Candi K. Cann calls herself a death scholar. Technically, the associate professor in the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core of the Honors College is a thanatologist, though she allows that most people don’t know what that is.
For the record, a thanatologist is a specialist who studies death, dying, grief, and loss. It’s no secret that Americans have been remarkably averse to talking about death, but a 2018 survey released by The Conversation Project suggests that a huge cultural shift may be under way. “We have begun to break the taboo around talking about death,” Ellen Goodman, founder of The Conversation Project, reported at the time.
If the cultural zeitgeist is any indication, we may be ready to have that “conversation” about a subject that has been taboo for far too long. In 2017, Pixar’s Coco about a boy named Miguel who is transported to the Land of the Dead where he meets his great-great-grandfather was Mexico’s biggest blockbuster. Now Netflix is streaming HBO’s Six Feet Under, the award-winning series about a family of undertakers that went off the air in 2001. Day of the Dead celebrations have gone mainstream, and green funerals are growing in popularity. With more people choosing a forest instead of a traditional cemetery as their final resting place, companies offer the option of having your ashes mixed with soil and spread at the base of a memorial tree in one of their protected forests.
In her latest book, Death and Religion: The Basics, Cann examines dying, death, grief, and afterlife disposal, a term that thanatologists use to describe burial, cremation, and, yes, composting. Cremation, which was forbidden by the Catholic church until 1963, has become more popular in recent years (up to 43.7 percent in 2022 from 29.7 percent in 2015), and Cann thinks the driver of that trend is cost. “It’s not only cheaper than traditional burial but cremains are portable,” she said. “You can do a lot more with ashes than you can with bodies.”
With a Ph.D. in Comparative Religion from Harvard, Cann tends to look at everything from a comparative perspective. So, if she looks at death and dying in the U.S., she also looks at death and dying in Asia and Great Britain. “We tend to believe that the way we think about death and dying is the way everyone thinks about death and dying,” she said, “but when you look at other countries, you see that that’s not the case.”
In India, for example, it’s the family’s choice whether or not to tell the dying that they’re dying, which can be problematic for Hindu Americans. “It bumps up against our idea that patients should have full autonomy or control over their medical decisions,” said Cann, “which I find to be an interesting intersection of a religious worldview bumping into medical culture.”
Most of us have probably never heard of tear bottles, but they were popular in Victorian England. “The idea was to catch your tears in a glass vial,” said Cann. “When they evaporated, it was a sign that your mourning was over.” While tear catchers date back to ancient Rome, Cann found a Colonial tear bottle in Charlottesville, Virginia. [Curious? Go to tearcatcher.com and check out the merchandise for sale.]
To demonstrate how bereavement traditions differ in the Anglo and Hispanic communities, Cann took a group of her students to a Latino funeral home in Central Texas in 2015. During extended wakes that last overnight, entire families may set up card tables to play games and exchange stories about the deceased, enjoying food and drink in the process.
In her second book, Dying to Eat, Cann examined cross-cultural perspectives on food, death, and the afterlife. Funeral cookies wrapped with printed prayers and poems meant to comfort mourners were popular in Victorian England. In China, Japan, and Korea, it’s customary to offer food not only to the bereaved but to the deceased as well with ritual dishes prepared and served to them. She also examines the role of funeral casseroles and church cookbooks in the Southern United States.
“There’s this idea of community food collection where people sit together and eat, but another function is to reorganize the community without the deceased,” she said. “You’re acknowledging their absence and putting them firmly in the past, changing the present tense to past tense as it were. Smaller communities may have certain dishes they’re known for, say, Meemaw’s funeral cake or Grandma’s funeral potatoes.” While traditionally it was men who presided over funerals as pastors, it was the women who prepared the food. “I call it gendered caregiving.”
Sugar has also played an important role in the mourning process. Sugar skulls, which are made of sugar, feature in Day of the Dead celebrations. Why do you think we give out candy on Halloween, which is the night before All Saint’s Day? “Sugar literally causes a chemical reaction in the brain,” said Cann, who notes that in China mourners are given a piece of hard brown sugar when they leave a funeral service as an antidote for the bitterness of death.
What worries Cann is that we don’t make space for death and grief in everyday life, that the celebrations of life instead of a funeral that have become so popular may be a form of grief-denying.
“I think there’s a need for these somber funeral services in our world today,” she said. “It’s nice to have a place where our sadness can be validated and we can express our sorrow with the community.”
“It’s nice to have a place where our sadness can be validated and we can express our sorrow with the community.”
While Catholics celebrate a mass on the anniversary of someone’s death and pray the rosary at cyclical intervals, Protestants have no such liturgical ritual to remember the dead. What’s more, so many of us work for companies that don’t permit us to take more than one day off when a loved one dies. So, instead of having enough time to process our grief, we may express our sorrow by getting a tattoo of our loved one’s name instead.
In her book Virtual Afterlives, Cann addresses the dramatic cultural shift that has made the physical presence of death secondary to the psychological experience of mourning. Grieving has become a virtual phenomenon. The dead, she says, live on through social media profiles, memorial websites, and saved voicemails that can be accessed at will. Her book attempts to resituate death as part of life, and mourning as a unifying process that helps to create identities and narratives for communities.
At the height of the pandemic, Cann thought that we’d be talking more about death, but it turned out that we were making a spectacle of it, focusing on people with pre-existing conditions and body counts instead of grappling with the idea of death itself. “By talking about the spectacle and horror of death, we were fetishizing it,” said Cann, who worries that in a grief-denying world, we hide our sadness and are careful about sharing our losses.
In her classes at Baylor, where she’s been a professor since 2011, Cann tries to get her students to talk about death in general and about the grieving process in particular.
“We have so many pre-med students and others who want to become chaplains and work in counseling, and I think it’s important for them to learn how to deal with grief and to contemplate their own deaths,” she said. “Most of my students have either lost a grandparent or had a pet die, which is not insignificant since pets are part of our daily lives in ways that people often aren’t. This semester alone, two of my students lost friends in car accidents. I think it helps them to know that death is a universal experience. It’s going to happen to all of us.”
“It’s going to happen to all of us.”
In her capstone course on death and dying, Cann has her students plan their own funerals.
“They bring in their favorite foods and create playlists,” she said. While she finds that most people take a senior capstone in order to reflect on their journey at Baylor, Cann also thinks it’s important to use that time to envision what kind of life you imagine for yourself. “I want them to think creatively through this funeral exercise about where their life is going and what they will leave behind.”
A fifth generation Texan, Cann has a lot of family in the state.
“That’s what brought me back,” she said.
Losing her mother, brother, grandparents, and best friend within years of one another has definitely informed her work, but it also made her think about the practical decisions all of us will have to make one day.
“Let’s face it, death is coming for us whether we want to acknowledge it or not,” she said. So, while she was fairly young at the time, Cann executed a will, a trust, and an advanced directive, and appointed someone as power of attorney. Doing so, she believes, was like giving her loved ones a gift.
“By relieving them of the burden of making those decisions when the time comes,” she said, “they’ll be allowed to simply grieve.”
