Family Night (Waking Xerma)

[rinue]

Max and Patrick hold shovels above a freshly dug grave. Max's pants are striped red, Max's t-shirt is black, and Max's skin is green, as is Patrick's hair. It is dark. Shadows of trees stripe the side yard and the mint-colored concrete of the garage. Scarlett, in black with a red-striped purse, wails as Uncle Rex, also in black, holds her. Stretch, her t-shirt the same white as Death's, swallows rice as she softly chants next to Romie of the red-striped belt and mint green shirt, Romie with a Viking burial charm. Romie is crying.

A word about funerals: They're primarily rehearsal. The rest is reminders and shock tactics. Inevitably this leads to melodrama, which in turn creates a cult of death. Predictably, my family embraces this sort of thing, which leads to my cousin throwing herself on the grave of a ferret as she weeps uncontrollably with perfectly genuine emotion.

I could rant for hours on the current funerary establishment; I could launch fleet after fleet of pointed attacks on Restland, the Dallas-based cemetary that pioneered many of the modern approaches. Suffice it to say, I believe the decision to rob death of its power by setting it in a peaceful cheery park where nobody ever goes is a cripplingly negative one. I fail to understand how anyone can receive a sense of closure by standing in Sunday best on a manicured lawn, politely listening to one person's eulogy lecture. Polite, dignified social funerals are crap. Placing dirt on a grave with your bare hands is animal sacrifice.

I hate the false removal of death from everyday life. If I were to think about it, I'd get upset that my grandmother wasn't buried beneath my driveway. This may be the reason we assume her ghost still lives at Clinton House with half a dozen others - we know how to remember.

An interesting thing about white American culture: we don't draw power from our dead. There's a lot of talk about "souls" and "those who came before us," but we have a weird reluctance to call on the strength of our ancestors. Because we bury in dirt, we think of death as dirty.

This is not actually normal, nor is it particularly healthy.

Matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Nor can energy, not really - just transformed and moved.

I don't know about you, but I now have a ferret spirit to help me.

Comments

[treehavn.livejournal.com]

I've never seen either of my grandfather's graves. I know one is in some bland cemetery in Ontario, but I'd have to take my Oma along to pinpoint exactly where he is - the rest of the family wouldn't know without a map. The other is in a hole in a wall in Spain. I like the second option better; the graves are decorated with ribbons and candles.

[(Anonymous)]

At one time, I had a desperte passion to run pioneering studies in thanatology. I believed I could change the Victorian aura surrounding the American belief system and actually get people to give Death its due. This was a dream of mine in 9th grade.

I have since given up on it.
--

Ciro

[hipgunslinger.livejournal.com]

If I ever have such an amazing sum of money that people will see it, blush and exclaim "that's amazing!"
I decided in the event of my being buried, that a tombstone I shall have designed of my torso (buried up to the waist) clawing it's way out of the ground.

[jusheureux.livejournal.com]

I rather liked the funeral rites of the, er, barbarian tribe in Queen of the Damned. They seemed far more comforting and final than the sterile funerals I've been to. But the process doesn't go over well with family members, and it's really hard to find a place to build such an elaborate funeral pyre, anyway. It's also unlikely that I'd be able to eat the flesh of my grandmother when it came down to the wire. Uh.

Of course, I say this operating under the assumption that everyone has read the same crap books that I have, which is silly. Oh, well.

[swimcoyote.livejournal.com]

The idea of burying the dead came from a fear of them. We as a people became afraid of the spirits and what they would do. In the mayan empire, it wasn't safe to go out at night because all the spirits walked the earth and would prey upon your soul if they caught you. And it's not entirely a fear of the dead, it's a fear of death itself. By separating themselves from the dead body, they felt they could stave off their own deaths that much longer. Spirits and ghosts as we (today) see them can be good or evil, it depends on the person it belonged to. But then, any ghost or apparition was Death itself, coming to claim your life. Thus the practices of the sterile funeral developed.

But in many cultures, the tradtion of the Wake remains. The wake for my uncle was actually one of the better parties I have been to. He was a musician, and had all kinds of crazy stuff that his friends would pass around and play on. Even though you could go off into other rooms in the house and mourn if you wanted to, you were inevitably drawn back into the light and sound and celebration of a life. The wake is what modern culture has maintained to offset the sterile funeral.