Funerals
I seldom go to funerals unless I am awfully close (not a likely situation) to the surviving families— the primary reason being the deceased will not be there. And, as oft stated, I really don’t like prolonged inane chit chat with people who I will seldom, if ever, see again. I know, a very self serving trait. Less important is the unavoidable ’normal’ social atmosphere right after the funeral. Frankly, I would prefer to honor someone who has survived to old age by having a celebratory gathering of their friends and family at some appropriate age, like maybe 70. That way we have paid our respect/social warmth to them in person and can skip the funeral and keep the sadness of their death personal.
There seems to be some sort of relationship between the ‘importance’ of the deceased and the length and elegance of the funeral. This is probably good. “Lincoln was shot last night and this morning was cremated at a local crematorium. If anyone wants to pay their respects or watch any gathering of mourning, your own personal thoughts will have to suffice.”
It is often said that we should not speak ill will of the dead since they cannot defend themselves. Suppose this was against the law. That would sure change the nature of history books. Also, we all have known good persons whose bland non social life was such that their death would hardly be noticed by anyone. This seems a tad sad, but then 'being important’ is not a priority for everyone.
When I pass a homeless person begging on the street all disheveled and raggedy-assed dressed, it strikes me as one of the saddest pictures from life’s other side. It is something best not to dwell on, as it detracts from our own relatively ‘zippeddy do dah day” state of mind. Even worse, when it is a mother begging with two small children sitting in a large box starring at passerbys, the reality of it is surreal. What kind of future are these kids or mother likely to have? Such occasions invariably remind me of two quotations:
"I do not believe that just because you're opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you don't? Because you don't want any tax money to go there. That's not pro-life. That's pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is." (Catholic Nun)
“Don’t speak to me about your religion; first show it to me in how you treat other people.
Don't tell me how much you love your God; show me in how much you love all His children.
Don't preach to me your passion for your faith; teach me through your compassion for your neighbors.
In the end, I'm not as interested in what you have to tell or sell as in how you choose to live and give.” (Unknown)”
As one whose religion is basically The Golden Rule I don’t spend a lot of time believing in Heaven. Nor do I spend much time trying to picture what God looks like, or how He/She/It thinks. Wherever there is a gift there is a gift giver and the gift giver I define as God. I certainly don’t believe that anything I might pray for to God would be granted, and those two children in a box be ignored by God. When I read of a child being tortured and raped I hardly believe that it was God’s will.
I do know we all will die, but there is little basis upon which to understand what a proper funeral should be. I know in history when some despised ruler died by being slowly quartered alive and then what’s left be dragged around the streets by wild dogs—well, this is 100% pure vengeance. The evolutionary process is pushing human civilization to be more civilized, but it moves at rather glacial speed.
At the other extreme, Lincoln’s funeral procession and final burial took twenty days while roughly a third of the country’s population viewed the casket or stood along the train route carrying the casket from Washington to Springfield Illinois. What is strange here is that few people were more maligned during their lifetime than Lincoln; at differing phases of his Presidency he was the target of real ire by all the various parties in such a civil war. Lincoln has best been described as like a steel cable that goes from Point A to Point B, sways this way and that way, but in the end the steel cable reaches it’s intended ending. While Lincoln bent, as needed, this way and then that way, in the process of moving public attitudes toward the better angels of human nature, he achieved the impossible—the end of slavery in the U.S. There was a basic goodness and fairness about him which generated genuine shock that anyone would actually kill him. In that sense Lincoln got the well deserved ultimate funeral process.
Death after a full life, for the purposes here to be defined as up to retirement age, is not a tragedy at all. Like who could seriously say “Who could ever have imagined that I might die?” Of course we are going to die, and this is tragedy only when it happens to the young, and the younger the more tragic.
When I think of death it neither scares me nor saddens me. Like why should it? Of course my life could have been better—I could have had a better hand dealt—I could have played my cards better, I suppose even more people could have saved me from more self destructive behaviors, and so on, but what I do know for certain, which generates genuine gratitude for my life—is that there are far more people who never had as good a hand dealt, and never had the good luck I had. Who wins in a poker game tells us nothing about the person’s character, their basic goodness, or any other meaningful thing about them. It took me a lifetime to finally realize none of evolutionary direction is controlled by any individuals of the millions of species which have existed from the beginning of evolution, billions of years ago. The process is not only amazing and effective, but it has nothing to do with our individual lives, not even individual human lives. We have always invented our own individual importance, the notion that we exist in the image of God, think like God, can have a personal relationship with God, are God’s favorite species with dominion over other species and the planets natural resources, and of course, will get to Heaven if we let God save us from our sins. These seem clearly to be pure self serving notions that have existed throughout human history.
