Memorial near Central Park
My Culture doesn’t deal with death too well. But, after I attended the Memorial near Central Park of one of my closest friend and was back at my hotel central park in the distance, I wondered why this countries the burial rituals, the beauty and personal touch was missing. My friends Memorial was so predictable and calculating. I also couldn’t help pondering how Westerners have been conditioned to accept basically only two choices with how to attend to a dead body. Either we cremate or we bury the dead. By law those are our only choices.
We fail, as a culture, to discuss death and dying. Death gives life its meaning; an obvious statement affecting an appearance to be trite, but there is nothing trite about death. It is the most profound realities of our human condition. Death has been alternately trivialized and denied mostly among the Western American culture. This attitude is often assigned to the funeral industry. An industry that grew out of the peculiar needs of the Civil War to embalm bodies being shipped home from the battlefield. In the mid-twentieth century, the funeral home industry not only had virtually appropriated our death rituals, but they grew obscenely rich by convincing the grieving that it’s wrong somehow to just bury their loved ones without a casket. Other factors played in the commercialization of death, including but not limiting to the influences of urbanization. This helped fragment the community and scatter families and the advancements of health care, the increasing life spans and the expansion of hospitals also were major factor to the growth of funeral homes hold on our Phyche, our instintic to respect death as a natural cause of life. Funerals lack ritual, lack connection and convinced us to fear death because of the very nature of a funeral; they lack substance and form. They create rhetoric over meaning. Dogma over reality. It’s time to review our laws regulating the handling of our loved ones lifeless body and reclaim the lost beauty of ritual and rites. Respecting the dead anyway we chose should be the law and natural law.
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