{"id":93237,"date":"2016-01-06T17:58:29","date_gmt":"2016-01-06T22:58:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=93237"},"modified":"2016-01-06T18:24:34","modified_gmt":"2016-01-06T23:24:34","slug":"im-not-dead-yet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/01\/06\/im-not-dead-yet\/","title":{"rendered":"I\u2019m Not Dead Yet"},"content":{"rendered":"

The nineteenth-century obsession with premature burial.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Antoine Wiertz, The Premature Burial<\/i>, 1854.<\/p><\/div>\n

I was eleven when the family cat died\u2014we found her on the cold concrete floor of the garage\u2014but once we\u2019d buried her in the backyard and erected a modest wooden cross, it occurred to me that she might not be dead. Sure, I had seen her dead, had held her dead body, but what if we\u2019d been premature, what if she were\u00a0only sleeping very, very stilly? The thought haunted me: I had a few nightmares where her little calico paw came jutting up through the ground, as in the archetypal images of zombie uprising. I went so far as to visit the grave with a trowel in hand, but the ground was soft and spongy, the soil still unsettled, and I got the creeps. I convinced myself the cat was extremely, entirely deceased.<\/p>\n

Maybe I should\u2019ve been more diligent. There was a big story a year ago about Bart, a bona fide zombie cat from Tampa Bay, who \u201cclawed his way out of the grave\u201d after five days underground. You\u2019ll find that vivid, morbid phrase in almost all the coverage: \u201cclawed his way out of the grave.\u201d I missed all this in 2015, but it\u2019s been brought to life again by the black magic of the news cycle: this is the first anniversary of Bart\u2019s resurrection. \u201cZOMBIE CAT WHO CLAWED HIMSELF OUT OF GRAVE AFTER BEING KNOCKED DOWN BY CAR IS UNRECOGNIZABLE A YEAR ON<\/small><\/a>,\u201d read one headline this week, indicating Bart\u2019s revivified fluffiness. \u201c\u00a0\u2018ZOMBIE CAT\u2019 NOW AT THE CENTER OF CUSTODY BATTLE<\/small><\/a>,\u201d said another.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019m proud of Bart, and I laud his apparently indefatigable will to live, but it\u2019s clear that his popularity among humans stems from jealousy. We could never hope to claw our way out of the grave. There\u2019s our fundamental clawlessness, for one\u2014and even if we could transcend that, it\u2019s our bad luck to have adopted burial rites that favor elaborate coffins and grave depths of six feet or more. We want to stay down.<\/p>\n

This has caused some trouble, historically. As readers of Poe know, in the nineteenth century, premature burial was a going concern. Short of waiting for decay to set in, the medical community had few means of certifying death, and the burgeoning press was quick to sensationalize any hasty pronouncements. Trawling the public domain not long ago, I was excited to come across William Tebb\u2019s Premature Burial and How It May Be Prevented, With Special Reference to Trance, Catalepsy, and Other Forms of Suspended Animation<\/a><\/em>, published in 1896, the same year its author cofounded the\u00a0London Association for the Prevention of Premature Burial. Owing to \u201ca distressing experience\u201d in his family, Tebb dedicated himself to stamping out the scourge of premature burial and other \u201cdeath-counterfeits\u201d; \u201cthe danger,\u201d he wrote, \u201cis very real.\u201d By his estimate, in England and Wales alone some twenty-seven hundred\u00a0people were annually \u201cconsigned to a living death.\u201d A stern epigraph from Professor Alexander Wilder drives this point home: \u201cThe thought of suffocation in a coffin is more terrible than that of torture on the rack, or burning at the stake \u2026 When we neglect precautions against a fate so terrible, our tears are little less than hypocrisy and our mourning is a mockery.\u201d<\/p>\n

