Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust

    There was an interesting interview on NPR the other day, talk being of the discovery of Neanderthal graves highlighted on a blog on archaeology at Vassar University:  To an archaeologist, human remains can be considered a treasure chest of information.  Human remains do not just simply tell archaeologists about the death of the individual, they can also reveal much of the life story, such as age, sex, height, genetic ancestry, if they had any illness/disease, types of food they ate, past injuries and how they were treated, any deliberate body modifications, and so much more.  An individual’s remains can explain a little bit about their life, but a burial ground(or lack thereof) can explain much about the surrounding culture of the people as a whole...The findings from the site showed that Neanderthals were not the ignorant, barbarian-like characters that modern humans perceive them to be.  Archaeologists found that the Neanderthals were more similar to modern humans than they had previously thought.  Neanderthals had actually decorated themselves with pigments and wore jewelry made from feathered and colored shells.  They also cared for their sick and elderly.

    But not all scientists are convinced that the various sites are actual burial grounds, as shown in the article from the LA Times on the initial discovery back in 2013: ...as many as 40 potential Neanderthal burial sites have been discovered across a wide swath of the world ranging from southeast Spain to Mongolia.  However, not everyone believe these places are truly Neanderthal burial sites.  There have been questions from the scientific community about the accuracy of the excavation of the burial site in 1908 and suggestions that the Neanderthals did not have the cognitive ability to choose to bury their dead.  One suggestion in the article is that it took effort to create a dirt pit and that other animal bones were not so buried, possibly indicating, says William Rendu (lead author of the study and a researcher at the Center for International Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences in New York) that,  If we look carefully, we find the Neanderthals may have had some symbolic or spiritual thoughts that were not needed just to survive...If they just wanted to get the body away from them, they just had to put it in the open air and the carnivores would have eaten it.  "Instead they removed a large quantity of sediment.  It took a very long time for them to do, and it was not essential to their survival.
  
    Such rituals are not unique to humans, but it certainly seems that humans have a higher propensity toward the ridding of remains once life ends.  Is this a recognition of our own inevitable passing, a need to "hide" the rest of the living world from what is to come for all of us?  Or is it a spiritual designation, an equal recognition of something greater in the cycle of life.  Throughout history, various cultures and times have presented as many answers as they have questions.  For some early cannibal cultures, the thought of burial was horrifying;  in some of their cultures, it was necessary to continue the cycle of life by eating portions of the dead, even using their bones...in this way, other life could continue among them.  And in other cases, death itself was a spectacle, crowds of hundreds turning out for an execution (even in the West, hangings were often viewed by the entire town) or a flogging (beheadings in Saudi Arabia are still attended by thousands, as are the crucifixtions which slowly suffocates their victims over a period of days).

    Some cultures have a belief of a natural return to the land once a person dies (a simple linen cloth covers the body so that decomposition can occur more quickly), others letting scavengers (primarily larger birds) feed off of the deceased so that, like the cannibals, death can feed life.  But in much of today's modern world, death remains something hidden and sterilized, something bordering on the unreal.  Bodies are "preserved" and cleansed (religiously or by a mortician), buried in massive and elaborate caskets (which by themselves are such a huge business that large warehouses such as Costco now have their own catalogues of them) which are in turn buried in concrete vaults (an expensive requirement by the cemetery and usually not by the state).  But of course, the body still decays (even Costco has to put this disclaimer in, capital letters no less: THERE IS NO SCIENTIFIC OR OTHER EVIDENCE THAT ANY CASKET WITH A SEALING DEVICE WILL PRESERVE HUMAN REMAINS).

    And then there's cremation, a topic thoroughly and somewhat humorously (trust me on this) covered by author Caitlin Doughty, a licensed funeral director who put her six years of crematory and mortuary experience into her book, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes. But right up front, she is quick to warn readers:  For those who do not wish to read realistic depictions of death and dead bodies, you have stumbled onto the wrong book.  Here is where you check the metaphorical blindfolds at the door...We can do our best to push death to the margins, keeping corpses behind stainless-steel doors and tucking the sick and dying in hospital rooms.  So masterfully do we hide death, you would almost believe we are the first generation of immortals.  But we are not.  We are all going to die and we know it.  As the great cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker said, "The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else."  The fear of death is why we build cathedrals, have children, declare war, and watch cat videos online at three a.m.  Death drives every creative and destructive impulse we have as human beings.  The closer we come to understanding it, the closer we come to understanding ourselves...ignorance is not bliss, only a deeper kind of terror.

    In my early years, I toured a crematorium, the curator (or perhaps he was simply the operator of the crematorium) giving me an up-close view of a cremation in progress, the furnace flames as bright and strong as a glass blower's flames only multiplied to industrial strength.  The "blender" (properly termed, the cremulator) reduced any remaining large bones to a uniform size, the leftover metals removed by magnets and such (beyond jewelry, we're talking pins and replacement parts now made of titanium and other materials).  Pacemakers (which can explode) and silicon implants (ditto) are removed before the body even goes into the burn chamber...older people leave more bone fragments since their calcification is more progressed (think of trying to saw an older piece of wood vs. one freshly cut).  All in all, I found it fascinating, and, like the curator, baffled that such expensive pieces of furniture (the $8,000 caskets and such), beautiful as they were, were simply reduced to ash in a matter of hours...truly, money up in smoke.  On the "other" side, at a mausoleum, I was given the entire tour, a sales pitch that made used-car salesmen look like amateurs.  The point being --and not trying to make light of anyone who has made such a personal decision-- is that the industry knows how to hit you at your weakest ($8,000 casket, anyone?), and much of that emotional tug of war comes from our lack of knowledge (or perhaps unwillingness to hear) about the dying process and what follows.  Advanced research, in any form (say, touring a facility now or studying how different cultures treat their dead) can do much to alleviate the pain and emotions you will feel when someone close to you passes away.  And if you're already partway there, Caitlin Doughty's book will help fill in even more gaps...or for an easier transition, jump to the beautiful Academy Award winning film (2009) from Japan, Departures. 

    As author Doughty ends her book: Unable to choose how I would die physically, I could only choose how I would die mentally.  Whether my mortality caught me at twenty-eight or ninety-three, I made the choice to die content, slipped into nothingness, my atoms becoming the very fog that cloaked the trees. The silence of death, of the cemetery, was no punishment, but a reward for a life well lived.