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June 27 - July 3, 2023
In an impressively short time, America’s funeral industry has become more expensive, more corporate, and more bureaucratic than any other funeral industry on Earth. If we can be called best at anything, it would be at keeping our grieving families separated from their dead.
He hunted deer, tapir, and armadillo, and when he caught one he would kill it, flay it, and eat its heart out of its chest.
Why do we refuse to have these conversations, asking our family and friends what they want done with their body when they die? Our avoidance is self-defeating.
William Gladstone, a nineteenth-century British prime minister: Show me the manner in which a nation cares for its dead and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender mercies of its people, their respect for the laws of the land and their loyalty to high ideals.
when they freely admitted to cannibalism, bragging that they consumed flesh and blood (of their own God no less) in a practice called Communion?
Since religion is the source of many death rituals, often we invoke belief to denigrate the practices of others.
Most people could not tell you what chemicals are pumped into their mother during an embalming procedure (answer: some combination of formaldehyde, methanol, ethanol, and phenol), or why they are required to purchase a $3,000 stainless steel vault at the cemetery (answer: so the groundskeeping staff has an easier time mowing the grass).
What’s more, due to the corporatization and commercialization of deathcare, we have fallen behind the rest of the world when it comes to proximity, intimacy, and ritual around death.
The first step to fixing the problem is to show up, to be present and engaged.
The odor of burning juniper is the sweetest fragrance on the face of the earth, in my honest judgment; I
Crestone’s pyre is the only community open-air pyre in America and, in fact, in the Western world.*
“principally famous as a corpse” (literal and figurative burn),
When the body first went into the furnace, observers reported a distinct smell of burning flesh, but the smell soon gave way to the aromas of flower and spice.
They gobble thousands of dollars’ worth of natural gas a month, spewing carbon monoxide, soot, sulfur dioxide, and highly toxic mercury (from dental fillings) into the atmosphere.
People imagine themselves lying on that pyre one day.”
“Look at me, I forgive you.” Then the pyre was lit.
One woman decided she wanted to be buried in Crestone’s natural burial ground (the first in the state). When she died, her daughters drove her body down from Denver in the back of a truck in a Rubbermaid container filled with ice. “We didn’t have anywhere to put the woman until burial,” Stephanie said, “so we decided to keep her overnight in the town museum.” The daughters liked that idea. “Mom was such a history buff, she would have been into that.”
This existential longing for the pyre’s fiery embrace is common worldwide. In India, family members transport dead bodies to a row of cremation pyres along the banks of the Ganges River. When a father dies, his pyre will be lit by his eldest son.
At just the right time, a wooden staff is brought forth and used to crack open the dead man’s skull. At that moment, it is believed the man’s soul is released.
Locked away in the steel and brick-lined chamber, when the skull cracks open, the man’s soul will be imprisoned in the machine, forced to mingle with the thousands of other souls the machine has trapped. It will be an akal mrtya, a bad death.
“being bundled into a box and incinerated in a furnace is not my idea of dignity, much less the performance of an ancient sacrament.”
In the twenty-first century, removing money and profit from death is almost unheard of, mostly because it is so difficult to accomplish.
Legally and logistically, circumventing the funeral industry and its regulations to create a nonprofit death service for a community is nearly impossible.
a claim I lay with the utmost aesthetic respect.
People are too confounded to refuse him.
The majority of Indonesians are Muslim, but in the remote mountains of Tana Toraja, the people followed an animistic religion called Aluk to Dolo (“the way of the ancestors”) until the Dutch introduced Christianity in the early 1900s.
dodging and swerving around mopeds and trucks in a never-ending game of automobile chicken.
If you will direct your attention to the camera, we will create an Instagram.”
There is a system of debts that keeps people coming to funerals for years. As Agus said, “You bring a pig to my mother’s funeral now, I will bring one for you someday.”
no one wants to be perceived as disrespecting the dead.
Paul describes death in Toraja, as he’s witnessed it, not as a “hard border,” an impenetrable wall between the living and the dead, but a border that can be transgressed.
Speaking to your grandfather’s corpse is a way to build a connection to the person’s spirit.
The crowd’s keening noises and nervous laughter bloomed into a complex polyphony. The danger had brought the funeral to life.
Atto was texting furiously the whole ride, as you would expect from a teenager trapped in a car with adults.
few years prior a mummy had been stolen from the village and taken to Rantepao for sale to a collector. The villagers were tipped off as to who had taken it, and went to Rantepao to steal it back.
They could not afford to sacrifice a buffalo in his honor and the slight had haunted the son ever since. He believed that by not slaughtering the buffalo, “my father was not carried to the second life.”
Halfway through the meal I held up the bamboo leaf and looked closer at the crisp, fatty skin and saw the hair follicles, still visible. This is the flesh of a dead animal, I realized, and was for the moment repulsed.
French anthropologist Noëlie Vialles wrote of the food system in France, though this could be said of almost any country in the West: “slaughtering was required to be industrial, that is to say large-scale and anonymous; it must be non-violent (ideally: painless); and it must be invisible (ideally: non-existent). It must be as if it were not.” It must be as if it were not.
All night long people quietly crawled in and out of the walls around us.
A group of women fell to their knees beside the man and keened, wailing his name and stroking his cheeks. When their wails softened, the man’s son moved in with a set of paintbrushes—the kind you’d buy at the local hardware store. The son began to clean the corpse, brushing his father’s leathery skin with short, loving strokes. A cockroach scampered out from inside the boxer shorts. The son didn’t seem to mind, and carried on brushing. This was mourning as I had never seen it before.
I’m sad, but happy, because I can care for him as he did for me.”
The Torajans talked directly to the corpses, narrating their next move: “Now I am removing you from the grave,” “I brought you cigarettes, I’m sorry I do not have more money,” “Your daughter and family have arrived from Makassar,” “Now I remove your coat.”
they would only mummify the body in the old way—pouring oils into the person’s mouth and throat, and spreading special tea leaves and tree barks on the skin. The tannins in the tea and bark bind with and shrink the proteins in the skin, making it stronger, stiffer, and more resistant to bacterial attack. The process is similar to how a taxidermist would preserve an animal hide
embalmer’s formalin (a solution of formaldehyde, methyl alcohol, and water) injected into the body.
The villagers in this region of Toraja are amateur taxidermists of the human body.
I wondered why Westerners are so horrified at the practice. Perhaps it is not the extreme preservation that offends. Rather, it is that a Torajan body doesn’t sequester itself in a sealed casket, walled in a cement fortress underneath the earth, but instead dares to hang around among the living.**
But while these villagers spend an afternoon cleaning the graves, exuding a mundane normalcy, Norman Bates is the American Film Institute’s second scariest movie villain of all time, coming in behind Hannibal Lecter and ahead of Darth Vader.
Westerners feel there is something profoundly creepy about interacting with the dead over a long period of time.
When the family had to clean inside his boxers and brush around his mummified penis, they looked just as uncomfortable as you would expect.
“Look, makes me think about how I’m going to be like this. This is going to be me, eh?”
