Rest in peace, death.
If people spent more time with corpses, they wouldn’t be so scared of death, says the organizer of a day-long symposium on death and beauty inside Green-Wood Cemetery this weekend. “Death: A Graveside Companion” on Oct. 28 will educate audiences about the history of morbidity and how people’s feelings about it have changed.
“It’s my belief that part of why people are freaked out by death today is they just don’t see it anymore,” said Joanna Ebenstein, who will release a book also titled “Death: A Graveside Companion” on Nov. 7. “It’s a very different world where death has become the other and exotic and simultaneously terrifying but also fascinating.”
For her book, Ebenstein — founder of the now-closed Morbid Anatomy Museum in Gowanus, and of a blog with the same name — compiled more than 1,000 images that show how humans related to death, from prehistoric times to the present. The volume also features essays from guest experts, including Karen Bachmann, who wrote about 19th century artists who used the hair of their deceased loved ones in their work, and medical historian Michael Sappol, both of whom will speak at the symposium. The event is like a live-action version of her 400-page tome, according to Ebenstein.
“It’s a day-long form of the book,” she said.
The day will also include a show-and-tell session of morbid objects from the past, including hair art and dollhouses filled with miniature clues that were once used to train forensic scientists, along with a screening of films that illuminate how blase people used to be about death.
In the past, said Ebenstein, mortality rates were higher, and more people lived on farms where animals were killed for food. Now, people die behind curtains at hospitals instead of surrounded by people in their homes, and lack of familiarity with croaking has made people fear it, she said.
Those who come to the symposium will be buried in a flood of information about fatality and loss like none before, said Ebenstein.
“I don’t think there’s anywhere else you can immerse yourself so fully if you’re interested in the intersection of beauty and death,” she said. “It will be a very special day.”
Death: A Graveside Companion at Green-wood Cemetery’s chapel (500 25th St. at Fifth Avenue in Greenwood Heights, www.green
