Haiti: death care during catastrophes
January 15, 2010
A CNN “developing story” today described the cemetery and funeral crisis that is accompanying the Haiti disaster. Just two days after the earthquake there is insufficient space in cemeteries to bury the casualties, no time for real funerals, and not even enough coffins to put the bodies in. The desperation on the faces of survivors waiting in long lines to get their loved one’s body into the cemetery, who have to bribe officials for even the most wretched space to bury the body or who are forced to bury them unmarked in a field or watch them disappear in a mass cremation - this is heart-wrenching even beyond the tragedy of the deaths themselves. For not only are loved ones suddenly dead, there is not even the possibility of a dignified and loving farewell for them.
These tragic images should not only awaken our compassion - they should also be reminders that death is not always as manageable as we experience in our relatively peaceful and organized world. The “thronging in the lifeboats” has become completely foreign to us in our protected world. But by watching what happens in Haiti, we can get a preview of how it will be when a similar catastrophe strikes one of our cities. For we are naive if we think that we will be spared similar trials - in the long term, nature makes no favourites.
"Thronging in the life-raft" - what happens to death care during catastrophes?
We are equally naive if we think we will be able to manage our catastrophes much better. Sure, we have far superior infrastructures and disaster responses. But when the earth shakes violently enough, or when the wind blows strongly enough, we will be in the position of the Haitians today. Then not only will our life-infrastructure be handicapped, but that which takes care of death will be equally overwhelmed.
When a society is unprepared, then when the worst comes, which it always does in the end, it must scramble desperately to deal with the practical and spiritual consequences.
Like in Haiti, a similar disaster in San Francisco or New York or London or even a smaller metropolis will create an acute burial space crisis. Farmers’ fields, parks and wildlands near the cities will be appropriated for burials. If the disaster is bad enough, anonymous mass cremation will be the only choice to avoid contagions. There will be no time for meaningful funerals, for erecting a worthy memorial, perhaps even for recording where a body has been laid to rest.
What we see in Haiti should be a wake-up call to us to prepare ourselves now, as best we can, to deal with the mortalities of catastrophes. So that when they come, we can treat our dead in a half-way decent manner.
By locating and preparing enough suitable land for cemeteries in advance, we can avoid a good part of the indignity and the unnecessary additional tragedy that results when death care is forced to become a desperate, purely hygienic matter. By prepared the right kind of land, we can also save precious farmland and wilderness from being used for burials.
Hopefully we will be spared these mass catastrophes - but even then, such preparation can only help us for the inevitable rise in deaths which demographics is bringing our way in the next 3 or 4 decades.
All the more reason to move forward with Perpetua’s Garden now.
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3 Responses to “Haiti: death care during catastrophes”
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In the case of your illustration, the Raft of the Medusa, I think the survivors started to eat each other — but that was a different sort of catastrophe.
I agree: provision of burial space is vital in those cultures which favour it. Here in the UK that is not a great problem, with the cremation rate at 70% and rising.
But I cannot see what provision can be made in the case of buried bodies which have decayed beyond recognition in such numbers that they pose a threat to public health.
It is an enormously difficult problem. But in the UK we have some cultural experience: in both world wars, and in all of the wars before it, none of our service people were brought home for a funeral. This is part of the reason why our funerals tend to be low-key, even perfunctory — and none the better for it.
But when the next disaster strikes, it would be good to see the living and the dead sharing equal-first priority.
Thank you for this thought-provoking post.
Thanks, PG, for recent invitation via Charles’ GFG blog, to come here and comment.
Your basic idea seems to me brilliant. Presumably it would allow bodies to be buried at a sensible depth, to allow the sort of “composting” decomposition that poets and others idealise - whereas in fact at 6 feet under it is something quite else, I understand, and the problem then is methane.
Since industrial waste sites have to be re-landscaped these days, it would surely be possible to incorporate provision fror a natural burial ground?
To comment on Charles’ point above (posted back a bit now, I realise) We may all be cremating like mad, but a sudden catastrophe would certainly overwhelm crematoria. In the recent anxious preparations for swine flu, arrangements were being drafted for drastically curtailed ceremonies in crems working round the clock. If they worked round the clock, my guess is some of them wouold break down, and one FD said to me that he had no intention of working day and night. It seems the Dismal Trade, to use Charles’ phrase with no disrespect intended, all arms of it, operate on a “just in time” basis as far as capacity is concerned - like so much else about our supply chains these days.
Thank goodness swine flu was a flop, if you see what I mean - but the emergency scenario was drafted for what would in fact have been a relatively small rise in the death rate, for a very short time. In wouldn’t have been Haiti.
As we often grumble, our culture pushes death to the edges of our lives, pretends we are not mortal - if a catastrophe overwhelmed us, I reckon we might find it much harder to deal with than cultures that have faced mortality more directly and integrated it with their lving. Well, let’s hope castrophe doesn’t overwhelm us, though you’re probably not being pessimistically unrealistic when you say that it will, one day, for sure.
More positively, I feel we are on the move. The counterforce isnot just the hand of a sometimes perfunctory tradition, it is also and perhaps more insidiously the relentless trivialisation we see in the Co-op advert - that won’t help at all if/when the waste products hit the ventilation arrangements!
Dear Gloriamundi,
the basic idea of using “dead lands for the dead” is a no-brainer when one considers the purely practical reality we are entering into in the next decades. The trick is finding the appropriate techniques for the particular types of dead lands, and also re-awakening humanity’s primal instinct for memory and eternity.
Unfortunately I can only see this awakening happening when the need to transcend life/death becomes obvious again, and this in turn when catastrophe is written in capital letters on the wall.
Such an initiative must not be a purely for-profit operation, but at the same time I see no problem with it being done on a for-profit basis, as long as profit remains the means and not the end.
Indeed, I think we need to try to use market forces to make this happen on a large scale, otherwise it remains a fringe operation for a select few - and that is simply unfair.
Please keep your comments coming - we are on the same wavelength.
Thomas Friese