Last week I got a phone call that I’ve been waiting for since 1973.
That year I was sixteen, a student at an alternative high school in New York City. All of us were wannabe hippies, jealous of our older siblings who’d gotten to live the sixties. That summer there was a rock festival upstate at Watkins Glen, what turned out to be the biggest ever. Among the six hundred thousand who made the pilgrimage were two of our friends: Bonnie Bickwit, with her peasant blouse and bandanna, and Mitchell Weiser, with his ponytail. They met up at the summer camp just outside the city where she was working, and hitched off to the rock festival. And we never saw them again.
Everything we know about them said they hadn’t run away. Something had happened to them. Throughout that fall, we talked to grizzled rural sheriffs and reporters. We spent our weekends posting pictures of Bonnie and Mitch in the East Village in Manhattan, near the buildings of cults that were rumored to kidnap kids. And then, the nights after, we would have our nightmares about rape and torture and murder. Their disappearance was one of the galvanizing events of our adolescence, ultimately the longest unsolved teen disappearance in our nation’s history.
And then last week the phone rang.
Mitch and Bonnie’s classmates had gathered for a twenty-fifth reunion. A ceremony had been organized to remember them, there’d been some media coverage, and the right person watched it on TV. And called the police.
The story he told explained their disappearance, described their death by accidental drowning. The details were right, it made sense. And thus the phone rang with the news, e-mails rocketed back and forth among people who now barely remembered each other. And amid the muted excitement, we all kept coming back to the same issue: if this man’s story was true, the bodies of Bonnie and Mitch should have been found. Show us the bodies, we thought, and the mystery will finally be solved.
The desire for tangible proof of the death of someone we know or love is a natural human impulse. But often that desire extends well beyond a purely rational need for certainty. In circumstances where there is not the remotest chance that someone is still alive, even where the dead died centuries ago, we still expend great energy, have lawsuits and diplomatic standoffs, even risk and lose lives, all to retrieve the dead. Consider, for example, the extreme risks taken by an international team of divers in 2001 to recover corpses from the sunken Russian submarine Kursk. Or as an immensely powerful example, for months after 9/11 our nation was brought to an awed silence by a version of this, the nearest thing we have had in generations to a holy national rite—the dangerous search for the dead at Ground Zero.
The quest to get the body back is a drama played out in an endless variety of settings. In Chile, for instance, where civilians of the wrong opinion vanished during the murderous reign of Augusto Pinochet decades ago, the now-elderly mothers of the disappeared still gather to demand—give us even a single bone of our children. Sometimes, the demand for remains crosses national or cultural boundaries and is passed down from generation to generation. A few years back, Spanish authorities (despite some local protest) returned the body of a chief to his native Botswana, more than a century after it was stolen from its fresh grave by colonial looters, preserved, and displayed in a Spanish museum. And the same desire is played out in the court battles between paleontologists and Native American groups: Does the scientific value of studying a skeleton outweigh the desire of a tribe to bury its ancestor? What is arguably the most extreme version of this ritualistic return took place a few years ago: in a 1597 invasion of Korea, the victorious Japanese cut off and preserved the noses of twenty thousand of their vanquished foe, and the whole lot of them were recently repatriated to Korea as a sign of reconciliation.
Twenty thousand noses? Lawsuits over a bone? The living dying to retrieve the dead? Why, in society after society, are we so obsessed with bringing back the dead? Why such ritualistic significance to a body?
Well, it seems obvious that our reverence for the dead should extend to reverence for their earthly remains, and the carrying out of rituals to put those remains to rest. “See that my grave’s kept clean” goes an old spiritual. Even Neanderthal ritualistically buried their dead. Even elephants have their elephant graveyards.
Naturally, none of this turns out to be so simple. Some paleontologists now question whether the haunting image of the Neanderthal burial actually occurred. And while elephants do seem to have an eerie interest in their bones, will carry them for miles, cover them with vegetation, the graveyard is a myth. And human cultures differ dramatically as to their relationship to their dead. While most societies traditionally bury or cremate their deceased, others, such as the Masai of East Africa, discard them for scavengers. And even among cultures that bury their dead, our sense of a grave as hallowed ground is not necessarily shared. As late as the nineteenth century in northern Europe, burial was akin to leasing an apartment: graves were intermittently dug up and the remains discarded, to make room for the next tenants. And while the Western model of death involves grief and whispered respect, the Nyakyusa in Malawi have ornate funerary rituals of mocking the deceased.
