WHEN Jessica Mitford died, in 1996, at the age of seventy-eight, a rumor went around that she had left behind an unfinished sequel to her 1963 nonfiction classic The American Way of Death, an acerbic study of American funerary practices at mid-century. It was perhaps Mitford more than anyone else who established in popular culture the images of the soothing, mercantilist funeral director and the vast commercial enterprise, by turns pathetic, futile, and grand, of which the funeral director is the embodiment -- images that may be somewhat short of the truth even as they are now effectively beyond parody. Lending substance to the rumor of a sequel was the companion rumor of a persuasively Mitfordian title: Death Warmed Over.
Alas, the rumor turned out to be mostly just that -- no fresh work awaited publication. But with an eye to a new edition Mitford had undertaken a certain amount of revision, and the result, under the title has just been published.
A revised edition was long overdue, for two reasons. The first is that owing in some measure to the influence of The American Way of Death, funeral customs in America have during the past three decades become far more personalized and freewheeling than ever before. Communities around the country have loosened regulations governing attendance upon the dead, allowing families rather than funeral homes to arrange for the ultimate disposition of remains. In some places embalming services have been organized into collectives, on the model of food cooperatives. A brochure that recently came to my house suggests that a thriving mail-order business in coffins now exists. The choices I was offered by a company called Casket Royale ranged from the understated and inexpensive Canterbury model to the costly but elegant Buckingham; a box on the order form could be checked for "24 Hour Rush Delivery." Though still the destiny of a majority, burial is the option desired by fewer and fewer Americans these days. A company called Relict Memorials, in Mill Valley, California, specializes in turning cremated remains into customized granitelike slabs. Kits are available for swabbing and preserving samples of the departed's DNA, and a company now exists to provide "perpetual care" for one's Web site. A Kentucky bookbinder and printer, Timothy Hawley Books, offers a line of what it calls bibliocadavers -- handsomely bound volumes whose blank or printed pages are created from a pulp containing the ashes of a loved one. The advent of bibliocadavers will, if nothing else, add a new facet to the idea of a book's being remaindered.