“What I felt on the Ganges,” says Atul Gawande, the surgeon and author of Being Mortal, “was he had brought us there and connected himself to all that was important to him, but he was connecting us as well.”
Rituals surrounding death vary from place to place, and even from community to community within the smallest of towns. Bastienne Schmidt and Philippe Cheng traveled across the US to photograph the wide range of those rituals and what they can show us about the people and places that created them.
Among developed nations, the US has the highest rate of infant mortality despite pumping huge amounts of money into healthcare. That may be down to the lack of support for low-income families, where death rates among children are much higher.