DYING Have you ever heard someone express a fear of dying alone? I have never quite understood this. In fact, my position on the matter is just the opposite. I'm sure it's possible that I could change my mind when the time actually comes, but from my current perspective, I believe I would much prefer to die alone. I just don't see how it's something I'd want to do in the company of other people. Especially loved ones. To me, it seems that being around loved ones would make it so much harder to let go. Not that (when the fateful moment arrives) you would have a whole lot of choice about it. It's just that, if you're around people you love, whose company you like, during the moments just before your departure, it seems like it would make that leaving ... well, difficult. I mean, isn't it bad enough that you have to go at all? Does it have to be compounded by the presence of mourners? And the planning thing I really don't get. I'm talking about making all these plans for how to dispose of your remains. This goes completely over my head. For the life of me I cannot imagine how anyone could possibly care about what happens to their remains after they're gone. I mean, think about it. Are you going to be hanging around to make sure your wishes are carried out? Suppose they weren't. Would you be pissed off? Can you imagine someone's ghost waiting around to see whether or not their burial wishes were respected? What if, for financial reasons, the family decided on cremation instead of burial? What the hell would the ghost do? Haunt them? If I had to make a decision about my remains, like if someone held a gun to my head and said I had to make arrangements or die on the spot, I would opt for re-insertion into the food chain. It seems the most natural thing to do. Just lay my body in a forest somewhere and let the animals have it, the worms, flies, ants, maggots, carrion birds, wild cats and dogs. Hell, yes! Put me back in the food chain. (I also think it would be so much easier to make the actual passage—to die—in a natural setting than in a humanly-contrived one. We have a way of becoming that which we are immersed in. It seems so much more desirable to become one with a forest, or meadow, or desert or ocean than a stark hospital room, or in the company of fearful, apprehensive human beings.) I would really like for someone to give me a good reason why humans should not be re-inserted into such a natural biological process. Doesn't the bible speak of returning to the dust out of which we were made?
For dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.
I have always thought it interesting that the bible doesn't contain any specific burial instructions. The Israelites were simply commanded not to touch a dead body. In the New Testament Jesus speaks downright brutally about funeral ceremonies:
Let the dead bury their dead.
I have looked into this verse, and try as I might, I can't seem to explain it away. He seems to have meant exactly what he said. The occasion of this utterance was an exchange with a young man who had assured Jesus he would like to follow him but he first had to bury his father. The verse above was Jesus' response. We cannot begin to truly appreciate what Jesus was getting at, however, unless we consider something else he said about death: But about the resurrection of the dead--have you not read what God said to you, 'I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob' ? He is not the God of the dead but of the living. The operative words are, "He is not the God of the dead but of the living." At the time when God spoke these words, Abraham had been dead for over three-hundred years. But Jesus said that God is not the God of the dead. He is obviously implying that Abraham (from God's perspective) was not dead. To mortal eyes he did indeed appear to be deceased, but not in the eyes of God. In other words, Jesus is suggesting that—from God's perspective—people do not really die. And if that's true, funeral ceremonies seem downright ridiculous. Thus, his famous dictum:
Let the dead bury their dead.
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