He explained that he talks about death “all the time” with his friends. They ask each other, “Hey, what you want when you die?”
Luciano asked, “Don’t people say that where you come from?”
It was hard to explain that, no, for the most part, they really don’t.
One of the chief questions in my work has always been why my own culture is so squeamish around death. Why do we refuse to have these conversations, asking our family and friends what they want done with their body when they die? Our avoidance is self-defeating. By dodging the talk about our inevitable end, we put both our pocketbooks and our ability to mourn at risk.
I believed that if I could witness firsthand how death is handled in other cultures, I might be able to demonstrate that there is no one prescribed way to “do” or understand death. In the last several years I have traveled to observe death rituals as they are practiced around the world—in Australia, England, Germany, Spain, Italy, Indonesia, Mexico, Bolivia, Japan, and throughout the U.S. There is much to learn from the cremation pyres of India and the whimsical coffins of Ghana, but the places I chose to visit have tales equally spectacular and less often told. I hope that what I found might help us reclaim meaning and tradition in our own communities. Such reclamation is important to me as a funeral home owner, but more so as a daughter and a friend.
THE GREEK HISTORIAN Herodotus, writing over two thousand years ago, produced one of the first descriptions of one culture getting worked up over the death rituals of another. In the story, the ruler of the Persian Empire summons a group of Greeks before him. Since they cremate their dead, the king wonders, “What would [it] take [for them] to eat their dead fathers?” The Greeks balk at this question, explaining that no price in the world would be high enough to turn them into cannibals. Next, the king summons a group of Callatians, known for eating the bodies of their dead. He asks, “What price would make them burn their dead fathers with fire?” The Callatians beg him not to mention “such horrors!”
That attitude—revulsion at the way other groups handle their dead—has endured through millennia. If you have ever come within 500 feet of a modern funeral home, you know that morticians love the following quote, attributed to William Gladstone, a nineteenth-century British prime minister:
Show me the manner in which a nation cares for its dead and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender mercies of its people, their respect for the laws of the land and their loyalty to high ideals.
They etch the quote onto wall plaques and feature it prominently on their websites alongside American flag GIFs and muzak tracks of “Amazing Grace.” Unfortunately, Gladstone never supplied the equation that would allow us to determine, with his promised “mathematical exactness,” that one particular method of handling the dead is 79.9 percent barbaric while another is 62.4 percent dignified.
(In fact, Gladstone may have never even produced this quote at all. It is first recorded as appearing in the March 1938 issue of The American Cemetery, in an article called “Successful Cemetery Advertising.” I can’t prove Gladstone didn’t say it, but one prominent Gladstone scholar told me he had never come across the quote. The furthest he would go was to say it “sounded like something he could have said.”)
Even if we recognize the benefits of another culture’s ritual, we often allow bias to undermine those feelings of acceptance. In 1636, two thousand indigenous Wendat people gathered around a communal burial pit on the shores of what is now Lake Huron, Canada. The grave measured six feet deep and twenty-four feet across, and was designed to hold the bones of seven hundred individuals.
For the bones, the burial pit was not their first stop after death. When the bones were still fresh corpses, they were wrapped in beaver-skin robes and placed on wooden scaffolds ten feet off the ground. Every decade or so, the scattered Huron–Wendat communities would gather their remains for the communal burial, known as the Feast of the Dead. In preparation, the bodies were brought down from the scaffolds. Family members, mostly women, were tasked with scraping the bones clean of any lingering flesh.
How difficult it was to clean the bones varied according to how long the person had been dead. Some bodies had decomposed, and only dried, paper-thin skin still clung to the skeleton. Other bodies were preserved and near mummified, requiring the desiccated flesh to be pulled off in strips and burned. The most challenging bodies belonged to the recently deceased, still swarming with maggots.
This cleaning ritual was witnessed and recorded by Jean de Brébeuf, a Catholic missionary from France. Instead of reacting with horror, he wrote with great admiration of the intimate way the families treated the bodies. In one such case, Brébeuf observed a family unwrap a corpse oozing with decomposition. The family, undaunted, plunged in to clean the bones and rewrap them in a new beaver robe. Brébeuf asked if this was not “a noble example to inspire Christians.” He expressed similar admiration when it came to the ceremony at the burial pit. When the bodies were covered over with sand and bark, he found it “heartening to see” such “works of mercy” take place.
In that moment, standing at the edge of the pit, I’m sure Brébeuf was moved by the death rituals of the Wendat people. But it did not change his final, fervent hope: that all of their customs and ceremonies would be obliterated and replaced with Christian ceremonies, so they could be “sacred” as opposed to “foolish and useless.”
It should be stated that the indigenous people of Canada were not altogether open-minded toward the alternative rituals that missionary de Brébeuf offered. Historian Erik Seeman wrote that the First Nations and Europeans often discovered “chilling perversions” about each other. How were the Wendats expected to believe the French Catholics had noble aims, when they freely admitted to cannibalism, bragging that they consumed flesh and blood (of their own God no less) in a practice called Communion?
Since religion is the source of many death rituals, often we invoke belief to denigrate the practices of others. As recently as 1965, James W. Fraser wrote in Cremation: Is It Christian? (spoiler: no) that to cremate was “a barbarous act” and “an aid to crime.” To a decent Christian, it is “repulsive to think of the body of a friend being treated like a beef roast in the oven, with all its running fats and sizzling tissues.”
I have come to believe that the merits of a death custom are not based on mathematics (e.g., 36.7 percent a “barbarous act”), but on emotions, a belief in the unique nobility of one’s own culture. That is to say, we consider death rituals savage only when they don’t match our own.