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.
“Purification” of human remains
December 3, 2009
From Charles Cowling’s excellent blog The Good Funeral Guide I copy a few lines from his last article entitled “Haunting Presence“.
“The beauty of burial is that it results in the permanent relocation of the complete body. You think it’s all over as the soil rattles down on the coffin. It is. Your hands are now empty.
Not so with cremation. You get a version of the body back.”
Actually Charles, this distinction in terms of final disposition between burial and cremation is not always as clear as you make it, certainly not in many aboriginal cultures and not even in all western ones.
This year, on the 3rd anniversary of the death of my Greek wife’s grandmother, my mother-in-law needs to go back to the tomb of her mother to clean out and reinstall the bones back into the grave. This is traditional in Greece. And it doesn’t merely serve practical purposes such as compacting the remains for the next family burial etc. It has a religious meaning I’ve yet to discover.
In many traditional aboriginal cultures, similar practices are common. There are two phases, corresponding to your “cremated remains dilemma”: the purification of the remains by decomposition or other destruction of the fleshy “earthly” parts; then the installation of the cleaned remains in a permanent place of rest. Until their purification, the remains are potentially dangerous to the living, spiritually speaking - although as a pure materialist one could speculate about hygienic concerns being the basis of the spiritual practices. Once purified, the remains become harmless to the living, indeed they become sacred, since they create a symbolic connection with the dead and the afterworld. They form the basis of the ancestor cult.
What is especially relevent here: in some of these cultures, cremation is used for the first purification phase. The cremated remains are then ritually placed in their final home. As something no longer fearful but rather sacred, they can even rest in or near the home.
Essentially your observation in this article points to the enormous need of our secularized society to apply themselves to these death-matters a little more deeply and less tritely. Other cultures understood better the “remains dilemma”, and they figured out psychological/spiritual solutions. Perhaps our own culture, confused and insensitive to these matters, could learn something from them. For example that the final home of cremated remains is an important issue and taking the path of least psychological resistance may not work. (I think in particular of scattering, which I personally object to.)
Common and anonymous graves
March 11, 2009
Anonymous ash-scattering grave in Switzerland
Browsing through landscape architecture magazines in search of promising architects and architectural ideas for perpetual cemeteries in the 21st century, I at least found exactly what I would not want Perpetua’s Garden to become!
In Germany and Switzerland, recent demand has led to the creation of various forms of Gemeinschaftsgraebe, that is, common areas, usually plain flat lawns, where ashes are scattered or buried with no individual grave markers. At best, the names of the individuals whose remains lie there are inscribed on common plaques or pillars at the edges of these featureless lawns, along with the other unrelated people whose remains lie equally randomly there.
Often the scattering is completely anonymous, so that no-one except the cemetery register and the surviving families know who is buried there. In one example, urns were deliberately buried randomly under the lawn, so that survivors would not know even more or less where on the open expanse of lawn their loved ones lay.
I cannot deny that I find this personally abhorrent. It is an unsurpassable symbol of the heights that nihilism can reach, that there is no higher meaning to life beyond a one-time physical existence. No, that there cannot even be a hope of a higher meaning, be it only the memory of others. Therefore we should make an active effort to erase all memory of a life lived, loved and suffered through. No individual physical marker, no name or image or symbol to stir the memory of future generations. No, these individuals are dead and gone in the most absolute way possible.
To counter a possible objection…. Hindus also scatter their ashes and leave no sign of their existence once their physical existence is over. But they actively believe in reincarnation, that is, an aspiration to something beyond this physical temporal life. Those buried in these anonymous graves on the other hand actively believe in the meaningless of anything beyond this once-only purely physical existence. There’s is an attitude of hopelessness, the Hindu’s is full of hope and belief. There is no comparison to be made between the two.
For the record, the anonymity and hopelessness illustrated by these Gemeinschaftsgraebe is the perfect antithesis to what Perpetua’s Garden will be.
Cemeteries and funerals: body or soul?
February 5, 2009
The first and most obvious point in discussing the question above it that it always includes at least the materialistic matter of dealing with the dead body. But how this is done, with what accompanying beliefs, with what ulterior purposes, in short, everything beyond the actual body disposal is where the question of spiritual or materialistic becomes relevant.
If the material body disposal issue is always present, what of the spiritual elements which are also presumably present, even if only to a minor degree? Can we say which practices and aims are material and which spiritual, and to whom are they seen like that? These distinctions are very personal in nature, since the very same act or object can have spiritual or material significance or both, depending exclusively on the person or culture making the judgment. Moreover, we should look carefully, below the surface - for each individual or culture, what looks like a materialistic goal or value at first glance might reveal itself as spiritual, and vice versa.
