Us and Death: Why the Disconnect?

Being the daughter of a mother who works in health care, I get some pretty frank discussion about getting old and dying - discussion that sometimes results with me yelling "Mooooom oh my god, stop talking! Seriously." I remember, when she worked with the elderly, my mother jokingly asking out loud before reading the obituaries "let's see whether I have any schedule changes for tomorrow." Now that she works in the ER, the stories are much worse. For a long time I wondered how the woman remains cheery and functional when she deals with death on such a regular basis (perhaps she's pocketing so-and-so's meds now and then?) She's seen a dead body -- I have never seen a dead body (aside from the sterile bones in the Anthropology lab, hardly the same thing).

"I touched a dead guy at work today, kids!"

However disturbed by my mother's dinner table conversations (the ones that taught me not to ask "so what did you do at work today, Mom?"), I have been considering something lately, maybe due in part to all the morbid blog posts I've been writing. Perhaps it's not that my mom is a little bit kooky (ok, ya she's totally kooky), but maybe it's our ideas about the dead that are disconnected from reality. Why is it that I get creeped out when she says that it was a patient's "time", or when she tells me exactly what she wants her funeral to be like?

These questions are ones that I have been mulling over this past semester. I think seeing death from an archaeological perspective has showed me that we (i.e. modern, western populations) have an unprecedented alienation from our dead. Our folklore, popular culture, and even our science tell us that the living and the dead should have as much of a divide between them as possible, and however unlikely it is that I will become a mortician any time soon I definitely see this disconnect as something that I wish were different. I feel that, if we were all more like my mother (It's like she's comfortable with the reality that everybody dies or something -- what a novel idea), then people would have a lot less to be freaked out about. Perhaps then we could live by the golden words of wisdom of 1970s Canadian rock band Trooper, "we're here for a good time (not a long time), so have a good time."

Buddhism, Cremation, and Impermanence

1325 CE depiction of the Buddha's death

This semester I took Religious Studies 200B: Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Chinese Religions (fantastic course by Dr. Martin Adam, by the way - I recommend it). One day we were encouraged to attend a talk by author Tim Ward about his stay at Wat Pah Nanachat, an English speaking Buddhist monastery in Thailand for outsiders wishing to be introduced to monastic practices.

Since I'm mad diligent, I had my death blog on the brain and perked right up and started taking notes when Ward (an excellent public speaker) started talking about a particular experience from Wat Pah Nanachat that stuck with him. (For background knowledge, Buddhists usually prefer cremation because it symbolizes detachment from the self, among other reasons.)

The skeleton on display at Wat Pah Nanachat. Image source

In Ward's story, a female cancer sufferer who lived near Wat Pah Nanachat committed suicide and, as is customary in cases of suicide, was not permitted to be cremated (I promise I'll quit with the suicide posts, and no I am not planning on harming myself). However, since she was a particularly devoted Buddhist it was permitted, as it often is, for her bones to be cleaned and her skeleton to be displayed in the temple as a lesson on impermanence - in this case the impermanence of life.

According to Ward, a German monk at the monastery who had befriended the woman before she died volunteered to be the one to clean the woman's bones as a personal lesson on impermanence. In Ward's account the monk used his dinner knife, which he later cleaned and used in his meal preparation, to prepare the woman's bones to be displayed.

I think that this story was particularly interesting for the fact that the monk was coming from a western society, where the dead may often be treated as scary or dirty, and where many (if not most) people have never seen a dead person. However, he chose to have an experience that many westerners (myself included) would be absolutely traumatized by, one that might even be considered disrespectful. In fact, I'm certain that it would be impossible in our (western) society to find yourself in an instance in which you could legally do what this monk did.

Another thing that this story made me think about was how, to somebody who does not know what they are looking at, the display of the woman's skeleton in a monastery might signify that she was of some special, higher religious status. However, it's sort of the opposite. In actuality her skeleton is there because she did something that meant her body was given the second most preferred treatment. Additionally, an observer could tell that there is something significant about the skeleton, but many of the multi-layers of meaning that it holds for the living (i.e. the monk who cleaned the bones) are lost.