How do children learn about death?

   My first experience about death was a very young age. My mother's mum died several years before I was born and consequently, she was never that 'grandmother' figure to me. Sharon, as she liked to be called, is buried in Nelson and every time we went and visited my mother's father and step-mum, we would go visit Sharon. For the longest time I couldn't understand why my mum would be so sad when we would go to the cemetery. But every time we went, I always felt really uncomfortable,  because for some reason I knew that this place was a sad one but I never felt sad there.
   Then, one of my brothers started to become curious about his birth mother (as both of my younger brothers are adopted from Haiti). My parents had to break it to him that the reason that he was in an orphanage was because his mother died and his grandmother was no longer able to take care of him. Suddenly there was something that was more relatable for me to understand about going to a cemetery. I couldn't imagine loosing my mum and for years I would have nightmares about my mother dying.
   My family had always had pets in the house. At one point we had two dogs, three cats, a hamster, and several fish. Then one year, we had to put down two of the cats and one of the dogs. Both cats were very old and had a very poor quality of life because they were always sick and no longer able to eat because their teeth had fallen out from old age. We had to say goodbye to our dog who had become accustom to attacking the other dog and had even bit me once or twice and my parents couldn't take the chance that he would attack either of my brothers and myself as we were still in the early years of elementary school. This is one of the first ways that many children experience death at a young age unless something awful happens to them.
   After that, nothing much happened until I was supposed to start high school. My mother's step-mum had an elderly mother who died. She was always very kind and made sure to always send us a happy birthday card to us, even though we were never really her great-grand children, except through marriage.  One day we went to her care home for her funeral, which was I believe what anyone could have wanted; a celebration of life. That was the first funeral that I had ever been to.
   During my last year in high school my dog, Lucky, died. He was very old and had crohn's disease and suffered greatly. He was always getting sick and could no long his ability to control his bladder. It was very sad to see him go, I had gotten him a few weeks after my brothers arrived to Canada when I was four. When things were coming to an end, I was in Europe with my school for spring break. He died three days after I returned.
   Then just last year, my grand father on my dad's side died. He and I were very close, and we are coming up to the anniversary of his death within the next few days. Sorry if I don't say too much about him as it is still too soon. He died less than a month away from his and my grandmother's 50th wedding anniversary.
   Just this year, my great-grand father on my mum's side, died at the age of 102, less than a week after his birthday. He suffered from extreme loneliness as he couldn't hear and wasn't very mobile after his second hip replacement several years ago. I never met him because he lived in Moncton, New Brunswick, and as you can imagine, it is very difficult to go out there with three children, no matter what time of year it is.
   People deal with death in very different ways, but how do we explain to our children (especially if they are very young) that someone has died. Do we tell them that they moved, or that their pet dog went to a farm and tell them later on when they are older that they actually passed on? I really can't give you any advice about your son, Dr. McGuire.
   Children learn about death in many ways. Sometimes it's through the loss of a pet or the loss of a family member or a friend. The only thing that I can say: is that through all of this, the best thing for me to have was a person who understood what I was going through and could let me grieve how I needed to.

As a society, we are so determined to put people (and prehistoric ones, for that matter) in their prescribed groups. Let those groups be whether or not those people were hunter/gatherers or carnivores or highly religious or even in terms of their sexuality. I can see from a archaeological stand point that knowing if the people that you are researching are hunter/gatherers or not may be important because we are curious of how humanity started out and if the hunter/gatherers started using another form of getting food or if they stayed this way and why. 

There may have been a big fuss about this because some may think that 'hey, people have been expressing their sexuality in different ways for millennia!'. Well sorry to burst your bubble, but science has proven that a person's sexuality is determined in the genetic code and being 'gay' like the caveman that they are describing is not a choice.

Looking at an article in the Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/8433527/First-homosexual-caveman-found.html), it doesn't seem that the researcher was being critical of that person's potential sexuality, but she may have failed to consider that the man may have been buried in this way as a punishment in the after life. Or even in other cultures where there isn't a boy in the family, a daughter will take the place of a man in a marriage, this may have been the case, where there weren't any daughters in the family, so this man took a female position in a relationship. I do not refute the researcher's point that this may be the first transgendered individual found in the fossil record, but is there really a need to make a big fuss about it. Is there any evidence that this individual wasn't in fact human? I don't believe so. This individual was/is human and should be treated as such.

