HW 50 - First Third of Care-of-the-Dead Book Post

Precis:
I am an undertaker-in-training attempting to discover why we handle death the way we do in our current society, and how we handle the bodies that remain. I figured that the best way to learn about these things is through personal experience, although I have to admit, I can barely handle myself on top of any of the deceased that cross my path. A theory I've developed for why the majority of people tend to avoid the subject of death and the care of the dead rather than exploring it is because in our society we human beings have managed to conquer nature but the two aspects of our lives that remind us that we're human are: sex and death. Therefore these two major aspects of our lives have been tabooed; and death was best left to be handled by the experts. There are a wide variety of ways to deal with dead bodies, some cheaper than others, some more more extensive than others, but what you are your deceased loved one chooses to undergo completely depends on your, or their, values. I've had to sit through crematings, which are very short and simple, and if also had to prepare for open caskets, which is no where close to short or simple. I've assisted the funeral-home's embalmer make (and pump chemicals into) this recently deceased men and women to make them look almost lively enough for his family to recognize them before they were buried into the ground. See, this is the life I traded in over my old job as radio producer at CBC, but I'm glad that I had because uncovering this gap between death and burial time was important to me.

Quotes:
"Death wasn't something to fear, it was something to aspire to, after the troubling business that came before it, of which there was little need to speak."(26)

"In death you're a cold, physical problem that must be dealt with."(26)

"Bake, shake, be done with it." (32)

"The embalmed corpse is an in-between: both a person and an object to fear." (57)

"fuzzy noble notions made fuzzier by repetition." (76)

I believe that Jokinen's theory about why death and sex are tabooed in today's world makes a lot of sense and is very interesting. It explains why many people don't educate themselves or others about "the gap" because they would rather keep death a bigger mystery than it already is.  While reading him describe actually handling and touching dead bodies, I imagined myself in the same position and I have to admit that I felt a little uneasy from  it.  Not that death disgusts me, but it just seems that painting, cutting open, dying, pumping chemicals into a cold human being with who has no control over what you do to them seems messed up. I know this is all for the sake of families, but it just seems to me that after a person dies the right thing to do from then on is to leave them alone (unless they requested otherwise). One thing that was brought up in the book about caskets and burials that really made me question was that a lot of these caskets are built so the last as long as possible underground. I always thought that the whole point of being buried is to become one with the earth again, not to take up space in it. I wonder if they make caskets that will eventually decay into the earth in a way that isn't harmful to it.