People had once been buried in charnel houses or tombs where all bones were mixed together; now everyone had "his or her own little box for his or her own little personal decay"

[...] Americans' unwillingness to prioritize how we deal with the dead (or our supposition that the story, or the parts of it that matter, stop with the heartbeat) may constitute a failure of moral imagination, but it absolutely fails to imagine the way the living and the dead remain connected, no matter how the living feel about it. The dead tell us how we're dying, how we're living, who among us gets a better shot than others at a whole and healthy life, and how we remain vulnerable to one another and to the vicissitudes of an unpredictable world. Our epidemics, the commonality of our despair, our continual mistakes, the progress we have yet to make, the wrongs we have yet to correct - all these are mirrored back to us by the dead. No one likes to be reminded of these things, but they don't go away just because the bodies do.