Cultures even differ as to when they decide someone is good and dead. And sometimes, individuals whom we would consider robustly alive are considered dead. For example, in traditional Haitian society, if a person does something sufficiently taboo, the village collectively hires their shaman to turn the miscreant into a zombie—thereafter, the community believes he inhabits the world of the dead. Conversely, some societies continue hearty, active social interchanges with people we’d consider dead. In traditional Chinese society in Singapore, younger siblings have to wait their turn to get married, so sometimes an older sibling who dies unwed is betrothed in a “ghost marriage” to someone appropriate and deceased. And even in our own culture, with our obsession with bringing back the dead, with sufficient passage of time (and probably with the demise of the immediate kin of the deceased), the respectful act becomes just the opposite—while we consider it a moral imperative to try to retrieve the dead from the Kursk, doing the same to any skeletal remains on the Titanic would be seen as inappropriately disturbing the dead.
So much for the way we in our society do things as automatically constituting the human norm. Nonetheless, a huge number of cultures put their dead to rest in a somber and ritualistic manner and go to extraordinary lengths to retrieve bodies for such rituals. Why the obsession with getting back bodies?
The most obvious reason is to make sure the person really is dead. From Ulysses to Tom Hanks and his volleyball finally getting off that island, the “But I thought you were dead” is a time-honored plot device. Until the invention of the modern stethoscope about 185 years ago, determining if someone was dead or just in a coma was often difficult. That some people were buried alive gave rise to all sorts of adaptations to prevent this—Irish wakes (i.e., you sit around for days to see if the “corpse” wakes up), seventeenth-century laws that mandated a waiting period of days before burial, aristocrats who stipulated in their wills various ways that their corpses were to be mutilated (i.e., bodily insults meant to wake the not-dead). At its truly nutty extreme, this fear of being buried alive gave rise by the nineteenth century to patented coffins with escape hatches, and the German “dead house,” where corpses, complete with little bells attached to the fingers, were stored until convincingly putrefied. Just in case.
So there’s a long tradition of the dead occasionally turning out to be not so dead, and a decaying corpse is a pretty good way to rule out that possibility. I suspect that another reason for wanting the body back has much to do with the irrational energy that we put into denial. Beginning with our first toddler encounter with a dead robin in the backyard and our parents’ uncomfortable “It’s only sleeping,” or with Grandpa going to the hospital and simply not coming back, our Western model of death is one of euphemism and denial, complete with our tiptoeing and whispering around the dead as if they really are just napping. As first demonstrated in the landmark work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, people in our society tend to react to tragedy—death, the news of terminal illness—with a fairly stereotyped sequence of stages, the first being denial (most typically followed by anger, bargaining, despair, and, if one is lucky, acceptance). To eventually reach that state of grace of acceptance, the denial must be passed—and thus the tendency of so many of us to consider it almost a bracing necessity, taking the bull of denial by the horns, to ask that the coffin be opened, to look upon the loved one’s face. And you need the body for that.
Some of the time, we want the body back not so much to be convinced that they died, but more to learn how the person died. This can be a vast source of solace—“It was a painless death, he never knew what was happening.” This can be the ghastly world of forensics, where sequence is everything—“She was already dead by the time X was done.” Sometimes, the solace of “how” comes from learning something about the deceased by the nature of his or her death, the heroic act, the sacrifice that affirmed a group’s values. In “A River Runs Through It,” Norman MacLean wrote of the youthful murder of his hell-raising brother. He had been beaten to death by thugs unknown, and the autopsy revealed that the small bones in his hands were broken. And thus, “like many Scottish ministers before him, [MacLean’s father] had to derive what comfort he could from the faith that his son had died fighting.” Similarly, many people were relieved to discover that passengers on the hijacked plane that crashed in Pennsylvania on 9/11 had apparently put up a valiant struggle.
The desire to get the body back is also sometimes associated with what we believe to be the spiritual well-being of the dead. The Tlingit of Alaska, for example, believe that a body must be recovered for reincarnation to occur. Among the Nuba of Sudan, men are circumcised only after death, and this is a prerequisite for an afterlife. A top-of-the-line Church of England funeral requires a body that can be blessed and put to eternal rest. Some cultures not only need the body, but all of the body. And thus Orthodox Jews saved teeth, amputated limbs, excised appendixes, for eventual burial, producing the recent image of Orthodox Jews in Israel combing the site of a terrorist bombing for scatterings of shredded flesh.
