THE NIGHT HUSBAND:

EXPERIENCES OF MOURNING AND MORTUARY RITES

Jennifer Kerner

(Gallimard, 224 pages, 2023)

The Night Husband retraces the birth of a vocation born out of grief and mourning. When thanato-archaeologist Jennifer Kerner was barely twenty years old, she lost her first love to a drug overdose. Searching for solace after her loss, out of desperation she sought to understand how others cope with the death of their loved ones. So began a passion devoted to the study of funeral rites in both ancient and contemporary cultures.

Based on her research and findings from archaeological sites, Kerner takes us on a world tour of funerary practices: from the “macabre cuisine” inherited from the Germanic peoples aiming at “the recovery of bleached and degreased bones ready to become relics,” to Brazil’s Tupinambá, who consume powdered bones of their dead to “domesticate the absence of the deceased”; from Japan’s drive-through funeral parlors to Madagascar’s “turning of the bones” and “aromatics’ bouquets” replacing the entrails of the deceased Agnès Sorel, favorite of the French King Charles VII. What becomes clear in this mind-boggling diversity of rites is the need for many human societies to care for the dead in order to console the living.

The sophistication of these practices also highlights the impoverishment of funerary rites in contemporary Western societies and the way death is kept at bay. Kenner observes how “we are struggling to create new gestures that … would transcend the death of loved ones by breathing into them a new form of life. We, the living, are sick of neglecting our dead.”

The Night Husband effortlessly interweaves scientific considerations and historical perspectives with reflections on mourning, and intimate and deeply affecting passages evoking the life-defining loss of “J,” the author’s first love. In her richly textured narrative, Kerner invites us to question our relationship to death—our own and that of others.

Dr. Jennifer Kerner is an archeologist who has investigated double-funeral ceremonies and manipulations of human bones in funerary or ritual contexts from archaeological and ethnological points of view. After conducting postdoctoral research at Sun Yat-sen University in  China, she now teaches Prehistory in Paris-Nanterre University. She published Manipulations post-mortem du corps humain: implications archéologiques et anthropologiques (Sidestone Press, 2018). She is also the creator of a YouTube channel, Boneless Archéologie.