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So I recently finished a book called From Here to Eternity, about funeral practices around the world. This isn't something I've thought about much, as I'm only twenty-five and keep alternating between being certain I won't die any time soon and knowing that if I should die there will be other people to handle my funeral, people who will actually know what they're doing.
But my parents aren't twenty-five, and while they're still fairly young, my grandparents aren't. One grandmother died about five years back, and the other recently had uterine cancer. She's doing fine now, but she and her husband have already picked out burial plots. (The other grandfather has breathing problems. We don't know how long he has.) It's really weird, going with your grandparents to look at the place they'll be buried, but what was even weirder was looking at the cemetery.
I haven't been to many cemeteries. I haven't even thought about them much, but I still have a rather romanticized vision of them in my head. They're places full of grass and mossy tombstones, with flowers laid on graves and random trees dotted about. The place where my grandparents will be buried has trees, but it's large enough to drive through, and the streets all have names that feel very distant from death.
Part of the argument From Here to Eternity makes is that Americans as a whole are too distanced from death and the dead. We keep ourselves separate from it, and that leads to death anxiety. I don't feel too worried about my own death, perhaps in part because I spent several years nearly suicidal and faced my own death fairly often. I'm not even worried about others' deaths (as long as I'm not confronted with them suddenly but have time to consider them), but I am worried that, when someone I love dies, I'll be handed all the responsibility but won't know what to do.
I don't want my mother, a woman who has encouraged me to follow my conscience as long as I put thought into that following first, to have an ordinary burial. I want to give her something that will connect her to the earth, something that will have meaning for both of us, and not the canned sort of meaning funerals pretend to have. I know I have years to prepare, but a part of me feels like I should be figuring this out now, so that I'm ready in another twenty-five or so years.
More than anything else, I don't want her death to be all about money for the funeral industry. I know she'd hate that.
But my parents aren't twenty-five, and while they're still fairly young, my grandparents aren't. One grandmother died about five years back, and the other recently had uterine cancer. She's doing fine now, but she and her husband have already picked out burial plots. (The other grandfather has breathing problems. We don't know how long he has.) It's really weird, going with your grandparents to look at the place they'll be buried, but what was even weirder was looking at the cemetery.
I haven't been to many cemeteries. I haven't even thought about them much, but I still have a rather romanticized vision of them in my head. They're places full of grass and mossy tombstones, with flowers laid on graves and random trees dotted about. The place where my grandparents will be buried has trees, but it's large enough to drive through, and the streets all have names that feel very distant from death.
Part of the argument From Here to Eternity makes is that Americans as a whole are too distanced from death and the dead. We keep ourselves separate from it, and that leads to death anxiety. I don't feel too worried about my own death, perhaps in part because I spent several years nearly suicidal and faced my own death fairly often. I'm not even worried about others' deaths (as long as I'm not confronted with them suddenly but have time to consider them), but I am worried that, when someone I love dies, I'll be handed all the responsibility but won't know what to do.
I don't want my mother, a woman who has encouraged me to follow my conscience as long as I put thought into that following first, to have an ordinary burial. I want to give her something that will connect her to the earth, something that will have meaning for both of us, and not the canned sort of meaning funerals pretend to have. I know I have years to prepare, but a part of me feels like I should be figuring this out now, so that I'm ready in another twenty-five or so years.
More than anything else, I don't want her death to be all about money for the funeral industry. I know she'd hate that.
