Tamerlan’s corpse — and ours

The debate over Tamerlan Tsarnaev's remains has sparked a larger one about how to treat dead bodies

BY CAITLIN DOUGHTY

It may have taken a dead body America hates to get us to notice the many dead bodies we don’t.

For anyone not keeping up with the surreal journey about town of the Boston Marathon bomber’s corpse, here is a brief recap. When Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed following a shootout with Boston police, his body was first taken to the Medical Examiner’s office, as is protocol with any violent death. After its release, the body ended up at Graham Putnam and Mahoney Funeral Parlors where the funeral director struggled for almost a week to find a cemetery willing to accept Tsarnaev’s body for burial. During that week protesters gathered outside the funeral home, waving signs and chanting “USA!” Finally, on Thursday it was announced the body had been quietly buried.

As the days wore on and nothing was done with Tsarnaev’s body, the Internet collectively developed into a legion of death and burial philosophers, commenting furiously on social media and blogs. There were those who resided squarely in camp “Make the Corpse Suffer for Its Sins.” Commenters in that camp said things like, “send him back to Chechnya,” “don’t care that he’s a Muslim, cremate him and dump him over the ocean,” or the popular, “he killed a child, let him be torn apart by wild dogs.” Then there were those in camp “Hate the Man, Not the Corpse,” people who believed that the body itself deserved a respectful burial, regardless of their thoughts about the man who used to inhabit it.

Whether the opinion on Tsarnaev’s ultimate disposal (“disposal” being the funeral industry jargon for what happens to a dead body) was gentle or savage, one thing became very clear: The corpse is important. After combing through hundreds of comments, one thing rarely, if ever, said was, “It doesn’t matter what happens. A corpse is just rotting meat anyway.” The general uproar over the fate of Tsarnaev’s dead body seems to demonstrate that as a society we consider corpses to be significant emotional symbols. We have strong opinions as to where dead bodies belong, what is decent and respectful, what the dead do and do not deserve. Commenters on both sides of the debate are starting with the assumption that the burials we provide U.S. citizens are good, dignified and proper.

full article
http://www.salon.com/2013/05/10/tamerlans_corpse_and_ours/