Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
This website also uses cookies that can’t be disabled through this tab and will need to be disabled manually. The blog itself uses a commenting system by wpDiscuz which uses a cookie to remember some of the information you put in to save you inputting it every time. It also helps prevent comment spam.
The blog may also feature embedded items such as youtube videos which can set cookies to identify your device and approximate location to optimize bandwith and tailor ads as handled by google.
Our Directory also sets some cookies for the Map to function based on your selection and preferences.
Unfortunately the scripts for these features cannot be placed here for you to disallow the cookies manually, therefore the button on this tab will have no affect.
However if you wish to disable these cookie, you will need to disallow them manually in your browser.
For Google Chrome – Please follow this guide and add this website to the cookie block list: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/61416?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en
Firefox: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-and-disable-cookies-website-preferences
Safari: https://support.apple.com/kb/ph21411?locale=en_US
If you need any support with this, or use a different browser you can contact us for advice.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.
The restoration of a horrifically mutilated child’s body so his tormented mother can see him again is indeed good work. The routine and unnecessary denial of the physical aspects of death is part of a paternalism that excludes people from a properly meaningful encounter with their mortality.
Very Lynchian in tone, isn’t it?
This story resonated for me, as I’m sure it does for many others who do this work. What is moving and transcendent is the care and tenderness given to the physical remains another human – a gift to the dead and the caregiver alike. This can happen on a pyre, or in a ritual washing too.
I applaud the dedication and calling of these men, but why should this experience be the sole province of the embalmer? I wish more families had the opportunity to participate in this powerful process of giving a last gift to their loved one.
I’d love to be able to agree with you about transcendence, Patrick, and I’m sure embalmers get high on their skills, but embalming just looks to me like mutilation unless there’s a good reason for it.
Such a ‘meaningful encounter with [our] mortality’ that Rupert speaks of can, with careful handling, bring someone forward through acceptance, and in my opinion it needs to be at least encouraged by those able to facilitate it. That’s just good practice.
There are many, however, who are carelessly permitted an unsupported confrontation with an unattractive dead body that they’re not prepared for. That’s bad practice.
Then there are those who contrive, chemically or otherwise, to deny death and postpone it till… well, until when? What will make us more ready in the future to rescue death from exile so it can do its vital work for us? When we’ve safely figured out how to fix the car and pay the bills and get on with life without the old man? When we’re safely out of the way of the busy funeral director whose real problem is that he can’t handle our actual grief? When? What does putting it off achieve, other than an unpleasant aroma (the very thing embalming is designed to prevent) lurking in the subconscious?
Death, like disease, doesn’t hide when you disguise it. “I want my last memory of him to be a good one” is a common complaint, and a common cause of gratitude is when that’s achieved. But he’s not in there any more; he’s elsewhere beside his body, if anywhere, and that’s where we need to be looking if we want to find him now, not in our daydreams.
‘Viewing’ (ugh) his body should serve only to convince us of this essential truth, not distract us from it. Embalming is, in America, only a recent fashion after all, so let’s not collude with elevating it to a time-honoured essential service to the dead without at least being quite clear with mourners about what it is, what it involves, and when and why it may be appropriate.