French historian Phillippe Aries chronicled the stylized and elaborate public deathbed rituals which declined throughout the Western world in the 18th and 19th centuries. Today, many in American culture lack the explicit rituals to help them deal with loss. 

She realized with a start that she had never, in that city, seen a cemetery, that peculiar sight which so attracted and repulsed her. The endless rows of tombstones like a pointillist with OCD called her to rest. They reminded her of her own inevitability in this world of gambles and wild coincidences. They reminded her of the commonality between herself and the millions of strangers in that harshly-lit, foreign city. They reminded her that her life has no greater purpose or underlying design, only the implicit return her body owes the earth. 

She lived by a hospital. Every night she fell asleep to the lullaby of sirens passing underneath her window. Sometimes she’d walk past that hulking white monstrosity and see people rushing in. Hardly ever did she see people leave, except the nurses in their sickly peach scrubs, marching down the streets with a dazed air like tin soldiers being brought home after a child played with them too roughly. 

She knew there were corpses insidecorpses, inside, though she’d never seen them. Bodies that died a clean, sterile death. How far did they have to travel to return to the fertile musk of damp soil? This city of extremes offered only the purest darkness and the harshest light. The soft grey of aging stone had no place here. 

She’d seen death walking through the streets of the city nonetheless, haunted women pressing sweet relief into their veins, a man sitting in front of a grocery store, part of his skull removed and wet flesh showing, 

but alive, alive, still.