This Is Resting in Peace? : Culture: Tell-all bios and nasty probate fights have done in respect for the dead, who have become vulnerable to character assassination by the living.

Nobody knows exactly when respect for the dead died.

But some time in the last few decades the fatal symptoms appeared: Offspring wrote nasty books about dead parents, museums ignored dead benefactors’ requests, tabloids aired dead celebrities’ dirty laundry. Inheritors became un-meek, contesting the wills of dear, departed relatives.

Intimate secrets people never revealed while alive became dinner table conversation after their deaths. Suddenly, there seemed no way to ensure privacy or perpetuity--no matter what kind of will was left, no matter how celebrated or humble the person who left it.

The dead had become vulnerable to assassination by the living.

When Anne Sexton’s psychiatrist gave tape-recorded psychotherapy sessions to the late poet’s daughter earlier this year, it seemed one more shift from long-standing regard for those who have passed on.

“Respect for the dead certainly has changed,” says David Beams, a minister and community relations director for Forest Lawn Memorial-Park. “People don’t focus on a dead person’s importance in their lives the way they used to. Perhaps that’s why they don’t feel so obligated to respect the person’s memory.”

Beams sees an erosion in the quality of funeral services arranged by families--if they arrange anything at all. He estimates that about 35% just fork over money and ask the funeral director to make all the plans. He’s been at “too many” services where no one shows up but the corpse.

“A few decades back, grandpa faced his final illness in his own bedroom, with his whole family there to help him. The pastor visited, the sons and nephews lovingly prepared a casket. He’d be buried in the family plot on family land; his life and death were all connected, and all his survivors felt very much connected to him,” Beams says.

Not any more.

Jerome Manning, an estates and trusts attorney and professor at New York University Law School, says he’s seen a major attitude change in just the last 15 years:

“Families aren’t as close as they were. . . . They’re willing to litigate if they’re not pleased about the inheritance or about how affairs are to be managed. Everyone’s looking at that famous ‘bottom line.’ Fifteen or 20 years ago, children rarely contested wills; siblings rarely acted against each other. Now we see it constantly.

“If a man leaves 60% of his estate to his daughter, 40% to his son, the son feels shortchanged and takes legal action. Twenty years ago, he might have been upset, but he’d respect the provisions of the will out of respect for the memory of his father.”

Remarriages are causing part of the chaos. Manning cites the example of Joan Whitney Payson, heiress to the Whitney fortune and owner of the New York Mets when she died in 1975, leaving her husband and four children very wealthy.

Payson’s husband made a premarital agreement with his next wife, limiting what she would get upon his death. “But the new wife made inroads on her husband over the next 10 years, and he eventually cut the four children from his first marriage out of his will,” the lawyer says.

The new assertiveness of women also has an impact, Manning says. “Thirty years ago, a father would leave his business to his sons, and the daughter would get what was left. She might not be pleased, but she would accept it. Nowadays, the daughter wants to be left the business--or half its cash value.”

Manning says many elderly parents still don’t recognize the rights of daughters, and they name their sons as executors of the estate. “I have a case right now where the son is executor and the stepson is second in line. The daughter came after both of them. She was furious.”

Waning respect for the dead also has begun to concern other professionals who deal with the issue.

“This society doesn’t have its act together,” says Msgr. George J. Parnassus of Los Angeles. “I think we’ve lost a sense of spirituality and of the sacred.”

The memory of someone close who has died, he says, should not be hidden or overlooked. It deserves reverence. “You must acknowledge the sacred character that the person had in your life.”

“It’s a new question--and as old as time,” says Gerald LaRue, emeritus professor of biblical history and archeology and professor of gerontology at USC.

“Priests of ancient Egypt guaranteed (that they would) protect the pharaohs’ tombs forever,” he says. “Yet we know that within years of the burials, robbers looted the tombs. And what they didn’t get then, archeologists are getting now.”

LaRue, a former archeologist, is ambivalent: “We dig up the remains of people who lived centuries ago, remove the anklets from their legs, the rings from their fingers, their headdress and beads--all in the sacred name of science.

“But these were real people who had feelings and dreams just as we do and who wished their possessions to remain with them forever. The bracelet on a girl’s arm could have been a gift from her lover, her father or her husband. You have no idea, but you remove it from her, put a tag on it, bring it home to a museum--and justify the act.”