Another reason for wanting the body back is not for the well-being of the deceased, but for the well-being, spiritual or otherwise, of those in control of the body. In Grave Matters, a surprisingly entertaining book on cross-cultural aspects of death, the anthropologist Nigel Barley makes this point, writing, “The dead do not own their corpses.” Funerary ritual, with the body as its centerpiece, is an unmatched opportunity to share, affirm, inculcate, and revitalize group values, while the funeral itself is a great setting to do politics, to shift alliances, to court, for mourners to gain honor with their piety and grief, for mourners to gain acclaim with the conspicuous consumption of the ceremony that they throw. A well-scripted funeral for a political martyr can galvanize potential crusaders into a self-sacrificing, homicidal frenzy. In a vast number of cultures, funerary ritual represents the triumph of the needs of the group over the needs, if any, of the deceased. And few settings match a state funeral as an opportunity for a government to signal don’t-screw-with-
us power and solidarity. Consider the seemingly odd act of the atheist Soviet Union of the 1920s preserving the body of Lenin in perpetuity like some Slavic saint. But, as Barley emphasizes, that was precisely the goal, the message to the great unwashed Russian peasantry—“We have crushed and replaced the Church”—thus spawning the weird ritual of deceased Communist pooh-bahs being mummified.
The group value of a funeral holds even when it is not for the mighty. Consider how we eulogize the dead. The overwhelming pressure is to say nice things, to glorify, exalt, and exaggerate the good acts of the person. This can sometimes involve some pretty selective filtering of memory, or downright invention if the person was a scoundrel or if the eulogist is a hired gun who didn’t actually know the deceased. In our own society, the good acts that are acclaimed in funeral oration are drawn from a list heavily featuring fidelity, devotion to young children and aged parents, religiosity, a robust work ethic, and fondness for barbecuing. If on a certain level the concrete rituals of a funeral are lessons for the next generation—this is how you do it, remember that for when my time comes—the values eulogized represent a remarkably effective vehicle of conformity, producing that superego of a whisper in the ear of so many of us, “How do I want to be remembered?”
Thus, the pressure at a funeral to make the deceased seem like a saint. And when the funeral is for someone whom that society really does consider a saint, watch out. In this realm, Barley’s dictim “The dead do not own their corpses” can stop being merely metaphorical. When Khomeini died in Iran, frenzied crowds of mourners were so eager to touch their beloved ayatollah that they tipped over his coffin and shredded his burial shroud. Barley tells the story of the death in 1231 of Elisabeth of Thuringia, someone so pious and clearly bound for sainthood that a crowd quickly dismembered her body for holy relics. Even more bizarre is the story of the eleventh-century Saint Romuald—in his old age, he made the mistake of noting plans to move from his Umbrian town; the locals, worried that some other burg would wind up with the holy relics of his body, promptly conspired to murder him.
The body can also be a vehicle for resolving cultural conflicts. After a small Japanese fishing vessel was accidentally sunk in 2001 by a U.S. navy submarine, the U.S. government mounted a multimilliondollar effort to recover the dead. And as part of it, a professor of Japanese religion advised officials on the culturally sensitive wording to be used in military communiqués about the operation, and stipulated the ways and time of day that corpses would be raised and placed in body bags as to be in accordance with Japanese custom.
By contrast, sometimes a body can be a vehicle for one society to express values that are hostile to another society. There is a Maori tale of a man, grievously injured in battle, begging his comrades to quickly cut off his head and retreat with it, so that it wouldn’t be appropriated, shrunken, and displayed as a trophy by the enemy. Recall the visceral power of the image of American dead being dragged through the streets by crowds of Somalis, or the American contractors recently ambushed in Iraq, their bodies burned and publicly hung. When Zaire’s kleptocratic ruler Mobutu was in the final days of his dictatorship, he is believed to have spent his time exhuming the bones of his ancestors, so that they would not be desecrated by rebels. Likewise, even though there was no immediate threat of hostility when the United States gave up the Panama Canal, not only were the VCRs and microwaves packed up to be shipped back to the US of A, but so were the bodies disinterred from the American cemetery.
And this reason for wanting the body back should help to resolve an issue that keeps arising in these battles over Native American bones. Tribe X wants the museum to return the bones of their ancestors for burial. The scientists often retort, “But you folks don’t even traditionally bury your dead.” And that’s not the point—the emotional force behind the Native American argument has to be “It doesn’t matter what we do with our dead; if you white folks think it’s critical to bury your dead, yet you think it’s okay to put our dead in your display cases, then something’s wrong here.”
So amid the vast variety of human cultures, there are a large number of reasons to explain the desire to bring back the dead. To be sure that they are dead, to find out how they died. For the well-being of the dead, or the well-being, prestige, and propagandistic power of the living. To reaffirm a societal value or to keep a hostile society from affirming it. But it strikes me that there is an additional reason why we want the body back, why we want a full explanation of what happened. And this has to do with Bonnie and Mitch—our friends from high school—and the phone call that was finally made.