In the absence of any scientific or logical basis for such beliefs, we have no reason to see death as something to fear. Are we upset we did not exist for the millions of years we did not exist before our birth? Of course not. And just how can the dead be upset about not being around for the future years of evolution?
Thus, it is not death that saddens me, but the fate of the losers in life’s poker game, and when some people are forced by law to endure suffering during their dying process—when they wish to end their lives with dignity and peacefulness. My career brought me in contact with all sorts of young people from all sorts of life backgrounds and genetic makeup. It is fortunate that those of us who see successes in our formative and productive years are mostly buoyed in spirit by these successes. It was my nature, especially when past my formative years, to be ever aware of those off to the side, out of the spotlight, fading further and further back from any contented existence.
It has always puzzled me, if God (however we perceive Him/Her to be) is all powerful, then why didn’t he skip all the personal tragedies and create a perfect world perfect for every creature? Maybe God has limits and needed to create the evolutionary process for progress to steadily happen.
Funerals don’t depress me, they give the living a chance to reflect on the deceased. No, it is those who have no funeral which depresses me. There is a 101 acre cemetery offshore from the Bronx in New York on an island called Hart Island. No one lives on this island, in fact no one is allowed to go on the island except the prisoners who buried the 850,000 bodies interred on Hart Island. Adults are buried in pine boxes stacked three high, twenty five across, two rows per trench. For babies, the coffins are five high and roughly twenty across in a single row. There is only one individual grave on Hart Island. The headstone reads: “SC-BI, 1985”. Underneath lies NYC’s first infant AIDS victim.
Each year about 90 dead babies are just found on the streets of NYC. The rest of those sent to reside on Hart Island, over 1000/yr, die with no one claiming the body. When someone dies with no-one to claim the body and no one gives a rat’s ass about their death, this seems the ultimate picture of sadness from life’s other side. Some things are just inherently sad. On Memorial Day I don’t focus on dead heroes, important historical figures, my dead relatives, but simply, late at night, try uselessly to understand why some humans can end up on Hart Island. What is of no matter—somehow seems to matter to me. What matters to me or doesn’t matter to me, is—of course—no matter at all.
In reality, evolution continues in a progressive and ever upward fashion as better always wins out over worse. But all this occurs on evolutionary time, not human time, in a very messy process with individual tragedies as a cost of the laws which govern the process. It is fair, I guess, in the sense that no God is predetermining in advance which individuals suffer tragedies. It is natural, I suppose, to question why God didn’t just make everything ‘perfect’ from the start. Maybe some things are not possible. For example, can we be happy on one hand without unhappiness on the other? It seems almost human nature for happiness to occur, there must be those who are less happy. Both teams can’t win the game. No one plays any games where no one wins or loses. It is not enough for us to win if no one else loses. What a wonderful thing that we breathe in and out billions of times to keep us alive, and yet so does everyone else. For example, the gratitude I feel for so many good things in my life does not include breathing. Everybody breathes, big deal. It seems we need things we have good in our lives that others don’t have in order for gratitude to kick in. Most of us are a tad more restrained in our gratitude than a Terrell Owens, who just goes apoplectic when he achieves something himself that others are trying to do but failed. “I win, you lose” is the ‘in our face’ reality for much of the pleasure we receive in life.
At any funeral I am cognizant that ‘death levels all’. That is our long run fate. Like it or not, I reckon it is fair enough. No one gets out of this world alive. I suppose memories of us survive until all who knew us are dead, and then poof, nothing is left. Oh, I suppose the individual molecules or atoms which comprised our bodies are still floating around recombining with other molecules and atoms and therefore exist—but we certainly don’t. On the other hand, if no one we knew exists anymore and we don’t either, who is there left to care? If nobody cares, it is, so it seems, merciful justice.
