Death and What Have You

I would agree with G-Detroit that cemeteries do seem rather illogical with our limited amount of public space. However, the idea of burying the dead is said to go back as far as 200, 000 years ago - an act that was probably a symbolic gesture of spiritual and physical connectedness with the earth. This means that we humans have an ingrained desire to give our loved ones back to the earth which has sustained not only all of the lives that have passed, but also our own.

Christians were not the first to bury their dressed up dead, and they definitely are not the only ones who still dispose of the remains of a deceased person this way. I know this first hand from working in a funeral home. The truth is this: most people would not be able to stomach what is involved in dealing with the process of caring for a loved one after he/she has succumbed to the inevitable. Naturally, we try to make the burden of loss as easy as possible for those grieving. 

Regardless if you want to agree or not with the business of death - it will always be there in some form. Say one day you come home and find that your girlfriend has jumped 30 stories to her death and now she is a mess of skin, various tissues, bones, hair, and what have you. By now the police and ambulance would have been dispatched and a legal cause of death will have to be assessed. This is how things are done in a western 21st century world. A trip to a morgue is inevitable. Even if you were to burn the body, or what was left of it, you would need to transport it. With what means would one achieve this task. Buying a body bag perhaps, but then you are supporting the death trade. Perhaps a garbage bag then - may I suggest the extra strong ones and layering up at least four times.

It is true that we no longer need to dispose of our loved ones through a dressed up burial (embalming is particularly bad for the environment and also a very disturbing procedure), yet there is always going to be a demand for funeral and disposal services, and there will always be those who will provide it.

Even if we outlawed the burial of people, having an in town reminder of how fleeting our lives and ideas are, in the form of cemeteries, would be a healthy dose of reality.