Death...

I am back on the morbid topic of death... recently I got Mitch Albom's Have A Little Faith for a friend and it has gotten me to think this topic again as I explore it again.

You know how it is. Whenever someone experiences a death in his family, we'd start exploring the need to prepare for death. And what would the preparation involve? Often, the little plot measuring 6"X8" or little space in the columbarium. We start looking for a place for our earthly body. We look for a resting place for that body of ours which begins to return to its dust form the minute we breathe our last.

And they don't come cheap. Places like Nirvana Memorial Park can cost a bomb. In today's world, everything costs money. They make money at birth and even death too! The better the feng shui the more it'll cost. But I wonder if it makes any difference to the dead.

Cos the final resting place may not be that final. After all we've read about former cemetery plots being converted to housing or industrial purposes. The world is after all for the living. And the needs of the living still takes precedent over the dead. So, who is to tell after a generation or two that the graves will not be dug out and be recycled? Death is after all good business too for there is no shortage of demands. Common sense will tell us that with the population explosion that we've been experiencing, they won't be enough burial plots unless we recycle.

I supposed preparation for death would also mean the donation aspect. In a Chinese funeral, there always seems to be donations given out. My friend said that is to allow the decease do a final good deed on earth. Does it? In death too there are many elaborate rituals over a period of a few days. To honour the dead? For the living to mourn? For show of piety? I am a bit of skeptic these days. Every now and then I hear of the aged living in deplorable state... yet in death, a great show is put up! It's like atonement, not for the dead but the living.

Or is it for the feel good factor for the family members. Sometimes the deceased would have lived out his last years in quite kasihan conditions.... yet at the funeral, large sums might be donated.

But recently I attended a wake service. I was touched by how the old lady was blessed to have a grand daughter who would clean her sores and sing hymns to her in the last months of her life. So which one? To have (huge) donations given out after you are dead so as to be seen as doing a good dead deed (and also for 'water face' of the living) or to be surrounded by loving and kind deeds of family members in the last months (years)?

So, preparing for death... this is only one facet of many.