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+--- Thread: The Best Place On Earth To Die (/thread-1514.html)
The Best Place On Earth To Die - C C - Oct 29, 2015
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-best-place-on-earth-to-die
EXCERPT: . . . My host’s three-year-old corpse reclines fully dressed on a wooden bed, with a bowl of rice beside her embalmed hand. I let out an involuntary, bloodcurdling scream, the kind of scream you hear in horror films. The corpse is neither blue, nor white, nor decayed. She doesn’t smell. She is glossy and green, embalmed with tea and formalin.
[...] In Toraja, it’s customary to feed one’s deceased relative every day, and to keep the embalmed corpse tucked cozily inside one’s bedroom—sometimes up to ten years after death. Corpses are treated as if “sick” or “sleeping”—not dead—until the family can afford a proper funeral. To a Westerner, this degree of intimacy with the dead may seem perverse or taboo, but Paul Koudounaris, who studied Torajan burial practices in his book Momento Mori tells me, “If you look cross-culturally and historically, there are plenty of examples of similar or related practices… the way we deal with the dead in the modern West, ghettoizing them or treating them as an abject group, turns out to be historically a lot more eccentric than the way the dead are treated in Tana Toraja....”
RE: The Best Place On Earth To Die - Magical Realist - Oct 29, 2015
I encountered a new form of guilt after I got my mother cremated. It was more traumatic than I had thought. I totally destroyed every bit of her. It was a strange sense of shame and guilt, as if I'd done something really bad. They don't warn you about this in the hospice pamphlets. There was SOME closure after we had the memorial service and buried her ashes in her gravesite. But it just seemed so final, like I was contributing to her eternal goneness. The structure of her body was instantaneously irradicated. So sudden and irreversible. I can see how an embalmed corpse of your beloved would help you accept their passage more gradually. OTOH, it seems creepily fetishistic, turning the beloved into an object like furniture.
RE: The Best Place On Earth To Die - C C - Oct 30, 2015
(Oct 29, 2015 06:36 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: I encountered a new form of guilt after I got my mother cremated. It was more traumatic than I had thought. I totally destroyed every bit of her. It was a strange sense of shame and guilt, as if I'd done something really bad. They don't warn you about this in the hospice pamphlets [...]
Believe me, that particular brand of mental shock and distress would have just been replaced by getting hit by a ton of emotional bricks from other directions, if otherwise going the body-burial route. In my case I still had both a good degree of contact before death and was directly involved in the slow process of the latter. All the shoulda-woulda-coulda reflections retrospectively concerning that demise period just haunted the daylights out of me for weeks on end. Blessed are those still engulfed by an exorbitant number of surviving family, friends, work associates, and customers so that all the obligations and interactions therein quickly swamp a person from having much introspective time to dwell with unsettled feelings and regrets over the lost one.
RE: The Best Place On Earth To Die - Magical Realist - Nov 2, 2015
(Oct 30, 2015 12:02 AM)C C Wrote:(Oct 29, 2015 06:36 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: I encountered a new form of guilt after I got my mother cremated. It was more traumatic than I had thought. I totally destroyed every bit of her. It was a strange sense of shame and guilt, as if I'd done something really bad. They don't warn you about this in the hospice pamphlets [...]
Believe me, that particular brand of mental shock and distress would have just been replaced by getting hit by a ton of emotional bricks from other directions, if otherwise going the body-burial route. In my case I still had both a good degree of contact before death and was directly involved in the slow process of the latter. All the shoulda-woulda-coulda reflections retrospectively concerning that demise period just haunted the daylights out of me for weeks on end. Blessed are those still engulfed by an exorbitant number of surviving family, friends, work associates, and customers so that all the obligations and interactions therein quickly swamp a person from having much introspective time to dwell with unsettled feelings and regrets over the lost one.
Guilt after the death of a loved one is a hundred-headed hydra which sprouts two more heads with every one that is hacked off. I found that I was questioning little things I could have done better, even though I had spent the past 4 years taking excellent care of my mom and picking her up for lunch every 2 days. There was no reason for me to regret anything, and yet here it was--the remorse of having failed to be with her all the time in hospice or of letting her die without being hydrated (since her kidneys had failed). This I figure springs from the inevitable feeling of helplessness of ourselves from having been unable to save the beloved from their fate. All our lives we aim towards keeping our loved ones from dying or getting hurt, and when it happens, guess what? You failed! Such is the logic of long habitual roles that die hard and feel like a harsh punishment for which there surely must be a grievous sin on our part. Siblings helped in this rehabilitation of myself after this "being fired" as my mom's caregiver. We are now closer than ever now that our parents our gone. Such is the healing strength of blood ties.