Monument Analysis

When our group (the Pharohs) decided to do our fieldwork in Ross Bay Cemetery it seemed to me like a daunting task because the cemetery is so expansive. To narrow down some of our research we decided to look at mausoleums and we didn't exclude any; we even looked at the ones like the Wilson mausoleum wich is more under ground and not typically considered a mausoleum. Here are the questions that we came up with to help focus our research: Does the position of a mausoleum in the Ross Bay landscape proved any information regarding the individual’s religious affiliation? And, In the Ross Bay cemetery, was mausoleum use favoured by (or limited to) a certain social group or social class?

Answers:

1. In a sense yes, the positions of the mausoleums did provide some information regarding a religious affiliation. The Rosso Mausoleum is a prime example of this because of the crucifix on the front, above the gate of the mausoleum and is in the Roman Catholic section (Old Cemetery Society of British Columbia). Other examples would include the Mackenzie and the Helmcken mausoleums, which were in the Anglican section, and the families were of Anglican faith (Old Cemetery Society of British Columbia). On the other hand, we did notice that some of the mausoleums were not in their correct ‘area’ for religious affiliation. Our guess for this was because the cemetery had run out of space in the correct ‘areas’ for the religious specific mausoleums and had to place them in the general section, expanded pre-existing ones to make room, or after the mausoleum was built, the family (or the individual) changed religions during their life, but still chose to be buried with the rest of their family. But, on a whole, the mausoleums did not show a lot of religious symbols and we had to use the BC Archives and a website called 'Victoria's Victoria' to help us decipher the religious histories of the families in question.

2. Of the mausoleums, the Rithet mausoleum one stood out the most with expansive marble work and the overall grandeur of the structure itself. Through our research we found that the Rithet family was a very influential family during their period, as they owned much of Victoria at the time. From our searches at the BC Archives we found that R.P. Rithet was very involved with the premier about the British Pacific Railway by means of personal correspondence and was invited to a ball with the wealthy Vanderbilt family of the United States, along with many other businesses and companies. With the help of the Old Cemetery Society, we had access to Victoria’s Victoria website that had numerous newspaper articles and journals about the families of the Mausoleums. Such as the story of how Victoria Jane Wilson left all of her money to her parrot, Louis. And that the Wilson and the Rithet families were connected by marriage: Mrs. R.P. Rithet (née. Elizabeth Munro) who was the sister of Mrs. J. Keith Wilson (née. Mary Munro).

So to conclude, no, there wasn’t really a correlation between the social status and the use of a mausoleum as a final resting place. It was really if you had the money, you could have one. Which is the case for the Mackenzie mausoleum as it looks to be simply built on the inside, but made of beautiful stone on the outside, which could show that the family wanted to show that they had high status in the community, but could not afford a mausoleum like the Rithet family.


Here is a link to our map:
 http://maps.google.ca/maps/ms?vps=2&hl=en&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&msa=0&msid=210630812341427334305.0004b7c446c9d63b9b5d9

Leona Taylor and Dorothy Mindenhall, “Index of Historical Victoria Newspapers,” Victoria’s Victoria, http://www.victoriasvictoria.ca/, 2007.

Old Cemetery Society of Victoria. (2012). Ross Bay Cemetery . Available: http://www.oldcem.bc.ca/cem_rb.htm. Last accessed February 16, 2012.

Monument Project

My group and I have been madly working away at our monument project. I was put in charge of taking pictures, uploading them to the map and working on some of the descriptions of the monuments. Since Tuesday I have had a lot of trouble trying to upload my photos. But, don't fret, with the help of the wonderful people at the computer help desk in Clearihue - speaking of Clearihue, did you know that there is a Clearihue buried in Ross Bay Cemetery? - I have been able to successfully able to upload my photos. Just a tip, if you are having trouble right click on your image and click the 'Copy URL' button and paste that into the pop-up window on the Google Map page.
During our guest lecture's presentation on Tuesday, she presented a field study that I'm really interested in. It's the one in South Africa excavating hominines. Unfortunately, I can't go. Not only can I not afford it, but this is my last semester at UVic. But you never know, I'll finish my degree one day and I would certainly love to do a field study then.

She has such beautiful hair...

My family and I are avid travelers and we love to watch Rick Steve's Europe TV show. We were watching an episode one afternoon and he was touring some religious destinations that were far off the regular tourist track. There was this one monastery where women were not permitted because for some reason the Monks who started this monastery believed that women would bring their children and they would distract the Monks from their religious life. Anyway, back to the point. On Wednesday, Dr McGuire was telling us about how some people save their dead relative's hair and make it into a picture. Well, in the monastery that I was telling you about, there was this one picture that a woman had made from her hair of angels that took her whole life to make. It was really interesting because you could see how her hair had changed over the years from strawberry blond to white as she aged.