Premature Burial <\/em>runs to more than five hundred pages, and its most gripping sections are given over to accounts of interment gone awry, along with the many anxieties of the nineteenth-century deathbed. There\u2019s the man who sank into such a prolonged lethargy that he was thought dead until he \u201cbroke into a profuse sweat\u201d in his coffin; the young woman whose corpse was exhumed for reburial only to be discovered \u201cin the middle of the vault, with disheveled hair and the linen torn to pieces \u2026 gnawed in her agony\u201d; the man whose fear of premature burial was so severe that he instructed his family to leave his body undisturbed for ten days after death, \u201cwith the face uncovered, and watched night and day. Bells were to be fastened to his feet. And at the end of the second day veins were to be opened in the arm and leg.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tebb draws some of his most abject cases, fittingly enough, from The Undertakers\u2019 and Funeral Directors\u2019 Journal<\/em>, a veritable storehouse of medical malfeasance. The Journal<\/em> ran at least one story of a pregnant woman who gave birth in the grave. It also has an episode with one of the only happy endings in the whole book:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cMrs. Lockhart, of Birkhill, who died in 1825, used to relate to her grandchildren the following anecdote of her ancestor, Sir William Lindsay, of Covington, towards the close of the seventeenth century:\u2014\u2018Sir William was a humorist and noted, moreover, for preserving the picturesque appendage of a beard at a period when the fashion had long passed away. He had been extremely ill, and life was at last supposed to be extinct, though, as it afterwards turned out, he was merely in a \u201cdead faint\u201d or trance. The female relatives were assembled for the \u201cchesting\u201d\u2014the act of putting a corpse into a coffin, with the entertainment given on such melancholy occasions\u2014in a lighted chamber in the old tower of Covington, where the \u201cbearded knight\u201d lay stretched upon his bier. But when the servants were about to enter to assist at the ceremonies, Isabella Somerville, Sir William\u2019s great-granddaughter, and Mrs. Lockhart\u2019s grandmother, then a child, creeping close to her mother, whispered into her ear, \u201cThe beard is wagging! the beard is wagging!\u201d Mrs. Somerville, upon this, looked to the bier, and observing indications of life in the ancient knight, made the company retire, and Sir William soon came out of his faint. Hot bottles were applied and cordials administered, and in the course of the evening he was able to converse with his family. They explained that they had believed him to be actually dead, and that arrangements had even been made for his funeral. In answer to the question, \u201cHave the folks been warned?\u201d (i.e.<\/em>, invited to the funeral) he was told that they had\u2014that the funeral day had been fixed, an ox slain, and other preparations made for entertaining the company. Sir William then said, \u201cAll is as it should be; keep it a dead secret that I am in life, and let the folks come.\u201d His wishes were complied with, and the company assembled for the burial at the appointed time. After some delay, occasioned by the non-arrival of the clergyman, as was supposed, and which afforded an opportunity of discussing the merits of the deceased, the door suddenly opened, when, to their surprise and terror, in stepped the knight himself, pale in countenance and dressed in black, leaning on the arm of the minister of the parish of Covington. Having quieted their alarm and explained matters, he called upon the clergyman to conduct an act of devotion, which included thanksgiving for his recovery and escape from being buried alive. This done, the dinner succeeded. A jolly evening, after the manner of the time, was passed, Sir William himself presiding over the carousals.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Most, of course,\u00a0were not so fortunate as Sir William. Read enough of these accounts and a pattern begins to emerge, a grammar of early\u00a0interment: the rent garments, the skeletons in panicked poses, the scratch marks on coffin lids, the distant sounds of knocking from new graves. You get the sense that people were exhumed more back then, and that the cemetery offered surprises as often as it did solemnity. It strikes me that in the hundred-plus years since Tebb\u2019s cri de coeur, our fear of premature burial has become something more like a hope, as suggested in the viral sensation of Bart the zombie cat. We yearn to mistake death for something else. It\u00a0doesn\u2019t hold the same mystery it did a century ago. When it arrives, it\u2019s with such biological certainty that to defy the grave seems more a miracle than a tragedy: score one against science, against the onslaught of empirical data. We\u2019re probably, all of us, a little more afraid of dying now, a little less at home in the graveyards of the world. Having decided to keep our distance from death, we share more than ever an ingrained feeling that bodies should be in motion\u2014even, or especially, when they\u2019ve ceased to move.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The Eisenbrandt coffin was one of many \u201csafety coffins\u201d patented around this time, though it wasn\u2019t the one Tebb endorsed.<\/p><\/div>\n

In a later edition of his book housed at the Wellcome Library,<\/em> Tebbs advocated for an invention that would, he thought, vastly reduce the incidence of premature burial<\/a>. It was a coffin fitted with a long tube leading to the surface, where it terminated in an iron box. At the first sign of motion in the coffin, the box would spring open to admit air, light, and the promise of rescue: \u201ca flag rises perpendicularly about four feet above the ground, and a bell is set ringing which continues for about half an hour. In front of the box, an electric lamp burns which gives light after sunset to the coffin below. The tube acts as a speaking tube, and the voice of the inmate of the coffin, however feeble is intensified.\u201d<\/p>\n

A variety of such safety coffins were\u00a0coming under patent at the time, and many were, Tebb said, quite reasonably priced. But these were intended to serve only as the ultimate precaution. The only true way to prevent premature burial was to forestall the funeral until one was absolutely certain that one had a corpse on one\u2019s hands. To this end he quoted Dr. Christopher Hufeland, \u201cone of the greatest authorities on the subject,\u201d who urged patience: he believed that a period of \u201ceight days or a fortnight\u201d could still prove too brief. (Just imagine the undertakers\u2019 ads: \u201cWe\u2019ll wait as long as it takes\u00a0to\u00a0guarantee the\u00a0solitude of your beloved.\u201d) Hufeland\u2019s testimony is maybe the most evocative and disturbing in the book. He deserves the final word on the subject.<\/p>\n

\n

I always advise a delay of the funeral as long as possible, so as to make all certain as to death. No wonder when those who are buried alive, and who undergo indescribable torture, condemn those who have been dearest to them in life. They will have to undergo slow suffocation, in furious despair, while scratching their flesh to pieces, biting their tongues, and smashing their heads against their narrow houses that confine them, and calling to their best friends, and cursing them as murderers.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n