Death is a very scary concept to humans. People have established explanations or euphemisms that try to lessen the permanent nature of it, whether it is through religion or simple phrases. Nobody wants to believe that in a single moment they could be gone from this earth wandering eternity alone. Diminishing the dramatic and frightening finality of death is natural. Embalming is a way for people to comfort themselves over the loss of a loved one and diminish the terror associated with their own death.
Throughout history and across cultures people have embalmed their dead to temporarily ward off the effects of decay in order to perform a good bye service. From the ancient Egyptians’ intricate procedures to the Inca’s value of mummification, cultures have established embalming methods to treat with their dead. The United States and Canada are no different in the fact that they must honor their dead in some ritual. For some reason or another, an open casket funeral that employs the use of embalming is the most common. The fact Europeans, Africans or Asians have another burial process, it does not matter if embalming is accepted in the US.
Death is not a pretty or elegant event, nor should embalming have to be. The grisly details, although disturbing in the telling, are necessary in order to ward off the appearance of the petrifying and ugly aspects of death. I did not need to know the exact steps in the embalming process, nor did I want to know. Sometimes details are better left unknown. For example, I committed an uncomfortable mistake by reading The Jungle byUpton Sinclair. I was nauseous for a couple of minutes but I didn’t have a sudden resolve to become a vegetarian. Embalming is disgusting but perhaps a necessary process.
Life, and death, can be unpleasant
and people should not be deterred but uncomfortable details. Embalming is a
gruesome amalgamation of euphemisms and processes that lessen the appearance of
death. Since so few things are sugar coated in life, why not sugar coat death,
the one thing that everybody fears.
I agree that death is not pretty, but, to me at least, the disturbing process of embalming is something that is unnecesary and rather ironic. It is ironic because it is this gruesome process that is used to make a body look better. It's kinda of like sugar coating something with a sugar coat made from poison. On the surface things look better but in reality are mutilated to appear so.
ReplyDeleteI disagree that embalming is a necessary process. Sure, the body may appear better, but it is still a dead body. Why should one feel the need to cover up the reality of death?
ReplyDeleteI like your point that preservation of the deceased is not simply an American cultural trait, as visibly honoring the dead in some shape or form exists nearly everywhere.
ReplyDeleteIt is true that embalment makes death easier to accept, but I think it is also an unnecessary expense. Why not remember our loved ones through memories and not a fake representation of what they were?
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