The caller, named Allyn Smith, was twenty-four at the time of the Watkins Glen rock festival. On the way home, he hitched a ride in a Volkswagen bus. A scrawny young couple were riding in the back, also hitching from the festival. Smith and the driver got stoned. It was a hot day, and a substantial river meandered near the highway. They stopped, planning to cool off in the water. As he was crouching down to take off his shoes, wondering at the wisdom of going in the water, Smith heard a shout. He turned to see that the girl had fallen in. The boy, her companion, leapt in to try to save her. And they were swept away, down the rapids, still very much alive.
This is the story Smith told the police. No names were exchanged in the van, but he had overheard the two talking about a summer camp where the girl worked, recalled identifying details about her clothes. No one else who had been to the festival was unaccounted for. It would appear that they were indeed Bonnie and Mitch. Smith is now cooperating with the police, trying to identify the road, the stretch of river. “I felt he was credible,” says Roy Streever, the investigating detective with the New York State Police.
Many of us have some lingering skepticism—what happened to their backpacks that were in the van? Nevertheless, this probably is what happened. But just as important is what didn’t happen next. Smith, tall, athletic, a navy vet, didn’t try to rescue Bonnie and Mitch. He thought, “I ain’t jumping into that, that’s for sure,” he told a reporter. Nor did the mysterious driver of the van. They sat there, wondering what to do. It is generally interpreted that they were hesitant to go to authorities because of their altered states. Eventually, they got back in the van, drove off. At a fork in the road with their paths diverging, Smith got out, and the driver said he’d report the two kids in the river to the police with an anonymous phone call from a gas station. Police have no record that a call was made, and no call was made by Smith…until the next millennium.
So, maybe it wasn’t a murder after all, it was just a stupid accident—but where no one bothered to call for help for twenty-seven years. “When I asked him [why he waited so long], it didn’t seem to bother him in the least,” says Streever. “He just shrugged.” One father and one stepfather went to their grave never knowing what had happened to Bonnie and Mitch.
And so a group of people has finally gotten the answer to a mystery from long ago. Once, we were kids who believed enough in our immortality that we’d hitch rides with strangers. Now, instead, we flaunt the same irrationality by cheating on our low-fat diets. Once, we had not yet learned that life brings tragedies beyond control. Now we wonder how we can spare our own children from that knowledge. And once, we lost two friends and could only imagine florid, violent sins of commission. And now, instead, we have had a doughy, middle-aged lesson about the toxic consequences of quiet sins of omission, of indifference.
Sometimes, when you get the body back, or at least finally find out the whole story, you learn something critical about the nature of the living, about those who knew all along what had happened.
NOTES AND FURTHER READING
The disappearance of Bonnie and Mitch was reported in a number of articles in The New York Times and the New York Post, 1973–74. The putative solution to their disappearance was reported in a series of articles (beginning 12/15/00) by Eric Greenberg in the Jewish Weekly; they contained the quote by Smith. The quotes from Roy Steever were based on a number of phone conversations I had with him.
The revision about supposed Neanderthal burials can be found in Gargett R, “Grave shortcomings,” Current Anthropology 30 (1989): 157, while the debunking of the proverbial elephants’ graveyard can be found in Moss C, Portraits in the Wild (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).
Nigel Barley’s book Grave Matters (New York: Henry Holt, 1995) contains information about the twenty thousand Korean noses and their repatriation, about funeral rituals of the Nyakyusa, Tlingit, Nuba, and Church of England, about the Maori warrior, as well as about “ghost marriages” among Chinese in Singapore.
Haitian zombification is the subject of Wade Davis’s The Serpent and the Rainbow (New York: Warner Books, 1985). (This book, by a Harvard anthropologist, and reporting original research concerning the neurochemistry of zombification, was, nonetheless, sufficiently entertaining and tawdry to get turned into a really bad horror movie by the same name—the dream of every academician.)
The fear, in earlier times, of being buried alive and the various cultural adaptations that were meant to prevent it are detailed obsessively in Jan Bondeson’s Buried Alive (New York: Norton, 2001).
Kübler-Ross’s work is summarized in her classic 1969 book, On Death and Dying (New York: Macmillan).
The efforts of the U.S. Navy to respect Buddhist sensibilities were detailed on National Public Radio (11/8/01). Finally, the story about Zaire’s Mobutu is told in Wrong M, In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz (New York: HarperCollins, 2000).