For Halloween and All Saints weekend, here's a list of "I never thought of that" death-related stuff that may, um, leave you howling (Caution--if you are squeamish or don't like talking about death, now is the time to click out to a happier, fuzzier blog):
- WalMart has apparently begun selling caskets and funeral urns via its web site. That's nothing new really--Costco's been offering theirs for about five years. It's not like their stacked up next to the toilet paper, but you can still get a decent casket for a lot less than the funeral home will charge (and, by law, a funeral home has to accept the casket you bring in and can't charge you extra for doing so). I just finished a fascinating (and kind of gross) book by Mark Harris titled Grave Matters which looks at all the possible ways one's body can be laid to rest. Bottom line is, no matter how embalmed, sealed, vaulted, or encased your body is after the funeral, it's going to wind up a decomposed slick of--well, read the book. So, it doesn't really matter what kind of casket you get--it's just delaying the inevitable.
- Then there's the whole process of getting the body ready for viewing and casketing. Harris describes it in detail in the book. Let's just say that the chapter he writes about that is something one shouldn't read right before bedtime, like I did. The toxic chemical stew that results is also a real environmental problem on a whole lot of levels.
- Harris also writes about cremation and about "green" burial in the book, which was intriguing. When we visited the Trappist monastery in Kentucky last summer, we saw a film about how the monks bury their dead in a simple grave with the deceased simply wrapped in a shroud. A natural process then takes place. Green burial sites are popping up (okay, probably not the best description) all over the country as people seek a more natural way of burial with no chemical embalming and no expensive metal caskets.
- Thomas Long's book Accompany Them with Singing: The Christian Funeral is one I've been recommending to colleagues recently. Long describes the interesting history of the early Christian movement and burial. Seems that in first century Rome common people were simply tossed into a ditch when they died (the Platonist idea that the body didn't matter dominated the landscape then as it, unfortunately, does now). The early Christians, however, would take the bodies of the poor, wash them, and prepare them for a proper Christian burial. Why? Because of their belief in resurrection of the body. The funeral and burial was thus an act of farewell and preparation for the resurrection to come. The body still mattered.
- Jesus' own burial comes into discussion here, too. First century Jews practiced a two-stage burial process. In the first stage, the body was washed, wrapped in cloths and laid out in a tomb or burial cave hewn out of rock. Spices were applied to the body to both hasten the decomposition process and cut down on the odor. A year after this first "burial," the family returned and placed the bones in an ossuary or "bone box" which was then put in a niche elsewhere in the tomb or buried. There are so many of these ossuaries in Israel that people now use them for flower boxes (sans bones, which have been long buried elsewhere).
- But what happens when we die? I'm now reading Joel Green's interesting book, Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible. Green takes a monist view of the body--that the body, mind, and "soul" are not separate entities and that science is proving this out. His discussion of what it means for humans to be created "in the image of God" is very intriguing. Point is, however, that it all goes to the importance of the idea of bodily resurrection over and against the immortality of the soul. I'll review it further when I'm finished. For a more popular (and humorous) discussion of science and the idea of the soul, check out Mary Roach's Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife.Her description of MacDougall's famous experiment where he tried to prove that a separate soul existed and that it weighed 21 grams is fascinating. I also enjoyed her other book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.
- Some of you may think I've gone off my rocker, but this stuff is actually fascinating. Hope you pick up some reading for "the day of the dead!"
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