Burial, Cremation, or the Water Way

 

What the Undertaker Knows

 

There’s an area between dying and grieving that we don’t think about much, partially because it doesn’t last long, but also because we’re squeamish about dead bodies and what to do with them. If we pay funeral directors a lot of money to take care of all the arrangements, then we don’t even have to see the body. This is the problem. In our ongoing denial of death, we can pretend that they’ve just moved somewhere else.

 

One of the reasons we don’t make funeral decisions ahead of time, and where our loved one will rest for all eternity, is that we don’t want to give up hope when someone is dying.

 

(“Resting” is a curious term, yet it goes to the heart of our thinking. When the body is in the casket at the funeral, it does look like they’re sleeping, but do we really expect bodies to rest in the grave until they enter heaven, and be as intact as when we buried them? And if they are going to have a spiritual body in the afterlife, then why do we try to delay their physical decay with preservatives?)

 

We want to believe that hope has the power to change unwanted realities. We want to think only good thoughts when someone is dying—“You will recover! You are getting better!” Some of us think that if we start planning for the worst outcome, then the worst will happen. Yet it would reduce the stress on our family if we decided ahead of time what we wanted done with our body.

 

No matter what we decide to do, we want to be respectful of the person who died and honor their spirit. Some religious encourage the family to sit in vigil with the dead body for twenty-four hours as the spirit takes its final leave of the body. In some cultures, families wash the body and prepare it for burial. My friend Beth was able to do this for her mother when she died. Caitlin Doughty, an artisanal undertaker, calls this ‘holding the space,’ and wishes that more people would do this.

 

Older cultures have rites and rituals for honoring the dead after they die, for accompanying the body to its resting place, and for the time of grieving. In American society, because people often die away from home, either in hospitals or nursing homes, we don’t see death up close. Bodies go from the hospital to the funeral home and into the ground, and we scarcely see the physical realities of death and decay.

 

            In her work, Doughty has seen people who’ve died at all ages and from a wide variety of causes. Knowing that we have no assurance of a long life can keep us focused what we want to do with our lives and not dawdle the years away with what doesn’t bring us happiness. 

 

In her three books, Doughty describes what physically happens to the body after it dies and goes to a funeral home or crematorium. If you don’t want to know the details, stop reading here. 

 

In Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Doughty’s first book, she recounts her work in a crematorium— picking up dead bodies, preparing them for viewing, the cremation process, and her decision to study to become a mortician. There’s a lot of yuck in this book. While the bodies of people who die in the hospital are generally in good condition, relatively speaking, quite a few people live alone and aren’t discovered for several days or weeks and physically they have begun to decompose. Some are found in lakes and their skin is no longer holding together.

 

There are two basic choices: burial or cremation, but before either one happens, we have to decide if we want the body made presentable for viewing. Eyes tend to spring open so little cups with prongs are put under the eyelids to keep them shut. Jaws will fall open unless wires are shot into the gums and tied together. 

 

Then there’s the embalming. If you’re going to be cremated, you don’t need to be embalmed. Embalming does nothing for the dead person; it only comforts the grieving. Even then, the dead person does not look like they did in real life, but more like a waxen figure. This was true for my grandfather. While seeing a loved one’s dead body can help us accept that they are truly dead, embalming only delays the body’s deterioration. The process is not for the squeamish because embalming is violent. Tubes are shoved into the abdomen to suck out the fluids that accumulate as the organs fall apart, and a tube is inserted into a neck vein to inject in the toxic embalming liquids (like formaldehyde) as the blood is drained out. Legally, you never have to embalm your loved one, unless your funeral home insists on this for certain of their services. If we were aware of the violence that embalming does to our loved ones, I think that many of us would reject this option.

 

Cremation is fairly straight forward, and Doughty walks us through the process. It’s unlikely that we will ever see a complete cremation because the body goes into a big furnace with walls, but we might get to watch the body slide into the machine and push the button that starts the flames. A place in Creston, Colorado does open-air cremations. After the flesh and fat burn away, only the bones remain behind. They are collected and, in the United States, they crushed so that they look like ash. This is what ends up in your vase. George Bernard Shaw watched his mother’s cremation, and said that as her body burned, there were beautiful “streaming ribbons of garnet colored lovely flames.” 

 

Where you bury someone depends upon the regulations of the state where you live. You can’t just plop them in the ground like you do with the body of your dead pet. There are several options. If you go to a traditional cemetery like Forest Lawn, the body goes into a rigid casket that is placed in a concrete vault six feet down in the ground so that the lawn overhead won’t sink as the body decays, which will take an extra-long time because of the metal shell and the concrete bunker.

 

There are alternatives to the traditional burial, including natural burials where people are simply put several feet down into the ground to decay naturally, and recomposition, where bodies are covered with natural elements to help them decay faster into fertile soil. This preserves the nutrients of the body so that it can be used by nature to grow. (Cremation destroys the nutrients.) There are also natural burial shrouds made out of mushroom spores that break down the toxins in the body. An alternative to cremation by fire is aqua cremation that dissolves the body (alkaline hydrolysis). It is more environmentally friendly than standard cremation (which uses a lot of wood or gas), and is gentler, like returning to the amniotic fluids we were formed in.

 

It really comes down to what we want. Do we want our loved one’s body to nurture the earth, or do we want to preserve their body for as long as possible as they slowly molder underground? Personally, I don’t like the idea of my loved ones moldering. One choice affirms death as a reality; the other denies it. 

 

In her second book, From Here to Eternity, Doughty talks about customs from cultures around the world. Her third book, Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?, answers questions that people have asked her over the years.