Hey, folks! Been under the weather this month so I decided to recycle a piece I had written prior to starting my substack. Slurp your chicken soup, take your vitamin C/D/zinc, and stay healthy as we finish out the year!
Most days, I observe the death of a complete stranger, one who passed more than a century before. As I sit here writing, for instance, a little locket attached to the bracelet I’m wearing dangles against my wrist, begging for attention. The locket is shaped like a book, and when I open it I read the following inscription inside its cover:
Henry Sherer
Died 24 November 1868
I look for the resurrection of the dead
And the life of the world to come
Behind the locket glass are strands of hair, coiled into miniature corkscrews, along with a tiny seed pearl — the Victorian symbol for tears.
Who was Henry Sherer? Where did he live? How did he die and at what age? Who loved him and mourned for him? I can’t answer these questions. And without answers, I can’t even form a vague idea of Henry to hold in my imagination. All I can do is wear the bare evidence of his existence on my wrist, marking a life that came and went. Perhaps that’s not much of a tribute. But by staying mindful of Henry’s mortality, I stay mindful of my own, and I’m better for it.
The 19th Century Way of Death
Some years back, my interest in antique fashion morphed into a fascination with 19th Century mourning jewelry. Although the tradition goes back centuries, mourning jewelry reached the height of popularity in 1861, when Queen Victoria lost both her mother and her beloved Prince Albert (his death was like “tearing the flesh from my bones,” she wrote). For the remainder of her life, she not only wore black, but adorned herself with jewels commemorating her loved ones. The public followed suit, creating miniature artworks to externalize their grief, often incorporating photos or locks of hair of the departed. I loved the rich symbolism of mourning jewelry, its delicacy, its wistful beauty.
So I began collecting, beginning with pieces in the funereal black of Whitby jet or gutta percha (a plastic derived from a Malaysian tree): earrings carved into strangely modern geometric patterns, or a pin depicting the much-loved Victorian symbol of a hand holding a spray of forget-me-nots in eternal memory. Soon, though, I found myself drawn to jewelry particular to a specific human loss, like Henry’s locket. Or a delicate black-and-white cameo ring in honor of a “Julia” lost to time. The personalization attracted me because it proved authenticity (here was a real mourning brooch, worn for a real person). But there was another draw, more compelling, that I couldn’t yet articulate.
I wear my mourning pieces regularly, simply as a practical matter. I’m of the opinion that jewelry shouldn’t be bought only to sit in a case collecting dust. Yet when curious family or friends inquire about, for instance, my black enamel pendant memorializing “Elizabeth”, their reactions tend towards the abjectly horrified. My penchant for mourning jewelry has been called “morbid”, “creepy”, or as my daughter put it, “freakin’ sick” — and not in the complimentary sense.
“Why would you wear something for a dead person you never knew?” she asked. Good question, one I’m grateful to have mulled over because the answers surprised me.
One reason is my newfound respect for the 19th-Century attitude towards death as compared to the modern. Like most people, I’ve experienced my share of death, both directly and vicariously. Under tragic circumstances, my family lost someone very close to us just a few years back. I’ve witnessed friends and relatives lose loved ones to cancer. And in the onset of the COVID pandemic, it seems we were all saturated with stories of death.
From what I’ve observed, we moderns tend to conceive of death, if not all losses, as a process to move through until we reach a definite and better end-point. Blame it on the influence of the Kubler-Ross “Stages of Grief” model, in which mourners cycle through degrees of psychological resistance before arriving at “acceptance” of death. Or blame it on our willingness to medicalize what may very well be inner spiritual turmoil, treating it much like any other “condition” — with therapy and drugs, until whatever’s ailing us is resolved or “managed”. Whatever the cause, we want to imagine death and its associated grief as temporal and almost spatial, charting a course through various benchmarks until we at last “get beyond” it, finally arriving at that magical place of “okay.”
But for our forebears? Death wasn’t a “process” to work through and leave behind, but rather part and parcel of life. How could it be otherwise? It was everywhere. A quick scour of the Internet shows the average 19th Century life expectancy was somewhere between 40 and 50 years, largely due to the enormous number of infant and child fatalities from diseases we now inoculate against. And as Victorian literature scholar Carol Christ has noted, death wasn’t only a commonplace experience, but a domestic one. Today when someone passes, it often occurs in a hospital room, under medical supervision. But not-too-terribly long ago, most people died at home, under the watchful eyes of family. Death must have felt less remote, more viscerally immediate, when it occurred in the very bed you once shared with the departed.
