Why were the Victorians obsessed with death? : Tennyson

A little weird to be writing about memorial verses today, xmas morning, but as it happens yesterday I was reading Tennyson's "In Memorium" (making me I guess the only non-grad-student in North America doing so) and wondering what is it with the Victorians and their absolute obsession with commemorating death? A walk through any older cemetery will confirm this - the morbid statuary, the carved angels and urns and even entire deathbed scenes (you can see one in Forest Lawn in Buffalo), and reading about the memorial verses in newspapers and the black ribbons everyone wore in the U.S. when presidents died - and mostly the great poet. Although these memorial verses go back farther - Milton's Lycidas an example, and the Romantics wrote about the death of Keats (Adonis) - though not with the same morbidity, desperation, and fixation as in Tennyson with whom it rises to the level of obsession: about 130 poems all in the same meter, linked only by the theme, various statements on the death of his friend Arthur Hallam, died young, full of promise, but uncelebrated - and that I think is part of it - in an earlier era early death was more frequent but as medicine improved it became more shocking, tragic. But mostly I think it must be what JH Miller referred to as "the disappearance of God," not the death but disappearance: Tennyson's Memorium filled with many references to Hallam's being in a better place and so on, but there's a sense that it's forced, that Tennyson desperately trying to believe what he doesn't feel. As the world was moving toward a modern, scientific sensibility, writers and other thinkers were evidently, and publicly, struggling with how to justify early death - in a world where it was increasingly difficult to have faith that we are all living in the hands of a Christian God.