In grade school, a nun told us the story of a saintly woman whose case for canonisation was closed when, after disinterring her body to check for signs of beatification - holy preservation or sweet aromas - the churchmen found, to their horror, the interior lid of her coffin deeply scraped and the nails of her fingers worn to nubs. Having awakened to find she had been buried alive, we were told, the virgin and mendicant committed the sin of despair (a deal breaker when it comes to sainthood) when she failed to accept, without struggle, God's manifest plan for her. This was among my early clues that these holy ladies in their blue habits and scapulars, in whose tutelage I found myself, were playing by different rules entirely.
So to find in Jan Bondeson's curious text that: "Thomas a Kempis, who died in 1471, was denied canonisation because splinters of wood from the coffin lid were found embedded underneath his fingernails when the coffin was opened; why, if he had been worthy of becoming a saint, had he made such desperate efforts to postpone his meeting with his Maker?" quickened in me the kind of "been there, done that" reverie that those with a nunnish upbringing share in matters of death, sex and sanctity.
Indeed, Buried Alive makes clear that versions of "the story" of premature burial turn up in every generation, in a handful of predictable motifs: a gravedigger who disinters a wealthy woman's corpse for the ring left on her finger only to find her still alive; young lovers not allowed to marry because of class differences, but reunited in the graveyard to a happier end than Romeo and Juliet; the lecherous monk who rapes an innkeeper's comely daughter's corpse, only to return in due course to find the woman alive and his infant son in her care; and the recurring case of the "Careless Anatomist", the most famous version of which involves the great Andreas Vesalius.
"According to a widely disseminated legend, Vesalius was once consulted by a Spanish noblewoman. After the death of his patient, he wanted to discover the origin of her illness and asked the family's permission to open the body. To the horror of both Vesalius and the noblewoman's relatives who were present to watch, the heart of the presumed corpse was found to be still beating." Dr Bondeson is nothing if not thorough in his investigations. Comprehensive chapter notes and a subject index provide evidence of his scholarship. Both a medical doctor and PhD, and a professor at the University of Wales, his former titles include A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities, The Feejee Mermaid, The Two-Headed Boy, and The London Monster. So the spaces between fiction, faction, rumour and truth are familiar territories for his curiosity. Like many scholars and scientists, however, he is better at the accumulation of information than speculations as to the meaning of it.
What does the fear or the fact of premature burial have to do with our changing attitudes to the dying, death, the afterlife, funeral fashions, medicine, and religion? The catalogue of variations on Bondeson's single theme might make better reading if the reader were challenged to do something besides imagine how it must feel to wake up in a coffin.
Does it have, for example, something to do with the 19th-century appeal of embalming in America? A thing that has shaped the funeral industry of the 20th century. Or the drastic increase in cremation in the western world? These connections are never made, though a mention of them is given in a two-sentence chapter note on the last page of the notes. The case that might support the subtitle's presumption is never made. Even after the umpteenth narrative of hands worn to stumps, elbows scraped to the bone, corpses disinterred after frantic fatal struggles, there are fears more primal than being buried alive, not least because Dr Bondeson never gets past the cartoon and caricature of his subject - the ghouls and ghosts and goblins - into the deeper discussion of mortality, spirituality, grief and existential dread. He whistles past these issues fairly quickly: "As we know, the mid-eighteenth-century process of dechristianization of death facilitated the spread of the fear of premature burial. But both the traditional fear of hell and the new fear of being buried alive were expressions of a deeper, underlying fear of death."
Do tell! How so? Who says?
AS FOR the practicalities of aligning social death (when we decide someone needs to be buried), somatic death (when one appears like they need to be buried) and cellular death (when one smells like they need to be buried) - distinctions that do not appear in the text or index - the Irish have had this part right for centuries. After free drink, good grief, old stories, and prayer, chief among the advantages of a wake is the certainty, achieved after keening and beads and bottles and liturgies, that the dead guy is, indeed, the dead guy. By the time it's done there is general agreement on this. Such sensible cultures that have kept the dead among them, present in their home places and present tenses, have no fear of being buried alive. They keep the difficult vigils with the dying and the dead and the bereaved. They watch and wait. They laugh and weep and pray. Nor need they fear that deeper oblivion from which terror there is no release, not to be buried and alive, but to be buried and forgotten.
Thomas Lynch is an essayist and poet and the author, most recently, of Still Life in Milford (poems) and Bodies in Motion and at Rest. He lives in Michigan and in west Clare