I have to admire, then, the unflinching courage the Victorians showed in their mourning jewelry: Instead of psychologically distancing themselves from death, they symbolically integrated it into their lives. Through sepia pins, hair bracelets and the like, they held their losses near to them, day in and day out, until the jewelry itself became a part of them — much in the same way my wedding ring has become so associated with my hand that I feel naked without it. And loss does become a part of you, doesn’t it? It may become less painful and pronounced over time, but it alters you, since the very act of loving someone alters you. There’s an argument that mourning jewelry — not to mention mourning attire and social rituals — is overly-formal, fetishizing death. But I’d argue it treats death with refreshing honesty.
There’s another reason I wear mourning pieces. Certainly, such jewelry served a 19th Century Christian purpose in reminding the bereft of the afterlife; whoever mourned Henry Sherer, for example, was confident of meeting him again in the “world to come.” But it also served a Stoic purpose that, for me, is not only meaningful but essential.
Memento Mori
My favorite piece of mourning jewelry, by far, is an old Victorian brooch. The reverse displays the hair of the departed, woven into a tiny checkerboard fabric. The front displays a miniature skull, carved from cow-bone and grinning slyly. To compound the sick joke, its eye sockets are set with two paste stones, so that when I look at the skull, it seems to be looking back. Is it laughing at me or with me? Both, I think. It’s funny, the skull says, how you try to pretend you’re immortal. And in the next breath it whispers: Hey, friend. Welcome to the club.
The brooch is a Memento Mori and its message is a classic: Remember you are finite. Make the most, and be the most present, in the time you’re given. Its gaze is a necessary corrective, calling attention to my limits. You only have this life, the skull chides me. Are you using your abilities well, in work that gives you purpose? Or are you only killing time? Harsh, I know, but more than once that little skull has kept me from falling into the bottomless pit of Twitter feeds and online shopping quests for all those Things I Don’t Really Need. Better yet, it has sometimes, though not always, prevented me from perseverating on my frustrated ambitions, my parents’ worsening dementia, and other forces not entirely within my control. I try to dedicate that cleared headspace to what Marcus Aurelius said is the only thing that isn’t worthless: “to live this life out truthfully and rightly. And be patient with those who don’t.”
The skull serves an additional reminder: I’m just one small being in the endless churn of the universe. Part of the charm of skulls, as symbols go, is that they reduce all human life to the same basic contours. The skull in my brooch could represent someone of any nation, race, gender or time — ultimately, it will represent me. That non-specificity links me to those that preceded me and those to come. What’s more, the commonality of our deaths causes me to reflect on how different, at bottom, one life is from the next. As my good friend Marcus puts it, I realize “that all the things which happen now have happened before” and “will happen again in the future . . . All the same now: just a different cast.”
It’s humbling to know that, contrary to what my third grade teacher told me, I am not all that special. And it certainly keeps my hubris in check when I’m tempted to pass sweeping moral judgment on my parents’ generation, or my grandparents’, or any of those that came before.
Yet there’s a paradox to the brooch: The hair on the reverse tells me that even though I’m not unique, I matter uniquely. There’s a longevity to hair in that it outlasts its owner’s death. It persists, as do countless acts of generosity and creation: forgiving a friend for a petty slight, moving closer to home to care for an ailing parent, having a child, writing a really great song. The consequences of such acts endure, even when the actors are no longer recalled as individuals, but only as members of the Nameless Dead. Or as George Eliot described it: “The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
That paradox of special/not-special reminds me very much of the Polish Rabbi Simcha Bunin’s directive to wear “two pockets.” In one pocket, the Rabbi advised, we should keep a slip of paper stating “I am only dust and ashes.” In the other should be a slip of paper stating “for my sake was the world created.” The brooch is a clever ornamental expression of the lesson. I stare at the skull and recognize that I am, fundamentally, common organic matter. Yet a quick flip to the hair on the reverse, and I realize that, in the eyes of the Creator, I am also fundamentally precious.
Every day, I need to ask myself whether I’m acting in a way that will merely be remembered or one that will endure. And every day, I need to remind myself that, as the Native American proverb goes, when the sun goes down at sunset, it will take a part of my life with it.
And so I fasten the brooch to my collar or my purse and prepare myself for the inevitable side-eye in the checkout line at the store.
“That pin you’re wearing?,” one kid told me the other day as he was bagging my groceries. “That’s . . . uhh . . . kind of disturbing.”
He’s right, it is. But it’s the good kind of disturbing: a gentle disruption to startle me awake.