Death’s Summer Coat

When was the last time you talked about death—really talked about it? Not as a statistic or a tragedy in the news, but as something personal, inevitable, and even meaningful? In Death’s Summer Coat, cultural historian Brandy Schillace invites you to do what most of Western society avoids: confront mortality. Through history, anthropology, medicine, and art, she argues that our avoidance of death has impoverished our experience of life itself. To live fully, Schillace contends, we must reintroduce death into our conversations, our rituals, and our communities.

Across its wide-ranging chapters, Death’s Summer Coat traces humanity’s evolving relationship with mortality—from ancient burial traditions to the polished sterility of modern medicine. It examines how different cultures respond to loss and what we can learn from societies that keep the dead near rather than hidden. Schillace blends scholarship with storytelling, personal reflection with cross-cultural insight, to reveal that remembering our mortality isn’t morbid; it’s deeply life-affirming.

Our Death-Phobic Age

Schillace begins by confronting the peculiar silence around death in contemporary Western culture. In the modern West—especially in the United States and Britain—death has been medicalized and sanitized. Hospitals, funeral homes, and euphemisms shield us from its reality. People no longer ‘die’; they ‘pass away.’ We fight battles with disease rather than prepare for natural endings. Even grief is time-limited: psychiatric handbooks define ‘normal’ mourning as two months, after which sadness may be labeled pathological. The result is not a victory over death, but alienation from one of life’s most universal experiences.

This silence, Schillace explains, is historically new. Across most of human history, death was visible, communal, and woven into daily life. Children saw the dying. Families washed and prepared bodies. Rituals guided communities through grief. In contrast, the twenty-first century’s promise of endless youth and technological innovation encourages denial. Companies like Google’s Calico project and thinkers such as Ray Kurzweil chase biological immortality, echoing what Schillace calls the West’s “war on mortality.” But pretending we can defeat death only heightens our fear of it.

The Human Need for Ritual

Rituals, she argues, are not quaint relics of superstition but structures that give meaning to chaos. They help communities absorb loss and integrate it into shared identity. When those rituals erode—as they have in modern Western societies—grief becomes harder to bear. Anthropology, neuroscience, and personal observation converge on this point: humans need symbolic acts to process death.

To illustrate, Schillace turns to cultures where death is a living presence. The Tibetan sky burial, for instance, feeds human remains to vultures not out of savagery but reverence—returning the body to the natural cycle of life. Among Indonesia’s Torajans, embalmed relatives are kept in the home and treated as “sick” rather than dead until the funeral can be held, a process that can take years. Families continue to lay out food and new clothes for them. Death, here, is not an abrupt end but a transition within community life.

These rituals, as alien as they may seem to Western readers, reveal something profound: they connect grief with belonging. In the author’s words, “Death, when kept near, ceases to threaten us, ceases to be alien.” Modern medicine’s clinical distance—its curtain-drawn deaths in intensive care units—has stolen that familiarity. By rediscovering ritual, we recover empathy.

History as a Mirror

Schillace also shows that even within Western history, our relationship with death has changed dramatically. The medieval ‘good death’ emphasized preparation, confession, and community presence. The Black Death shattered those patterns but also democratized death, challenging church authority. The Reformation further stripped away intercessory rituals—prayers for the dead, masses for souls in purgatory—creating new psychological and spiritual distance. By the Victorian era, industry had commodified grief: mourning jewelry, postmortem photography, and elaborate funerals transformed remembrance into fashion. Today, both religion and science have failed to fill the void left by that loss of shared meaning.

Yet Schillace insists this is not a lament but an opportunity. Just as the Cambodians created new ceremonies after the genocides of the Khmer Rouge, we too can innovate rituals for a secular age. Death cafes, “natural” burials, and the rise of digital memorials represent attempts to recover what the Victorians took for granted: that grief must have form and death must be witnessed.

Learning to Live with Death

Ultimately, Death’s Summer Coat is both diagnosis and prescription. Our crisis, Schillace suggests, is not death itself but our refusal to engage with it. By studying mortuary cannibalism, anatomy theatres, and death-positive salons with the same curiosity, she dismantles the taboo. What unites all these practices—from medieval bones dressed in jewels to modern ‘green burials’—is their insistence that life and death are continuous, not separate. To “wear death’s summer coat” means to honor that continuity, to recognize beauty in impermanence.

Schillace’s exploration leaves readers not with morbidity but with hope: that by reclaiming death as a shared human experience, we recover deeper compassion for one another. Death is not our enemy, she reminds us—it is our oldest teacher. Her call is simple but profound: bring death back into the light, and life will be richer for it.

