In English-speaking societies, the dead are remembered in a number of ways, including funerals which are held shortly after death and the more long-lasting epitaphs and obituaries. The origins of some of the words relating to remembering the dead are briefly described below.
Funeral
Funerals are, of course, rites of passage in which people acknowledge the change in status from living to dead. While funerals may be religious ceremonies with rites based upon religious beliefs about death and some sort of afterlife, funerals are more about the living than about the dead. In his book Religions of the World Made Simple, John Lewis writes:
“Rites associated with death are designed to counteract the centrifugal forces of fear, dismay and demoralization. They provide the most powerful means of reintegration of the group’s shaken solidarity and the re-establishment of the morale.”
In his book Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought, Pascal Boyer writes:
“All human groups have some rituals for dealing with corpses and some notion of how the ‘soul’ or presence of dead people must set off on a journey, to be separated from the living.”
With regard to etymology, the word funeral referring to a “ceremony of burying a dead person” came into English as a noun in the early 1500s from the adjective “funeral.” The root of “funeral” seems to be the Latin “funus” which referred to “death, corpse, burial rites.” Ultimately, it seems to come from the Proto-Indio-European root “*dheu-” meaning “to die” but this origin is disputed by some linguists.
Cemetery
It is not uncommon for the funeral to include a procession to a cemetery where the body is buried. Cemeteries thus become a place where the dead are remembered. In her chapter in Book of Death, Bess Lovejoy writes:
“Early Christian writers coined the term as a euphemism, from the Greek koimeterion, ‘sleeping place, dormitory.’”
During the Medieval Period, Christians adopted a burial practice based on the anticipated resurrection of the dead. In her chapter in Breathing New Life into the Evidence of Death: Contemporary Approaches to Bioarchaeology, Rachel Scott reports:
“Because the faithful believed in the literal resurrection of the material body, the dead were buried intact. Because Christ had ascended into Heaven in the east and would come from the east on the Day of Judgment, they were interred facing east.”
In his book Panati’s Extraordinary Endings of Practically Everything and Everybody, Charles Panati writes:
“Death in the desolate graveyard is brutalized, in the landscaped garden cemetery romanticized, and in the often lampooned modern memorial park commercialized. How people in a certain era bury their dead says much about the people, their historical time, and the prevailing attitudes toward death and dying.”
Many of the early cemeteries were in churchyards or they were private family cemeteries. In the late nineteenth century, the idea of garden cemeteries emerged. The garden cemetery was a place for the living as well as the dead, a place which people could visit and enjoy as well as a place of remembering the dead.
In the United States, the first cemetery which was not associated with a church or parish was Mount Auburn in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The cemetery was designed with the help of Dr. Jacob Bigelow, a botanist, physician, and poet, who envisioned nature as the backdrop for this burial ground.
The memorial park type of cemetery first emerged in Glendale, California in the form of the Forest Lawn Memorial Park. Charles Panati writes:
“The garden cemetery interred the dead in a largely natural landscape, assaulted with occasional man-made artifacts. But the memorial park was intended to rest the dead in an environment of pure fantasy. Nature was to be the subtlest of backdrops to art reproduction of taste and quality—only larger, bolder, brighter than the originals.”
Columbarium
Bodies are not always buried. Many are cremated. In some cemeteries there may be a columbarium, a structure with recessed niches for urns holding cremated remains. The word columbarium entered into English in the 1540s from the neuter of the Latin columbarius meaning “dovecote.” A dovecote is a structure for houses pigeons and doves, and it was felt that the ancient Roman places which held urns resembled dovecotes.
Shown below is the Columbarium at the Oregon State Hospital in Salem. Interred in the wall are ceramic urns containing the ashes of people who passed away between 1910-1971 in state institutions.
Epitaph
In Christian England it was customary to bury dead people in a specific manner and to mark their graves with some sort of monument. In the mid-fourteenth century, the word epitaph entered into English in reference to the inscription on the tomb or burial monument. The word “epitaph” comes from the Old French epitaphe which is from Medieval Latin epitaphium meaning “funeral oration, eulogy” which comes from the Greek epitaphion meaning “a funeral oration.” A deeper look into the etymology of epitaph shows it comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *dhembh- meaning “to bury.”
When asked about his choice of an epitaph, comedian W.C. Fields replied:
“Here lies W. C. Fields. I would rather be in Philadelphia.”
Playwright William Shakespeare:
“Blest be the man that spares these stones
And curst be he that moves my bones.”
Benjamin Franklin:
“The body of B. Franklin, printer, like the cover of an old book, its contents torn out, and stript of its lettering and gilding, lies here, food for worms. But the work shall not be wholly lost: For it will, as he believ’d, appear once more, in a new & more perfect edition, corrected and amended by The Author.”
Obituary
There was a time in the fairly recent past when newspapers were printed on paper and one of their widely-read features was the obituaries. The word obituary came into English in 1706 with the meaning “register of deaths” and by 1738 had come to mean “a record or announcement of death which includes a brief biographical sketch.” The word comes from the Latin obire which means “to go toward, to go to meet.” The Latin mortem obire means “to meet death.”
More Origins of English
Origins of English: Was English a Creole?
Origins of English: The Search for Indo-European Roots
Origins of English: Caxton's Printing Press
Origins of English: The Great Vowel Shift
Origins of English: The Normans
Origins of English: Samuel Johnson's Dictionary
Origins of English: The Anglo-Saxon Roots
Origins of English: The Norse Influence