Because only Vikings get burning funeral barges, and you’re not a Viking!
A funeral director told me of digging up a customer of 30 years before. The family had decided to move him to another cemetery. To make sure they had the right corpse, the casket was opened. Except for the eye sockets being somewhat sunken and the lips having gone black, the fellow looked pretty much the same as he did when he was buried.
The effectiveness of embalming depends a lot on how soon after death it is done.
I don’t personally care much for the rituals of death. However, my wife makes a nice living at a casket factory, so I go along with it.
to help funeral directors make large profits…?, perhaps :eek:
:dubious: Which explains why they existed before said companies did…
People don’t like death. The rituals give the people a chance to grieve. Most of the people I’ve seen that actively avoided funerals take a lot longer to grieve, and thus lose their productivity to society for a longer period of time. If my anecdotes are backed up by scientific evidence, then you’re actually making things worse.
My own opinion is that, just like every other ritual, death rituals sprung up because people felt a need for them. You can’t eliminate the ritual until you eliminate the need. IMHO, you are going about the “problem” backwards.
Back during 93? (94?) when there was flooding in Albany, Georgia, the cemetary my grandfather was buried in flooded and many of the caskets surfaced and floated downriver a ways. After they collected all the coffins, they contacted family members and we had to come identify our loved ones before they would re-bury the coffins. Luckily my grandfather’s casket was one of 5 green caskets so I only had to look at 2 bodies before I located my grandfather’s casket. He looked as described above and was easily recognizable. It was weird. And somewhat traumatic but that’s a story for a different day.
I really can’t understand this attitude but you’re not the first person I’ve heard say something like this. Someone out there loves you weirdaaron and when you shed your mortal coil it will leave a hole in their lives. Death rituals are not meaningless as they provide a way for people to grieve a great loss.
That isn’t to say that there aren’t plenty of valid criticisms for the funeral industry. But that’s a separate issue from calling our rituals meaningless. If they were meaningless nobody would have them.
Tell me about it, especially when rigor mortis sets in (which is always at the most inconvenient times).
Here and in some other parts of the country (and in parts of Great Britain) those are called palls. We asked about one when my mother was buried (she wasn’t in a cheap pine box, but it was more of an ornamental thing and a respect thing- she hated coffins) and the old bitch at the funeral home told us, in terms this blunt if not these exact words, “We don’t have them… they’re bad for business”.
To the OP add that until the modern era (the 19th century at least) cremation was just not an option for most families as it was prohibitively expensive. Anybody who’s ever cooked a roast on a charcoal grill knows how even if you leave it unattended and the coals flame up and it stays there for hours it’ll be charred but not disintegrated- it’s just a much ickier blackened brittle mess.
In today’s state of the art crematoriums it takes 2 hours of 1700 degree Fahrenheit to thoroughly decompose the body, after which an electromagnet passes over it to pick up any metal from the body (fillings, pins, etc.) and then the charred bones are crushed and put into the urn (there are no ashes per se). You can imagine how much wood this would have taken and for how long to do the same work, and in places like Great Britain and Italy where hardwood was very expensive it was a lot cheaper and a lot easier to just build a coffin than to keep flames going for a day or more, watching it constantly to make sure the flames don’t get out of control and set the countryside or any nearby buildings on fire or spook the horses, after which you’d have to let them cool for a couple of days or more and then go in and retrieve the bones- hoping there weren’t too many teeth or little bones that got left in the huge pile of ash, then go back and clean up the huge pile of ash and blackened earth. In Rome and other cultures only the rich could afford this kind of extravagance.*
What I don’t know and would be interested in learning is whether cremation was common for the lower classes in India or if it was reserved for the wealthier people. Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
An interesting weaving of the traditional and the modern: in traditional Hindu culture the oldest son (or oldest male relative if no sons) is the person who lights the funeral pyre. Now that cremation is done by laser furnace, some Hindus opt to have the oldest male turn the ignition switch.
Personally I wish to be cremated, but if there’s money from my estate I would like a cenotaph erected (perhaps with a family tree) for benefit of any distant relatives a generation or several down the road interested in genealogy research.
*In ancient Rome and in many other cities it was unlawful and punishable by heavy fines to bury your dead inside city limits. Those rich enough to afford cremation often erected a family columbaria on the roads leading from Rome, while others buried their dead in the country side but erected a cenotaph in the city suburbs. Today in most major European cities grave space is at a premium and graves are frequently rented for a number of years rather than purchased, after which the body is removed to a larger suburban cemetery and perhaps a plaque stating who was once buried there is placed. (Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde, whose graves in Père Lachaise are both places of pilgrimage, are both rented graves and there was consideration at various times of moving them when their ‘lease’ was up due to the unwanted traffic and vandalism [Morrison’s had enough dirt from his grave removed to reinter him 5 times and the male sphinx statue on Oscar Wilde’s grave was emasculated by souvenir hunters] though nothing came of it since they’re too high profile to evict.)
I’m perfectly fine with people mourning me in an organized way (in fact, I encourage it!), my problem is all the mussing around with the body. To me, a body isn’t any more representative of a dead person’s life than my SDMB user profile page will be when I’m dead.
I think people get too hung up on bodies, to the point where they seem to think that their loved one isn’t really gone, just chillin’ out in a box burred under ground. When I’m dead, I will no longer exist, and my body will just be something I’m not using anymore.
This might be because of some long, long internal socratic dialogues I had in my idle youth about the metaphysics of the self, mind, and body, and what constitutes “me.” I like to think that when people think of me, they don’t think of the molecules and cells and tissues and organs that make up my body, but a kind of amalgamation of my personality and actions. I treat my body like a fancy walking-around apparatus for my magnificent mind, like the aliens in Men in Black that are just suits for smaller aliens.