Schillace opens her journey by dismantling our binary thinking. We instinctively separate life from death, event from process, yet she argues that death is both: a physical end and an unfolding experience. Drawing from anthropology, psychology, and her own encounters with loss, she shows how this dual awareness shapes how we live.

Seeing Death as a Process

Humans, Schillace reminds us, differ from animals because we foresee our own end. This self-awareness layers every moment of existence. Sociologist Allan Kellehear distinguishes dying as a conscious anticipation of death—a mental journey as real as the biological one. Even before illness strikes, we engage in small deaths: cells shedding, relationships changing, identities evolving. Death, then, is less an interruption than a rhythm woven through living itself.

Her intimate examples make this personal. When her grandfather chose hospice care, his family experienced dying as a year-long process—a chance to grieve daily in small steps. In contrast, the sudden collapse of a stranger in a diner—an event she witnessed first-hand—exposed death in its most immediate form. Both experiences, she writes, were equally instructive: one unfolding, one instantaneous, each demanding connection rather than avoidance.

The Cultural Consequences of Denial

Western societies, Schillace argues, have flattened this complexity. By treating death solely as an event to be managed by professionals, we deny the process that gives it meaning. In ancient and early modern cultures, the dying and their communities prepared together. Today, clinical settings isolate both; the dying person becomes a patient, and loved ones become visitors. This isolation fuels fear and confusion, leaving families bewildered when loss arrives.

Her critique extends to psychology’s pathologizing of grief. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual once defined ‘normal’ bereavement as lasting two months—after which deep sorrow could be diagnosed as depression. This, Schillace observes, makes grief itself a kind of illness rather than a natural continuation of love. She calls for rejecting such artificial timelines in favor of culturally rich models where mourning is honored as transformation, not dysfunction.

Restoring the Dialogue

By reframing death as process, we reclaim the possibility of conversation. Schillace urges readers to talk about death as easily as we do about birth. Just as parents prepare for labor, she argues, we should prepare for dying through discussion, planning, and shared ritual. Avoidance may feel protective, but it leaves us unready for the moment that comes to every home. Her hopeful conclusion: when we stop fearing death as an abrupt event, we can begin to live with it as a familiar companion.

Anthropology is Schillace’s favorite antidote to Western amnesia. In Chapter Two, she takes readers on a global tour of death and grieving customs—from the vultures of Tibet to the rewrapped mummies of Madagascar—to show how other societies integrate death into daily life. Each culture reveals a different emotional wisdom that Western readers can learn from.

Death as Transformation

Among Tibetan Buddhists, death is not an ending but a transition. The dramatic ritual of sky burial—dismembering the body so vultures may consume it—embodies their belief in impermanence and rebirth. To Western eyes, it may appear gruesome, but for Tibetans it expresses compassion: even in death, one’s body nourishes other beings. Reciting the Tibetan Book of the Dead for 49 days helps guide the departing soul through this passage, turning funerary ritual into spiritual companionship.

Grief as Rage and Renewal

Schillace contrasts this peace with the raw catharsis of the Ilongot tribesmen of the Philippines, who traditionally practiced ritual headhunting after a loved one’s death. Anthropologist Renato Rosaldo initially saw this as senseless violence—until his own wife died in a field accident and he felt the same ungovernable rage. For the Ilongot, decapitating an enemy symbolized casting away that fury. His revelation: grief, unexpressed, becomes unbearable. The Ilongot ritual, like therapy, provides structure for emotion Western culture suppresses.

Eating the Dead and Keeping Them Close

The Wari people of Brazil once practiced mortuary cannibalism, consuming their dead as an act of love. Sharing the body among relatives dissolved grief through literal incorporation—the deceased lived on within those who ate. As anthropologist Beth Conklin discovered, this practice treated the body as sacred nourishment, just as Christians symbolically consume the body of Christ. Other cultures preserve rather than consume: Indonesian Torajans keep embalmed relatives at home, feeding and dressing them until the final funeral years later. Death, there, is gradual, not abrupt.

Even the vivid Day of the Dead in Mexico transforms mourning into festival. Families bake sugar skulls, offer bread to ancestors, and picnic at gravesides. Stanley Brandes calls this blend of faith and festivity both an embrace and denial of death: by laughing at mortality, we learn not to fear it.

Lessons for the West

What unites these diverse traditions, Schillace concludes, is community participation. Death in these societies is public, emotional, and embodied—a shared act rather than a secret sorrow. If modern Westerners appear lost in privatized grief, it is because we have lost our rituals of transformation. The solution is neither imitation nor nostalgia, but inspiration: to build new practices that restore death’s rightful place among the living.

