belonged to people of "no importance" and commemorates the dead who would otherwise be completely forgotten. Each creepy hair earring is a tiny shrine to a life once lived and the alarming dedication of his survivors.

And that's cool.

(For a great look at mourning jewellery both sold and for sale, visit www.thingsgoneby.com)