The Hole Left Behind by an exit is quite temporary, but no less profound for the living. The panoply of memorial activities (funerals, wakes, memorial gatherings) is supposed to mediate the mourning process, and is extensively analyzed in Thomas Laqueur's The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains:

The book draws on a vast range of sources—from mortuary archaeology, medical tracts, letters, songs, poems, and novels to painting and landscapes in order to recover the work that the dead do for the living: making human communities that connect the past and the future. Laqueur shows how the churchyard became the dominant resting place of the dead during the Middle Ages and why the cemetery largely supplanted it during the modern period. He traces how and why since the nineteenth century we have come to gather the names of the dead on great lists and memorials and why being buried without a name has become so disturbing... A fascinating chronicle of how we shape the dead and are in turn shaped by them, this is a landmark work of cultural history.

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(go to Start page, to Black Box, to No Where,
to Preparation, to Realizations, to Modalities)