In tracing European history, Schillace reveals how control over death shifted—from priests to doctors, from sacred ritual to sterile procedure. Her historical chapters show how each era redefined what it meant to die 'well' and how those definitions shaped modern medicine’s ambivalent role as both healer and gatekeeper of mortality.

The Good Death and Its Disappearance

During the Middle Ages, a 'good death' meant dying with awareness, confession, and community presence. Philippe Ariès dubbed this 'tame death'—an accepted part of life. The Black Death shattered that composure, flooding Europe with mass graves and fear. In its wake, manuals like the Ars Moriendi (‘Art of Dying’) taught ordinary people how to die faithfully when clergy were scarce: a democratization of dying.

The Protestant Reformation then stripped away intercessory rituals, banning prayers for the dead and rejecting purgatory. Death became a private moment between the soul and God. By the Enlightenment, rationalism had dethroned even that theology. Philosophers like John Locke and David Hume sought empirical explanations, turning death into a medical problem rather than a moral passage. Scientists dissected bodies not to save souls but to study systems.

Doctors Replace Priests

By the eighteenth century, physicians had seized the symbolic authority once held by clergy. They managed deathbeds, measured pulses, and prescribed moral composure along with laudanum. As historian Roy Porter noted, doctors became ‘the darlings of the deathbed.’ Yet this authority came with new anxiety: if medicine’s purpose is to fight disease, then every death becomes a failure. Modern hospitals inherited that unease; death is treated as medical defeat rather than existential truth.

Schillace’s historical synthesis explains why modern people rely on hospitals to stage-manage dying yet feel estranged from it. The doctor’s white coat replaced the priest’s robes, but the underlying fear—of disorder, decay, and the limits of control—remains the same. When we say 'she lost her battle with cancer,' we echo a script centuries in the making: one that imagines death as an adversary to conquer, not an experience to understand.

Few eras embraced death as passionately as the Victorians. In Chapter Four, Schillace explores how nineteenth‑century Britain transformed mourning into an art form, creating what she calls a 'grief industry.' From lockets woven with hair to photographs of the newly dead, Victorians made sorrow visible—and paradoxically beautiful.

Mourning as Public Ritual

After the industrial revolution, cities swelled and traditional churchyards overflowed. Public cemeteries such as London’s Highgate and Kensal Green emerged as landscaped sanctuaries where the middle class could grieve with dignity. Elegance replaced decay: black crape, jet jewelry, and strict fashion codes signaled moral respectability. Queen Victoria’s decades‑long mourning for Prince Albert made perpetual widowhood aspirational. As one etiquette manual advised, mourning attire wasn’t simply custom—it was psychological protection, a visible badge that said 'handle with care.'

The Art of Memory

Photography revolutionized remembrance. Because daguerreotypes were expensive, many families could afford only one portrait—their loved one’s last. Post‑mortem “memento mori” images, often indistinguishable from photos of the living, froze death in the language of sleep. Parents posed with dead children cradled in their arms; spouses clasped hands one final time. For the grieving, these were not macabre but tender reassertions of connection. As collector Steve DeGenero told Schillace, 'The pictures in the anatomy atlas did not show nail polish'—but some cadavers’ hands did, bringing the past palpably near.

Schillace sees this fascination as both coping mechanism and cultural mirror. In an age torn between faith and science, Victorians tried to domesticate death through craftsmanship. Mourning jewelry, relics, and portraits turned absence into presence. Our era, she suggests, needs new versions of these artifacts—digital or otherwise—to give grief shape again. The Victorians remind us that visible mourning is not indulgence; it is love, lingering.

The fifth chapter ventures into the anatomy theatre—a stage where science met mortality in its rawest form. Schillace traces how the study of dissection, from Vesalius’s Renaissance labs to modern cadaver‑less classrooms, reveals the uneasy partnership between medicine and death.

Bodies as Evidence

Early physicians lacked human specimens and relied on animals. The sixteenth‑century anatomist Andreas Vesalius revolutionized medicine by dissecting real corpses, producing stunningly detailed plates in De humani corporis fabrica. Over centuries, the quest for knowledge fueled a dark economy: resurrectionists exhumed paupers and marginalized people for dissection. The 1832 British Anatomy Act legalized use of unclaimed bodies, effectively turning the poor into a resource for science.

