David Sloan

There's whole etiquette books about how long you have to wear black and how you can then move to some parts are black and some parts aren't.

I mean, there's a really intimate relationship with death and with the dead.

Yeah, but it's exactly the opposite.

Where death becomes less part of your life, you hide more.

And where death is really in your life, you actually embrace the realities of death more.

Interesting.

A quick example, the gay and lesbian community of the 1980s.

During the HIV-AIDS crisis, yeah.

Right?

I know people close to me who went to 50 funerals.

It becomes a different reality when that's true.

Your relationship to that idea of death changes.

Whereas if you're somebody just going along, say born in the 70s, both your grandparents are alive, both your parents are alive, your siblings are alive, your mom might have had a miscarriage, but basically everybody you know is alive.

And they're alive for a really long time, right?

You know, there's lots of people who have

grandparents today, and they're in their 30s and 40s.

That's not going to be true as much in 1900.

So they did different ones.

They didn't do hair on the walls or anything like that.

But we know some of them, right?