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A mortician placed the embalmed and clothed body of David Morales Colón in racing position on his motorcycle for a viewing ceremony at a funeral home, in accordance with his family’s request, after he was shot in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
The embalmed and clothed body of Miriam Burbank rested in a sitting position at the living room table along with cigarettes, a beer, and a New Orleans Saints-themed manicure. Her daughters aimed to capture her vivacity.
Then there is the decades-long cryonics—the preservative freezing of the human body for future revitalization—case of Ted Williams. The baseball hall-of-famer’s frozen head was separated from his frozen body and allegedly mishandled. Both parts are reportedly still frozen, and perhaps both are in the same facility in Arizona.
There are many ways to think about death.
Some people seek to upload, transfer, or map their brain or mind states to computers after they die for future downloading—an idea that is already outdated. In the AppleTV series Extrapolations, a version of mind uploading is presented as a way to survive the impacts of climate change and as a way to revive endangered species once they’ve gone extinct.
In the Phaedo, as Socrates is dying from hemlock poisoning, he scolds Crito regarding his imminent burial: “Bury me in any way you like,” says Socrates, “for I will already be gone when my body is burned or buried.” Death is, after all, the freedom and separation of the soul from the body. But Socrates is indeed more mindful about his burial than the metaphysical dualistic remark suggests. Those who will be present at his death, he continues, will be able to “bear it more easily” when they see his corpse disposed of.
In Astrid Lindgren’s The Brothers Lionheart (Rabén & Sjögren), older brother Jonatan assures his consumptive younger brother, Karl, who has just overheard that he will die soon, that they will meet again, and when they do the bedridden Karl will be both ambulatory and of a healthy and handsome body.
Even these few vignettes raise many questions. Is burial for the grieving or the deceased? What exactly carries over in the resurrection of the body? Presumably the glorified body will not need reading glasses, but how can we have a beatific vision without eyes or sing praises without lungs? Is a machine that continues to cognize after the initial mind upload still me? And if it doesn’t continue to cognize, is it dead, too? What happens if my mind map is downloaded to multiple devices? How far, and indeed how fun, can all this go?
Regardless of what is possible when it comes to the end of life as we know it, one question I hear often in the philosophy of death course I teach is more narrowly focused on what is permissible: What counts as a proper, good, or acceptable burial?
Over the years, my students have responded to that question with variations of ideas such as:
- A proper burial involves a funeral Mass with the body present and then a move to the church graveyard where the coffin is lowered into the ground.
- A proper burial involves a church service at some point (funeral, memorial, Gregorian, intentions) without the body needing to be present and also a brief service for interring the body.
- A proper burial involves a Mass and burial of either body or ashes (cremains). Cremains are not to be left on the fireplace mantel but in the cemetery ground.
- A proper burial involves a funeral home, a wake, a visitation, a shrine, or some sort of quasi-religious civic service, and a ritual disposal of the body.
- A proper burial involves a celebration of life and perhaps a scattering of ashes over the Pacific Ocean.
- A proper burial involves incineration and placing cremains into the garbage can.
From this list, along with cryonics and mind uploading still in mind, we might fashion a more incisive question: What, if anything, doesn’t count as a proper burial?
A deep human instinct, when confronted with difficult questions, is to look for rules. Leaving aside philosophical critique of this tendency, let us consider some examples. In terms of civic regulation, while green burials are legal in all 50 states, some states are more lenient than others in what they allow depending on things like health codes and environmental regulations. In terms of religious regulation, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, citing Tobit 1:16–18, says, “The bodies of the dead must be treated with respect and charity, in faith and hope of the Resurrection.”
But rules can be more or less general. The latter rule, for example, does not specify what “treating with respect and charity” looks like in practice. Here again the deep human instinct asserts itself; more rules.
The Code of Canon Law more specifically states the requirement of an ecclesiastical funeral for members of the Christian faithful and goes on to explain what the purpose and agenda of that funeral should include. It states, “The Church earnestly recommends that the pious custom of burying the bodies of the deceased be observed; nevertheless, the Church does not prohibit cremation unless it was chosen for reasons contrary to Christian doctrine.” And it instructs where bodies of Catholics should be buried (typically, the parish cemetery, though there are other legitimate options).
Even with elaboration, however, it can be far from obvious whether or how to apply rules. Anthropological research reveals, of course, countless individual behaviors and communal events that are necessary for what different people and cultures consider a proper burial. To take some examples, in some places and times the mouth of the corpse is gagged so that the soul cannot return (see Sanskrit atman), the body is watched all night to prevent vampirization, only invitees may attend the funeral, red clothing may not be worn to the funeral, biodegradable water urns and woven willow caskets are used, ashes are pressurized into vinyl albums, and ancient sky and new space burials occur. An exhaustive list of rules to cover the billion further examples I did not mention seems an intractable problem.
It seems, then, that we are back to the relativism of Herodotus, who in his Histories implies the mutual horror felt by both Hellenes and Callatians upon learning the funerary practices of the other—burning the dead versus eating the dead. That is, what is deemed proper by one person or community may not be by others.
Yet, even across all the differences, or rather existentially underneath them, seems to be a sense that there are better and worse practices when it comes to burial. Achilles’ treatment of Hector’s corpse—dragging it through the dirt behind his chariot—is shameful, but the subsequent burial of Achilles, when his cremated remains are mixed with those of his close friend before being placed in a golden urn and buried, is a high point in Homer’s epic. Similarly, but pushing closer to the ultimate burial thought here, it is the sacrilege of an unburied Polynices, whose burial is prohibited as punishment for being a traitor. This emblazons the tragic and noble Antigone, his sister, who breaks the law and buries him anyway. In the contemporary Japanese film Okuribito or “Departures” (Sedic International), a son is mortified at the unceremonious treatment his father’s body receives at the hasty hands of the local morticians.
Instead of thinking of concepts like permissible burial merely in terms of rules that list which items are subsumable and which are not, we can perhaps avoid the problem of a near-infinite list by thinking of the concept as a somewhat fuzzy solar system, with outer rings containing less obvious elements. Whether to have a hallmark photo of my gourd calabash pipe inserted into the Requiem booklet is a question I am happy to leave others.
Placed on a more practical level, the overarching thought to keep in mind when planning a burial might be this: What is essential and what is ancillary? This grounding distinction should not be lost even in the inevitable quibbles about which things should be considered as essential or ancillary. One can maintain, for example, that whatever else is involved, the core of the burial should be sacred (and thus not fundamentally about either the deceased or grieving), even if the application of the sacred is not always perfectly clear.
Even if viewers of Okuribito cannot codify our empathetic understanding, we know exactly why the son, who is himself a mortician, takes over the burial of his father. With the priest-like performance of the burial, the son seeks to correct what is missing and bestow on the burial what we too feel and need: the ritualized sacred.
Acknowledgement: I thank my death students for sharing their experiences and reflections on death. Special thanks to Javier Rosa for research on extreme embalming, Luz Diaz on world cultures, Norbert Medina on catechetical matters, and Scott Jacubowski on civic, environmental, and crematory details.
Image: Unsplash+
