(no subject)

[lahermite]

i think and talk about death a lot. go figure. recent conversations with a recently widowed friend assist in my thoughts, frequent visits to the cemetary just down the road assist me, too.

logan was cremated in a simple box, his ashes scattered into the raging wind and sand and ocean. he joked one day that he'd like a viking funeral, his body laid on a bed of sticks, pushed out into the oceans, and set on fire. i went with the closest legal alternative i could. there is no marker for him.

in the event of my death, i would like to be cremated in a simple box, my ashes scattered into the the wind and leaf fall of a mountain creek. i want no marker.

there are graves up the road, side by side, with partners names on them. together in death as in life. one man, buried in twin graves, his name beside his wife's, is forever alone. the wife was never buried with him (she's most certainly dead by now). i wonder if that's the reminder of himself the man meant to leave behind for however many hundreds of years the his & (missing) her markers will remain.

my recently widowed friend doesn't believe that his grief is effected by the culture we live in. i do. many animals mate for life, and die after their mate dies. unable to live without them. this is undisputable. we have no way of knowing whether this is true for other planetary beings, like trees, for instance. but it is true for animals. the feelings that we have come from the pain of separation, and are uneffected by civilisation's sick obsession with the continuation of singular human identities. but we are most definitely effected by this. we come from the earth and water and to the earth and water we return. we cannot avoid this. no matter how many or how large the temples we build, no matter how perfect the art of preserving bodies, living and dead, we all die and return to the earth and water.

there are so many of us now, littering the planet with our bodies, living and dead, that preserving bodies, living or dead, is a moral crime.

we can't really know what non-humans think of death, we can watch their reactions. and no non-human fetishizes death. they all go back into the earth and water and those that survive continue. non-civilized humans seem to behave in a similar fashion. only civilized humans display this unhealthy relationship with something as simple and pure as death. our thousands of years of history have been plagued by displays of this sickness (pyramids, anyone?) these days, a dead human is generally cleaned out of all bodily fluids, all those bodily fluids replaced by a mix of chemicals that preserve the flesh, sealed in an air-tight box, sealed again in a concrete box, and placed in the ground, where it will all remain for possibly thousands of years. and there are billions of us doing this. this is Insanity. we cannot get rid of death without getting rid of life. they are one and the same.

humans must learn to mourn without obsessing, learn to accept death as natural a state as life. we can love and lose and mourn and wail and, yes, even die in tune with the planet, the earth and water. we cannot stop our becoming earth and water again, so why delay it.