Deborah Smith, curator of paper at the Strong Museum in Rochester, N.Y., organized a “last picture show” of Victorian Era photos in which dead people--all dressed up and ready for burial--were propped into positions to make them look alive. Such pre-burial photos were common in Victorian times, she explains, as keepsakes for grieving friends and relatives.

Smith says it’s easy to see shifting attitudes toward the dead and dying. Gravestones in her city are getting smaller and closer to the ground, there is less mourning and funeral ritual and young people are increasingly removed from every aspect of death.

“Old people die in rest homes or hospitals, where children rarely visit. It’s a sort of denial of death as part of life,” she says, and that possibly results in a survivor’s denial of the importance of the person who died. “It’s certainly a departure from what has gone before in Western culture.”

French scholar Philippe Aries, author of “Western Attitudes Toward Death From the Middle Ages to the Present,” sees four major attitudinal stages--the first three of which evolved very slowly:

* Until the 12th Century, he writes, people didn’t perceive themselves as individuals but as a part of nature and its collective destiny. Death was expected and accepted peacefully--a calming part of the communal experience.

* From the 12th to 15th centuries, people began to see themselves as individuals. This sense of self led to the beginning of wills, tombs and to a certain anxiety about one’s own death. Family, as it is known today, had not yet evolved.

* Starting about the 18th Century and through the Victorian Era, the modern family began and became paramount. Aries says loss of a loved one, not one’s own demise, was the thing most feared. Death was horrible because it separated family members and broke the circle of love.

The cult of ornate tombs began; mourning took on a hysterical tone with extended praying and rituals. Children were included in deathbed scenes and mourning rites. Families buried their dead in park-like settings. Wills changed from pious documents to tools for distributing fortunes to one’s nearest and dearest. People could die secure in the knowledge that their beloved families would preserve their reputations and carry out their final wishes.

* But in the 20th Century, a “brutal revolution” occurred. Suddenly, death became shameful and forbidden, Aries writes. People tried to avoid the emotion it caused. Hushing-up procedures accelerated between 1930 and 1950, as home deaths disappeared in favor of hospital deaths: Children were excluded; family and friends ceased to gather at the deathbed for a final goodby ceremony.

Funeral rites became shorter and more discreet; dark mourning clothes became less evident. People stopped pitying those who too noisily suffered a loss. Fewer made regular pilgrimages to grave sites. In the United States, he writes, a need for happiness has outweighed other realities--separating the living from thoughts of the dead and, as a result, from loyalty to their memories and to their final wishes.

The days when a person could write down final wishes and die confident that they would be carried out have disappeared, says Robert Shafton, a Los Angeles corporate attorney who is also chairman of the Cultural Arts Commission of Long Beach.

Instructions expressed as wishes, requests or desires are called “precatory words” in legal language; they are not commands and are not legally binding. For hundreds of years, men and women wrote such precatory words in their wills, correctly assuming that they would be heeded. Few would make that assumption today, Shafton says.

“For example, you might tell your kids to give you an inexpensive funeral and donate the money saved to your favorite charity. But these days, the kids may give only $20 to the charity and keep the rest of the money for themselves. The question is, how well do you know your kids?”

Or how well do you know your favorite museum?

In Adelaide deGroot’s case, not well enough. The New York dowager died in 1967, leaving 250 paintings to the Metropolitan Museum with the precatory request that it offer to give any paintings it didn’t want to other museums.

In what became a landmark controversy, the Met sold about 40 of the works to art dealers, which led to a huge ruckus in the press, an investigation by the New York state attorney general’s office and a new set of guidelines, which apply today.

Ashton Hawkins, executive vice president and general counsel for the Metropolitan, says the controversy brought to light the fact that many museums were circumventing their dead donors’ requests.

“From the museum’s perspective,” he says, “it would not have been wise to simply follow her wishes and distribute assets to other museums. She would be better memorialized another way, we thought.” In the end, funds from the sale of her pictures were used to purchase other works to upgrade the DeGroot Collection, Hawkins says.

As a result, donors who do not want their art sold by museums after their death can make that restriction a legally binding part of the gift.

Christopher Murray, a Los Angeles attorney specializing in entertainment law, agrees. People learn to protect themselves by hearing about mistakes others have made, he says. The Anne Sexton case is a good example, he says, because it, no doubt, made many people wonder how confidential their own psychotherapy records will be when they die.

“If I were a celebrity going to a psychotherapist these days, I’d be inclined to put in writing” either that no tape recordings be made or that they be given to no one upon the client’s death. “I would also put in writing that they are my property and must be surrendered to me at my request.”