Ashes to Ashes

For today's Lenten reflection, I am going to ponder Death and particularly the unnatural way we treat it in this culture. Very recently I read an article by a man who had just buried his father and father-in-law in vastly different ways, his father in the traditional over-the-top funeral with a hugely expensive casket and monument after being embalmed, while his father-in-law requested a simple burial. They made his casket and buried him in the backyard (after checking the ordinances, of course), and the author felt it was much more satisfying. I would think this is true. There's nothing worse than the way we get rid of dead people so quickly, handing them over to someone who makes them look completely unnatural so that we don't have to think about the fact that someday the same thing will happen to us.

Just this week an old friend died under tragic circumstances, and we have yet to see him so it doesn't quite seem real yet. (It doesn't help that this particulary individual was a master prankster so that it seems perfectly plausible that he could have faked the whole thing.) Seeing a person in death offers so much closure; just a century ago death was accepted as a sad but natural part of life, when people generally died at home. Now it is so foreign to most of us that it seems utterly terrifying. Lent is a time to reflect on our own mortality, not with fear of the unknown but with concern for the states of our souls and hope for the life to come.

People are also oddly disrespectful about death these days. There was a short online blurb about my friend who died, and people had written some bizarre comments speculating about the nature of his death. It is as if, by mocking Death, we think we can keep it at bay. Now I have a very dark sense of humor by nature and enjoy universal jokes about death (like the scene from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life that satirizes the final scene from The Seventh Seal), but I cannot understand making fun of an individual dying, especially at a young age under tragic circumstances. (Granted, they didn't know the full scope of those circumstances, but some of the speculations were kind of rude, I thought.) I almost wonder if this is a reaction of fear: hey, if someone my age could just... die, could I? So they make up scenarios to mock the deceased and comfort themselves that they would never fall victim to such an untimely death.

If Hardingfele dies an untimely death of Hantavirus from playing with swimming mice, then my office mate and I are going to take up her cause for canonization as the patron saint of mus musculus, the house mouse.

Famous Hat