Dehumanization and the Search for Meaning

By the nineteenth century, dissection had become a rite of passage for medical students, captured in eerie group photographs where grinning men posed with cadavers. These images, Schillace argues, mirrored the memento mori of their time: the dead as teachers, not objects. Yet public horror persisted, and students themselves risked emotional numbness. One professor warned disciples to remember that 'patients are not numbers.' Sociologist Emmanuelle Godeau later described the dissecting room as an 'ambiguous necessity'—a trial separating those who can confront death from those who cannot.

From Flesh to Plastic

Schillace connects this history to today’s debates over digital anatomy tools and synthetic cadavers like SynDaver™. Technology can replicate tissue, but can it teach compassion? Without exposure to mortality’s messiness—the smell, weight, and humanity of a real body—future doctors may lose vital empathy. She cites neurologist Michael DeGeorgia’s lament: “You enter as a human, and years later, you get to be human again.” Dissection, however unsettling, remains a rehearsal for the compassion dying patients deserve.

Schillace’s sixth chapter confronts medicine’s double bind: we expect physicians to defy death and comfort us when they fail. Through ethical quandaries and personal conversations with doctors, she exposes how modern healthcare struggles to balance control with compassion.

The Tyranny of Survival

Consider the story of a Jehovah’s Witness patient who refused blood transfusion during surgery. Her husband begged doctors to override her decision; they agonized but ultimately honored her beliefs. She survived—but the episode forced neurologist Michael DeGeorgia to ask: what does the Hippocratic oath require when saving life means violating autonomy? Such cases illustrate how medicine’s drive to preserve life at any cost often silences the dying person’s voice.

Philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote that “there is no such thing as a natural death.” For Schillace, this captures the modern paradox: in fighting nature so fiercely, medicine has made dying itself unnatural. Hospitals sustain bodies on machines, blurring definitions of life and brain death. From Robert Schwab’s 1950s EEG experiments to controversies like the 2013 case of Jahi McMath, whose body remained on life support after legal death, the line keeps shifting.

Doctors Facing Their Own Mortality

Schillace reveals another layer: physicians themselves are traumatized by this culture of denial. Training demands emotional detachment. Residents work eighty-hour weeks under fluorescent light, learning to hide grief lest they appear unprofessional. Yet detachment has a cost. Dr. Pauline Chen’s memoir Final Exam confesses how often doctors avoid the dying because it is easier than facing their own fear. Burnout and depression follow—symptoms mirroring the very patients they treat.

Toward Compassionate Medicine

Schillace champions reformers like Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, who teaches “healing arts” courses to reintroduce empathy into medical education. Hospice care, she argues, restores what hospitals have lost: human presence at the end. In a poignant interview, hospice worker Jane Carlyle declares, “The best hospice workers are those with compassion.” In their partnership with the dying, doctors rediscover what it means to be alive. The lesson is clear: medicine must stop treating death as failure and begin to treat it as a phase of living that deserves care and respect.

The book’s final chapters return to where they began—with conversation. Schillace chronicles the rise of the ‘death‑positive’ movement: death cafés, dinner parties, and salons where strangers gather to talk about mortality over coffee or cake. These grassroots rituals, she argues, may be the most revolutionary of all.

Eating with the Dead

Food, Schillace notes, has always mediated between the living and the lost. From Anglo‑Saxon funeral feasts to Mexico’s pan de muerto, meals honor continuity. Modern death dinners revive that tradition, transforming taboo into talk. Inspired by Michael Hebb’s Death Over Dinner initiative and Jon Underwood’s London‑based Death Café movement, people worldwide now host suppers where guests discuss living wills, organ donation, and existential fears. Far from macabre, these gatherings celebrate the same communal spirit as the Wari’s funerary feasts or Victorian wakes.

Digital and Green Revivals

New rituals extend beyond the dinner table. 'Green burials' and woodland cemeteries reconnect environmental and spiritual cycles. Online memorials, meanwhile, create digital afterlives but also new dilemmas—what philosopher Dennis Draeger calls “the haunting persistence of data.” Facebook profiles of the deceased can comfort or torment survivors, blurring life’s boundary even further. Yet as Schillace observes, all these practices strive toward meaning-making: they remind us that mourning is active, not passive.

Talking Our Way Home

Schillace closes with optimism. The resurgence of public dialogue—whether through Death Salons curated by scholars like Caitlin Doughty or intimate cafés in Edinburgh cemeteries—signals a cultural healing. “We cannot wait until winter to gather in the grain,” she writes in her epilogue. To prepare for death while life is still warm and full is to wear death’s 'summer coat'—a recognition that our fragility gives life its brilliance. Conversation, then, is the first ritual of a renewed death culture: one that unites curiosity with compassion.