Alina L. : DOWNLOAD LINK (CLICK HERE)
Ly D. : DOWNLOAD LINK (CLICK HERE)
Anna O : DOWNLOAD LINK (CLICK HERE)
Steph C : DOWNLOAD LINK (CLICK HERE)
Below (in the scroll box) are the questions I asked each interviewee:
1. What are your initial thoughts on care of the dead? (i.e. how we dispose of dead bodies, rituals, etc.)
2. Have you ever attended a funeral/ritual dedicated to someone who has died? If so, what was it like? How did you feel? Have you ever questioned the customs that go along with the rituals?(i.e. dressing in black, or any other customs specific to your religion or place of origin)
3. If not, what do you know of these rituals? And how do you think they are conveyed in society?
4. Are the days dedicated before and after the burial of a dead person happy or sad? And why?
5. Does the way a body is disposed of determine any meaning to the life that the body once lived?
6. How many ways of disposing of the dead do you know of? What are your thoughts on the ones that you know? (the emotional aspects as well as the physicality factor of the form of the body after it is disposed of in a certain way)
7. Japan’s cremation rate is 99%. What do you think of this number? What does that tell you about our society in comparison to that of Japan’s? (U.S. cremation rate is about 38% according to the National Funeral Directors Association.)
8. Burial and Cremation seem to be the most common. However there are other ways – less common ways our society chooses to use:
- Resomation: Liquefying the body leaving the calcium and excess stuff from the bones. The liquid is separated from the chemicals and mercury, in our teeth, in order to accommodate less mercury/other chemical emissions. This way is considered very eco-friendly.
- Coral Reef Ball: The ashes from after the cremation are mixed into other materials to make a coral reef ball to drop into the ocean (kind of like an underwater gravesite) people would be given GPS coordinates.
9. Some people may say that the two mentioned previously are ethically wrong, why do you think some people may think this? Do you think it is ethically wrong or rather, beneficial to our environment, leaving a smaller carbon foot print?
10. Is cremation respectful to the dead? Why or Why not? What are your own personal opinions? What are your opinions based on?
11. Can burying the dead be considered a human intervention? (Consider this: Neanderthals could have buried their dead simply because they smelled and not in order to provide a seeing off)
12. How do certain ways of disposing of the dead become accepted in society if they were at first scorned?
13. How would you want your body to be handled once you die? And if you have not made the decision yet, who would you like to decide and why?
14. Any final thoughts on care of the dead?
Ly D. : DOWNLOAD LINK (CLICK HERE)
Anna O : DOWNLOAD LINK (CLICK HERE)
Steph C : DOWNLOAD LINK (CLICK HERE)
Below (in the scroll box) are the questions I asked each interviewee:
1. What are your initial thoughts on care of the dead? (i.e. how we dispose of dead bodies, rituals, etc.)
2. Have you ever attended a funeral/ritual dedicated to someone who has died? If so, what was it like? How did you feel? Have you ever questioned the customs that go along with the rituals?(i.e. dressing in black, or any other customs specific to your religion or place of origin)
3. If not, what do you know of these rituals? And how do you think they are conveyed in society?
4. Are the days dedicated before and after the burial of a dead person happy or sad? And why?
5. Does the way a body is disposed of determine any meaning to the life that the body once lived?
6. How many ways of disposing of the dead do you know of? What are your thoughts on the ones that you know? (the emotional aspects as well as the physicality factor of the form of the body after it is disposed of in a certain way)
7. Japan’s cremation rate is 99%. What do you think of this number? What does that tell you about our society in comparison to that of Japan’s? (U.S. cremation rate is about 38% according to the National Funeral Directors Association.)
8. Burial and Cremation seem to be the most common. However there are other ways – less common ways our society chooses to use:
- Resomation: Liquefying the body leaving the calcium and excess stuff from the bones. The liquid is separated from the chemicals and mercury, in our teeth, in order to accommodate less mercury/other chemical emissions. This way is considered very eco-friendly.
