Reflections on a Funeral

While in Coventry we noticed a funeral at the cathedral. It was beautiful. People were, by request, dressed in their brightest colors, the pall bearers wore white, and the hearse was white with white horses. The coffin was also white. We could hear that during the service there was applause and laughter and singing. It turns out the deceased was a young woman of 22 who had been full of the spark of life, and her family wanted her funeral to reflect that.

On this same trip I went back and looked at the house in which I was born. I could look up and see the bedroom in which I had been born, with the help of a trained mid-wife. I could look up and down the quiet streets, the sort which we could play on safely as kids, staying out until called in for bed.

Both birth and death are obviously the defining moments of our human existence. Yet we have turned them into cold unpleasant affairs. Birth has become a clinical issue, like a disease to be cured with full hospital care. It is clear that proper medical attention is required as complications do happen and can be fatal. However, we have medicalized all births. If instead babies were born at home, with friends and family around, birth would be a celebrated entrance into the family and community, not a medical procedure. Death is the same. It has become a dour and taboo topic. The process involves whisking the body away, if it isn’t already tied to a million tubes and monitors in a hospital, and then it is examined, embalmed, and then viewed at a strange, liminal place called a funeral home. The funeral itself is mandated misery. It is preferable that, paralleling birth, death be an intimate process of departing the family and community. As much as possible the process should be at home, with the body staying at home and prepared for burial by the family as part of saying goodbye – this is very traditional. Then, another tradition, the wake can be a celebration of that person’s life, and a bon voyage to the next.

Personally, I’d like to be buried in a biodegradable box under a tree, then have everyone who showed up to hang around sitting on the grass and smoking weed.

The problem is the wonderful efficiency of modernity has taken away our humanity, and removed our human rituals and interactions. We are all about order and efficiency. I have written before about the little rituals of life. The big ones are important.

Think about work. We are scheduled to the minute. We work in spaces which maximize efficiency. Our interactions have intent to maximize productivity. The human is subsumed under the profitable. School can be the same. Regimes of testing ensure maximum utility. Kids must sit still for hours in neat rows of desks. Play is replaced by homework and scheduled organized activities.

Birth, school, work, death: all clinical, efficient, scheduled, orderly, controlled.

I have also written about the anarchist in me. I love a little disorder, inefficient human interactions, and purposeless, happy action. Work and school, like birth and death, need to be less controlled from above and less driven to assess and measure everything.

The operating word should be play. Make birth a fun playful moment for the family, let school allow kids to play and be creative, let work allow workers to be flexible and in control and creative, let death be a playful celebration of all life.

As a postscript. I am observing the sometimes condescending, sometimes angry commentary about the unruly, disobedient, disorderly, and disruptive Sanders supporters at the Democratic convention. Personally, I love it. Let’s keep the process messy and passionate.

Let’s keep life messy and passionate.