Let us take embalming. In North America, this seems at first glance to concern only the body, whose appearance it aims to preserve until the family has made its farewells, and whose dangerous potential to decay and spread sickness it purports to forestall. But at a deeper level, this is a non-material need: for the individual family, to create an attractive last impression; and for the society, to maintain the possibility of a collective denial of death through the preservation of the body as if it were living. (This modern western schizophrenia reflects on our materialistic culture and its fear of admitting to having spiritual needs which cannot be satisfied materially - that is, we pretend that we embalm for hygienic and aesthetic reasons, whereas in reality we do it to keep an awareness of our mortality at bay, to keep from looking for a spiritual solution to the problem of death.)
The ancient Egyptians were far more self-aware and coherent on their reasons for embalming. Their embalming was done explicitly for spiritual reasons of the soul, in this case for one (of the many) souls of the departed, that it have a permanent physical home to return to from its flights away from the tomb. The purely spiritual importance of embalming for the Egyptians is underlined by the fact that they also put symbolic facsimiles of the dead into the tomb, usually little statues, so that if the body did not not survive, the soul would still have a place to dwell. They evidently also understood the embalmed body as a symbolic home, and not purely literally.
We see from this example that what seems like a common practice has little in common when its aims and the world view of the practitioners is examined more closely. We would 0nly have something in common with ancient Egyptians if we admitted that fundamentally our embalming was also an attempt to deny death, albeit a rather pathetic one.
Let us further examine body preservation along spiritual/materialistic lines. Like the ancient Egyptians, fundamentalist and orthodox Christians and Muslims also apparently believe in preservation of the body for spiritual reasons of the individual soul: the body must rest undisturbed and intact in the earth until the Second Coming and the body’s resurrection. But even within these groups we cannot generalize based on external similarities: for the most fundamentalist, the resurrection is understand literally, as some sort of miraculous rising of the flesh-and-blood body from its grave. More mystically minded Christians and Muslims understand this rather as a resurrection in a higher body, an astral body, a gloried body, the names vary, in any case not the old flesh-and-blood body. Again, the difference is essentially whether the matter is seen materially or spiritually. Fundamentalists reveal themselves to be surprisingly materialistic in this sense.
Analysis along these lines is also interesting regarding cremation. For the most materialistic of Christian and Muslim “body-preservationists”, cremation can only be seen as evil, since it utterly destroys the flesh-and-blood body that is to be resurrected. (Among the ancient Egyptians, for whom a symbolic body-double could serve as a substitute home for the wandering soul, an accidental cremation or other destruction of the body would not have been so tragic.) For a mystically-minded Christian or Muslim, cremation should in theory be acceptable, since the body that will be resurrected is not the one destroyed in the flames.
For Indians, cremation is viewed from an altogether different perspective. Here it is a matter of the soul, but paradoxically one that actually requires the material destruction of the body: the soul of the deceased sees the utter destruction of the body by fire and understands, without leaving any room for hope, that its old life and body are gone, that it must make a clean start into a new incarnation.
Secular cremation in the New World appears on the contrary to be purely materialistic, a simple utilitarian matter of body disposal: it is a cheaper, less complicated and supposedly more environmentally-friendly method of disposal. Yet spiritual elements are also present, even in the most secular or atheist proponents of cremation. For example, the commonly heard aversion to the idea of being eaten by worms or “going into the cold damp earth”, reveals a spiritual belief which subconsciously must be similar to the beliefs of materialistic fundamentalists. If our bodies are merely matter, then what difference does it make what happens to that dead matter that our body becomes after death? Or do these people subtly believe in some kind of continuing life or significance of the body after death? Moreover, would not the “burning heat” of the cremation oven not be at least as uncomfortable as the cold damp ground? If the whole matter was purely material, none of these confused but genuine feelings would even be felt. Here too a subtle belief in a spiritual element reveals itself.
Some proponents of cremation may disagree here, claiming that that cremation is for them a spiritual return to the natural cycles of the earth, and thus a “spiritual” affair, a reincarnation of our matter, if you will. Of course, the cycles of nature in their complexity and beauty are wondrous things, and to see one’s place in them is a spiritual matter. But it is a nihilistic spirituality which cannot deal with the possibility of survival of the individual soul. Since it is not able to believe this, it opts for the only survival it can imagine, an anonymous survival of its physical matter.
Hence, it would be invalid to compare or justify cremation in the west by using the ancient Indian tradition as proof. There may be other good reasons for cremation in the West, but not the Indian one, unless we also accept reincarnation of souls.
This line of analysis could be extended to all aspects of funerals and cemeteries, but we leave it to readers to do that for themselves. Or post their ideas in comments below.
We will extend the analysis to green burial and cemeteries in a future posting.