HW 46 - Initial Thoughts on the Care of the Dead

The first thing i realized about the care of the dead is that almost all of my ideas have been influenced by Stiff by Mary Roach. The reason that this is worth mentioning is because it was the first real insight in to an industry that is usually relatively secretive. It isn't because the mortuary industry puts up an iron curtain, it is because most of us don't want to think about what would happen to us when we do die. We don't want to think of what kind of box they will put us in, or how they dig the grave. We just want to know that we will be taken care of.

It isn't all about fear, it goes back to the basic thought of ignorance is bliss. We will be happy if we don't know what an autopsy actually is, or if we don't know how hot a crematorium has to be to turn a human body to ash. What about leaving our bodies for science? What happens then? I believe that we don't want to know these things because to us, death is the end, we have heard stories about what will happen when we die, but we don't know for sure, so we are afraid and that is why Mary Roach's influenced me so much. Because it gave me insight into a world that i had never actually seen before, i had just seen the entranceway at funerals and such. But at funerals, no one thinks about what is happening around them because they are mourning.

I have experienced the death of someone close to me, you never see it coming, but in this case it wasn't a surprise. It shocked my family, but we accepted it, and after the body was cremated, that was it, we still speak about it, but we have a tendency to avoid where she is right now. We talk about how great she was, not where her soul is, or what happened when she did die. I feel like as a society, we have a very disconnected approach to death, we do not want to get tangled up in the emotions and the actual process of taking care of them. So we separate it. We grieve, and some people we don't know come and take care of the body. It is a process we don't really talk about, but is the same every time. Thats what i think about the process of taking care of the dead

Some questions i had were:

1. How does this process differ in other countries? What do they do?
2. Do people view death as a burden or as a relief?
3. How do people get in to the mortuary business?