ABSTRACT
In our nation's capital the sense of space dedicated to remembering the dead is especially powerful. Many other societies refuse the dead a continuing presence in the living world by less dramatic customs. Some groups insist that the name of a dead relative never be spoken again. Modern America offers an odd innovation on the theme of the preserved corpse as a "living" memorial. A thirty-nine-year-old Texas death-row inmate, Joseph Paul Jernigan, gained a kind of digital immortality when he agreed to donate his body to the Visible Human Project. Memorials that recall mass death due to intentional acts of murder sometimes demand that we vicariously relive the moment of death, in all its bloody detail, so as to embrace a moral message. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum adopts this approach to remembering. Mementos of the dead come in every size, shape, and form: a locket holds a strand of the deceased's hair; a photograph freezes moments in past life.