But yeah, I’m probably singular in that. I just hate being aware of how many of the things we do are from centuries-old traditions based in folklore and superstition. If there was some way I could arrange for my death to make my loved ones stop saying “bless you” when people sneeze (or expecting others to when they sneeze), I would, but it seems more convenient to shirk the rituals for the thing that just happened.
Completely, utterly unprofessional. Ugh!
He’s sleeping now, but if you’d like, I can ask my father tomorrow about this, and if there’s a big difference about being buried in the ground without a casket. Embalming is pretty much essential, at least basically – I think you can figure out why.
Oddly, those sealed metal coffins that dudes get suckered into pay hwaaay too much for to “protect their loved one” actually are worse than a simple box for preserving a body.
This is actually a selling point for some reason but even when I was a kid it begged the question “protect them from what?” As Zorba says “The dead you cannot hurt, only the living”, and I seriously doubt that I will ever desire or need to view the remains again. I used to love sitting in my grandfather’s lap but I’m guessing these days, 30 years after his death, it would be missing something.
The Civil Rights activist and murder victim Medgar Evers had to be autopsied 30 years after he was buried and due to a freak occurrence his body was almost perfectly preserved. (IIRC it was a vapor lock that formed.) That’s the one time I can think of when a body being protected from the elements was a good thing.
One of the “for a few dollars more” extras on the coffins when my mother died 3 years ago was a test-tube like insert that contains the name and information of the deceased on a piece of plastic and a microchip just in case there’s ever a flood or natural disaster. Again- if it happens- well, I’m not that worried about her being incorrectly reinterred under a stranger’s name; it’s a no harm/no foul thing.
There is a service I’ve seen advertised where you can save a small amount of skin (less than a postage stamp in size) from a deceased loved one as a just-in-case thing in case they ever need DNA. I have no idea if all funeral homes or hospitals participate in this- I would guess most would stare at you blankly if you asked- but I can understand the potential market for this. If in the future a great-granddaughter has a rare disease and they need to test for a certain gene in the family history or you need to an ancestral right to the throne of Bulgaria or whatever it would be handy to have something that didn’t require getting out the shovels. That’s about the most need you could ever really have though.
Couldn’t you just take a few strands of hair and store it in some inert fluid? Who needs a paid service for that? Just let it rattle around in your kitchen junk drawer with the batteries and superglue.
Only if you want an open casket funeral.
Yeah, but it would become like the Channel Code guide to the universal remote- something you’d trip over and write phone numbers on the back of it until the remote becomes deprogrammed and then you won’t be able to find it to save your neck and your distant cousin Basil gets coronated Tsar of Bulgaria while you’re still working your nerve up to ask for the day after Labor Day off.
Batesville Casket Company?
Coffins are also a form of conspicuous consumption. It says “this family is so rich they can afford to literally bury money!” an impulse that goes back thousands of years (remember King Tut?) Like weddings, funerals are a common time to display your family’s wealth to the community.
This is a huge problem today. Many of the poor cannot afford enough wood for their own cremation. This issue is particularly evident in Varanasi, where many essentially abandon widows spend their days begging and waiting to die. Those who cannot afford wood (or are otherwise not eligible for cremation) are often simply dumped in the river.
Which is what I was going to say.
When I was younger, 10 or 11, and my brother was in college, for money he did computer building and repair work for local businesses, and he occasionally brought me along on calls.
One of his clients was a funeral home, and one day he got a call that the bookkeeping computer at the funeral home place was broken and needed to be fixed asap, but the only time my brother was available was at night, so they gave him the code to the back door (“deliveries”—shudder). Naturally, he took me along. The computer was in the front office, and he was working on it for a while, me just sitting at another desk and trying not to look at any paperwork. My brother figured out that the problem was with a Molex cable inside the computer. He didn’t have any extra, so he showed me what they looked like and said to check any other less-vital computers inside the building to swap them out (he could replace the cables later). I went around to the other rooms, finding no computers, then went down a flight of stairs.
When you’re in a funeral home… slight tip… DONT GO DOWNSTAIRS. There were caskets on rolling table things lining the hallway. I was young, but not stupid, so I knew what would be behind all the doors, so I tried to walk straight and not look through windows, hoping I’d happen upon another office. When I got to the end of the hall, I turned back and saw that the door to the stairway was now blocked by one of the coffin-on-wheels. Maybe I bumped it as I passed and it just rolled over a few feet, but I didn’t want to touch it (and catch death) so I turned around again to go up the opposite set of stairs. I glanced behind me again, and the coffin was still in the middle of the hall, only this time it was closer to me.
Not one to take chances with such things, I doubled my pace and turned the corner to make it to the staircase, but because it connected to the outside it was locked. I looked back down the hallway, the coffin was closer still. I crossed the opposite side of the hall and found a supply closet. I grabbed a broom and tried to slide it across the floor to move the coffin, but it missed the wheels and slid down the hall. The coffin was even closer now. I grabbed a box of cleaning supplies and kicked it across the floor to block the coffin, but it rolled right past. I kept searching the closet, I could hear the wheels squeaking as it rolled closer.
The only thing I could find in the closet was a small bottle of cold medicine. Not knowing what else to do, I drank it.
And the coffin stopped!
hides
Strange memory…I recall that FBI director J.E. Hoover was buried in a custom made lead casket. it was so heavy that the pallbeares dropped it, while hauling it into the church.
I also remember that JFK was planted in a $75,000 solid bronze coffin.
Have any thieves been digging these things up for scrap metal?
wierdaaron, any more like that and we’ll find out if your family buries you in a coffin or not sooner than expected.
