"Bury this terrorist on US soil and we will unbury him", declared one protestor's sign outside the funeral home holding Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev's body.

"It's a disgrace," a woman in Hamden, Connecticut, told television cameras when asked about a proposal to bury the body nearby. "We don't want a bomber buried in our cemetery," a man agreed.

It took more than two weeks of searching to find a grave for Tamerlan, who died 19 April in a gun battle with police. Cambridge city officials refused to bury him in the city cemetery, while private cemeteries also denied him admittance. Worcestor funeral director Peter Stefan, who took charge of the body, told reporters "I can't keep playing musical cemeteries." Thursday morning, Worcester police finally released a statement saying that "a courageous and compassionate individual" had come forward to provide a secret burial.

Why was it so hard to bury Tamerlan? (Cremation is forbidden in Islam). The man is dead, after all, which severely hampers his ability to harm the living. Yet the furor around his burial highlights the strange power we assign to dead bodies, particularly controversial ones. Far from treating corpses as harmless, inanimate objects, we often view them as symbols – or more – of the departed, which deserve to be treated the same way the dead person was in life. And the way we deal with them says something about our troubled relationship with death, not to mention communities of the living.

For millennia humans have been treating corpses differently than other kinds of objects, burying them in specific poses and with items that would have been valuable to them during life. Even today, we seem to believe that corpses are special, and that the relationship between body and soul isn't quite severed at death.

Part of this may come from empathy: looking at a corpse, it's hard not to imagine how it felt when alive. Writing in The Lancet in January, historian Lindsey Fitzharris relates how her mother, a registered nurse, felt about her first human dissection subject:

"I felt sorry for her. … I wanted to cover her body with a blanket, not because she was naked … I don't know. I just thought she'd be more comfortable with a blanket over her before we began poking, prodding, and pulling her to pieces."

On some level, we don't really believe that death is the end. Countenancing the idea of someone else's consciousness becoming separate from their body – or stopping entirely – means imagining the same thing happening in ourselves, a mental process a bit like imagining what it might be like to go to Mars. As Freud wrote, "At bottom no one believes in his own death." We can't really imagine what it means to die, which makes it very hard for us to understand what it means to be a corpse. And believing that some of the person's consciousness still survives after death means there's more reason to punish their corpse. According to the General Social Survey over 70% of Americans believe in life after death.

The idea of a personhood inextricable from our remains is also influenced by religious beliefs. In the Bible, death is occasionally just a temporary predicament, reversible by god or prophets. Ideas about corpses have historically been influenced by a belief in resurrection, a time in the future when the soul will be reunited with the resuscitated body. In eras past, Christian belief in resurrection had a practical impact on the treatment of the dead: people were horrified at the idea of medical dissection in part because of fears that a dismembered body wouldn't be fully resurrected. At the same time, criminals were sometimes sentenced to dissection as an extra layer of punishment after their execution, thus condemning them in both life and afterlife.

Barring Tamerlan from local cemeteries is also an exclusion from the community, a posthumous casting-out. At least since Americans began building parkline, sculpture-strewn cemeteries in the 19th century, burial grounds have often been a place where we enshrine our highest ideals. They are places where we build memorials to our finest selves and engrave our greatest accomplishments into metal and granite.

More than other kinds of killers, terrorists aim not just to destroy bodies but to wound a community's ideals. Allowing them burial in our cemeteries can seem like a tacit acceptance of their ideology. That may be why the concerns around Tamerlan's burial seem louder than for other kinds of criminals; even serial killer Ted Bundy's will was carried out, his ashes spread on the same mountain range where some of his victim's bodies had been found. It also might be why practical concerns about his burial – fears about vandalism, or lowering the desirability of nearby plots – make a great deal of sense.

Such concerns may also hint at social change. In 1963 we managed to bury Lee Harvey Oswald, presumed assassin of John F Kennedy, with a minimum of fuss. (He was laid to rest in Rose Hill Cemetery). Although it had been difficult to find a minister, the executive secretary of the Fort Worth Council of Churches stepped in to perform the burial, saying "Someone had to help this family. No man should be buried in Fort Worth without a minister."

Ultimately Tamerlan's remains are just a set of flesh and bones, and the way we dealt with his body was a message we communicated about ourselves, not to him. He is gone, his resting place was supposed to be unknown, although reports are that it is in Virginia. His acts stand as his epitaph, and our response to them as our own kind of marker.