Thomas Long’s wonderful Accompany Them with Singing: The Christian Funeral has a chapter on the disturbing trend of “memorial services” (without a body) displacing funeral services, even among Christians. Long cites Thomas Lynch, a funeral director, on the insidious “just a shell” theory of dead bodies. He remembers a time when an Episcopal deacon said something of this sort to the mother of a teenager, dead of leukemia, and promptly received a swift slap. “I’ll tell you when it’s ‘just a shell,’” she retorted. “For now and until I tell you otherwise, she’s my daughter.” Lynch goes on to say, So to suggest in the early going of grief that the dead body is “just” anything rings as tinny in its attempt to minimalize…