Creepy. Demonic. Disrespectful.
Those are just a few of the words people used to describe the homegoing celebration of 24-year-old Maryland rapper Goonew, who was shot and killed on March 18. On Sunday, his embalmed body appeared on a stage at a D.C. nightclub wearing a hoodie and a crown.
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Maybe you’ve seen one of the videos taken of that event. They show music playing, people dancing and Goonew standing in a position that, if he were alive, would have allowed him to take in the whole scene. The event was called “The Final Show.”
Videos showing Goonew’s propped-up body, unsurprisingly, traveled quickly through social media, drawing shock and head shakes. “That is so messed up,” read the reaction of one person. “I’m truly disturbed,” read another.
Sickening. Disgusting. Savages. Those are some of the other words people used.
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On Monday, Bliss, the club hosting the event, put out a statement offering condolences to the family of Goonew and an apology to “those who may be upset or offended.”
“Bliss was contacted by a local funeral home to rent out our venue for Goonew’s home-going celebration,” it explained. “Bliss was never made aware of what would transpire.”
pic.twitter.com/tR1npCH64f
— Bliss Club (@blissclubdc) April 4, 2022
The family of Markelle Morrow — Goonew’s real name — also spoke out. His mother, Patrice Morrow, defended the celebration in an interview with Fox 5.
“People just saying what they want to say, and that’s fine,” she said. “That’s perfectly fine. I’m pleased with how I sent my son away. I wish people would just let me grieve in peace.”
Of all the words that have been uttered in response to the event, those are the only ones that matter. Families should be allowed to grieve in whatever way feels most fitting for them.
Goonew made rap music feel timeless in his own way
“Different cultures celebrate life and mourn loss in different ways, and no one has the right to tell a family how they should mourn,” says Monica Torres, an internationally recognized embalming technical trainer and the owner of NXT Generation Mortuary Support, which offers education to professionals and the public on embalming. “At the end of the day, whatever brings the family comfort on their most difficult and darkest day is what we need to stand by.”
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When people do otherwise, she says, they are “whitewashing what they think mourning should look like in America.”
Torres often works with families who have been told by other funeral homes that an open casket isn’t possible because of the condition of their loved one’s body. The body may have been decomposed or involved in a major car accident. Torres says those cases aren’t easy but she takes them because she recognizes that, for many people, seeing the body can play an important role in their grief, especially when that death was unexpected.
“It is an opportunity for people to accept the loss,” she says. “And it sets them on the path in their grief journey toward healing, true healing.”
I reached out to Torres to get context for what people saw in those videos of Goonew. I have covered many deaths over the years, and as a result attended many funerals of strangers. I have even sat next to families as they’ve chosen urns. When you do that, you learn to suspend your own beliefs about what should happen after someone dies, or what you would want for your own funeral, and listen to what people say matters to them.
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When bodies are posed in lifelike positions, it’s called “extreme embalming,” and Goonew’s family was not the first to request that service. In 2014, a Washington Post article told of several families who worked with a funeral home in Puerto Rico to make it possible. Among those embalmed: an 80-year-old woman who was propped up on a rocking chair and surrounded by plants, a 23-year-old boxer who was placed in a makeshift boxing ring, and a 22-year-old man who was dressed in biking gear and positioned on top of his Honda CBR600.
A funeral home’s specialty: Dioramas of the (propped up) dead
To prepare a body for those type of lifelike displays is time-consuming, costly and takes a high level of skill that not all embalmers possess, Torres says.
“Embalming is 50 percent art, 50 percent science, and you have to know both,” she says. “You have to be a chemist and you have to be an artist.”
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She describes extreme embalming as “a true expression of grief and memorialization and the real meaning of ‘I want to remember him the way he was.’” She says it’s a relatively new trend that has been embraced by some Latino and Black families but also points out that the art of embalming has a long history.
Abraham Lincoln had the body of 11-year-old son Willie embalmed after the boy died in 1862. When Lincoln was assassinated, he was embalmed and taken by train along a route that spanned more than 1,600 miles, allowing a grieving public to see his body before it reached its final resting place in Springfield, Ill. Historical accounts tell of people camping along the railroad tracks in hopes of catching a glimpse and waiting in line for hours to see his open casket.
“During a 20-hour public viewing, approximately 150,000 people passed by Lincoln as he rested near the foot of the Liberty Bell,” reads an article on the History Channel’s website. “Even larger crowds emerged in Manhattan. There, a half-million spectators — including six-year-old Theodore Roosevelt gazing down from a second-floor window in his family’s mansion — witnessed a massive procession in which 16 horses hauled an elaborate hearse decorated with patriotic imagery. An estimated 125,000 people filed past Lincoln’s corpse in City Hall.”
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An article in the Smithsonian Magazine describes the president’s body in this way: “Lincoln’s appearance early in the trip was apparently so lifelike that mourners often reached out to touch his face, but the quality of the preservation faded over the length of the three-week journey.”
The way Goonew’s body was displayed was unusual, unexpected and yes, jarring. But it was not disrespectful. It was not many of the words that people reached for quickly to describe it.
It was what the people who will miss him most wanted.