- Coral Reef Ball: The ashes from after the cremation are mixed into other materials to make a coral reef ball to drop into the ocean (kind of like an underwater gravesite) people would be given GPS coordinates.
9. Some people may say that the two mentioned previously are ethically wrong, why do you think some people may think this? Do you think it is ethically wrong or rather, beneficial to our environment, leaving a smaller carbon foot print?
10. Is cremation respectful to the dead? Why or Why not? What are your own personal opinions? What are your opinions based on?
11. Can burying the dead be considered a human intervention? (Consider this: Neanderthals could have buried their dead simply because they smelled and not in order to provide a seeing off)
12. How do certain ways of disposing of the dead become accepted in society if they were at first scorned?
13. How would you want your body to be handled once you die? And if you have not made the decision yet, who would you like to decide and why?
14. Any final thoughts on care of the dead?
Care of the Dead is certainly a touchy subject – it’s not often that we discuss how our future decomposing dead bodies may be sited, dealt with, or cared for, all of which are euphemisms for “disposed of.” I can ask myself why such euphemisms are used to conceal the distinct distaste, discomfort, and sorrow we carry when we talk about the deceased – the once living and breathing organisms that we’ve created memories with and have recollected images of, in our minds. This is surely a tough question to ask as our society has created an infrastructure, purely made to deal with how we care for the dead by instituting places like crematoriums and burial grounds. I ask similar questions to my peers in light of discovering the how and why we choose to pick certain ways of disposing of the dead. Frankly, I don’t think it could ever be as simple as saying that Neanderthals buried their dead just because they smelled but because there were underlying ethical and emotional reasons. After collecting answers from four of my peers, I found myself with an array of terse, lackadaisical, lengthy, insightful answers. However I decided to focus on one perspective because it seemed only logical to attend to the answers that were less bubbles but, more insights.
Alina, a good friend of mine, reasoned that leaving any physical form of the dead body would be nothing less than a selfish act, performed in order to console those who are still living. The left over ashes in an urn or decomposing body in a casket underneath earth’s soil represents the memory that the living cannot let go of.
“If a body is buried in a graveyard, it is easier for the person's close relatives or friends to feel like they are next to the body. I think people need some proof that the person once existed and that is why they choose to bury the people in a wooden casket instead of let go. Like I mentioned earlier, cremation is probably the easiest way to forget a person, because once the ashes are released, not much ties one to the former life of that person. I think the selfishness or disinterest of the ones still alive is really what determines how the body is treated and how it is remembered.”
After hearing her reasoning, I thought to myself: What qualifications does a treatment of the dead body need to fit in order to be considered right, just, and unselfish? When is deciding the fate of how a body is treated considered “okay” when the consenter is dead? I find that society is caught up with the idea of leaving something behind after death– a legacy of some sort. A burial of a body can tag along with it a stone with writing, which poses as the indicator/reminder of the flame that the human being that died once burned but then sadly flickered out. When there is an unidentified dead body, it seems as though people believe the dead person did not receive his or hers seeing off by their loved ones. I can see how the act of seeing a body off may be selfish because it relieves the living’s feelings but in actuality serves no purpose to the buried or cremated. Examining our selfish intentions in this aspect is important because it will allow us to better understand what is considered acceptable and unacceptable in different ways of disposing of dead bodies.
Although my initials thoughts and that if Alina's leaned more onto the category of bubbling, it touched on some important insights. My initial thoughts were similar to but also different from that of Alina’s. This is because I had never thought about our society’s need to bury the dead and give memorials and funerals as selfish and an act only to give peace to us rather than to the dead. The funerals and burying may be a facade – a veil put over our own eyes to help us believe that everything is okay and that death is not a huge black abyss. This is only one perspective among several others and I’m sure that the others will be further explored later in the unit.
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