Death is a wide subject.

A few days after All Saint's Day, I felt the need to address this topic.
On November 1, I read to articles that aroused my curiosity; both are similar in that they show our conception of death evolves and takes new shapes nowadays, but it's still taboo, even though it's unavoidable, universal and egalitarian.

The first article is taken from the online version of Le Monde, a French newspaper, dated November 1, 2007 (http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3238,36-973052,0.html?xtor=RSS-3208) :

On All Saint's Day, Daniel Coing-Daguet is expecting a high number of visits on his website, lecimetiere.net. Since it has been created in 2003, the activity rose slowly, though steadily. "Death is a delicate matter, people hesitate to visit the website or talk about it", his creator, a 49 year old blue collar whose passionnate about computering, admits.
As baffling as it may sound, the concept is simple: lecimetiere.net let users upload the picture of a departed and celebrate his/her memory by sending pictures of flowers or landscapes, for free or for a fee, with texts et personnal notes. The webmaster of this site says there are more than 10,000 virtual graves and that between 1,000 to 1,200 flowers are sent everyday. They "wither" and disappear from the site after seven days. A space reserved to "individuals" is located next to places dedicated to departed children, "the angels", or to "celebrities".
Originally, Mr Coing-Daguet wanted to pay tribute to artists he liked, then he added family members on the website, before making it available to others. "For some, visiting the site has become a real need, they have a real cult for their departed ones. It also helps people whoe live far from the burial site of their departed, he explains. It's true that here, everything is virtual, but so is meditating at somebody's grave, isn't it?" However, the initiative is shocking to some: the webmaster admits he had troubles with some families. "A woman uploaded the picture of her dead mother on the website. Her brother couldn't stand it and threatened to sue", he says.

SOFT TOYS ON THE SIDE OF ROADS

But the relocation of meditating places doesn't stop there. Websites and blogs created by friends or relatives of young people who died in an accident or from an illness have been developping for a few years now. These new virtual meditating places are places where teenagers can express their pain. For other families, the tribute paid to departed invades the public scene. Colorful bouquets, cross engraved with a name, photos with poems or soft toys are more and more numerous along the side of roads in France, spectacularly indicating where an accident has happened.
"These tokens are often placed there by friends or members of the family of someone who died in an accident, usually a teenager or a child. They highlight the unbearable aspect of the violent death", Laetitia Nicolas, a young anthroplogist and author of a dissertation on this topic, notices. "For some parents willing to fight for road safety, the activist dimension of installing a memorial in a public place is obvious. But many find it difficult to explain their gesture; they do it spontaneously, at the risk of shocking those who can't bear to see a private pain blatantly exposed."

The second article is a dispatch from the AFP (Agence France Presse, French Press Agency), on the same day (http://www.afp.com/francais/news/stories/newsmlmmd.1ce666b3843ee033bc86af5199ff36a2.c1.html) :

PARIS (AFP) - Halloween is losing momentum, French go less to the cimetery to put flowers than they used to, cremation is developping, mourning is dicrete: All Saint's Day is no longer what it once was. 
[...]
But many French mistake All Saint's Day with the day of the dead (November 2), dedicated to the memory of the departed of the family and traditionnaly the time to go to the cemetery. Even this tradition is losing momentum, according to a poll issued by Credoc (Centre de recherche pour l'étude et l'observation des conditions de vie, Research center for the study and the observation of life conditions) realised the CSNAF (Chambre syndicale nationale de l'art funéraire, National Committee of Funeral Art).
The same poll shows more and more French arrange their funerals themselves or intend to. Traditionnaly, this was left in the hands of the family, which just had to conform to religious rituals, dressing in black from head to toe for months (one year for the spouse, nine months for a parent).
Nowadays, mourning isn't visible anymore, religious pratice diminishes and 25% of the deads are cremated. François Michaud Nérard, manager of the Funeral Department of the city of Paris, even talks of a "death revolution".
This week, "Pèlerin magazine" publishes a special edition entitled "Confronting death - how to rebuild oneself". One of the author notices that every primitive society has developped a cult of the dead while Western societies are erasing rituals: "Not only is death rejected, but it is denied in a society driven by a dream of immortality, or should I say amortality."
The same magazine lists faiths et rituals in several religions and groups of thoughts, and interviews Sister Emmanuelle, 97, who says "(her) death will be the happiest day of (her) life".

Here it appears that the need for meditation is still important, but is evolving with today's world. We pay tribute in front of our computer, even if some find it offensive, as the first article illustrates, we no longer go in mourning for months, we barely mourns during the funeral.
What doesn't change is the fact of mourning and its necessity, which is a tradition in our society, and not following the ritual of mourning is considered an heresy.
Whatever the way one mourns, it strictly is a personnal matter, everyone mourns in a different way, depending on the links with the departed, sometimes on our state of mind at the time the death occured, if we were particularily fragile for some reasons (problems at work, family or money problems, or whatever). But above all it's a personnal matter, each and every way of mourning is respectable. So if the woman in the first article felt the need to pay tribute to her mother over the Internet, her brother should have respected her choice; apparently, he considered this way of mourning disrespectful, but instead of taking it at her sister, he opted to threaten to sue the webmaster. 

Did he really think his sister was disrespectful or did he actually want his pain to remain private, hidden, like it was a shame? The second article agrees with the first one on that matter. In our society, we erase rituals, we do everything we can to whipe death out, and keep it private. But death is here, it's not a shame, it's unavoidable. This may be another face of the cult of youth. The old age and where it ultimately leads to, death, is rejected by any means. We don't want to talk about it, and when somebody does,  it's always tough to find what to say. Are we afraid the grim reaper will come to take us if we talk about him (or her, I don't know if the grim reaper is a he or a she) ? The more I think about this topic tonight, the more it seems to me that most of our problems in dealing with death are linked to superstition...

But, in fact, when someone dies, is she/he really important? 
Let me explain: 
When someone dies, be he/she a relative, a friend or an acquaintance, our first reaction is to feel helpless, shattered, and to cry. Why's that?
Freud would say the reason for that is that at some point in our relationship with the dead we wished, inconsciously or not, him/her dead. So when the time actually comes, we feel guilty. Perhaps.
I'm more inclined to believe that at that time, we completely withdraw into ourselves. We think about the fact we'll never be able to see him/her, about what we didn't take time to say or about what we said during an argument and now regret, we think we didn't spend enough time with the person, that we've been postponing calling him for a year and that now it's too late. In other words, we keep turning things over, we blame ourselves, we regret.
When do we really think about the dead? Why not changing the perspective?
Instead of saying to ourselves : I didn't spend enough time with him/her, why not thinking: I remember when we had lunch together, he always had something funny to say. Yes, he had a really bad temper and was hard to take, but he actually was extremely generous with people he loved and who loved him. We had many great times together.
We must cherish times spent and not feel sorry about what we haven't done or said or what we won't have a chance to do or say.
Of course, we also must make the most of the time we spend on earth and see our loved ones as often as possible, as long as they (and we) are still alive. This will help us when it comes to avoid thinking "I should've called him more often".

The other change of perspective I want to stress, probably the hardest one to understand and do, is to "be in the dead's shoes", ie what now becomes of him/her, what will he/she lives. What does his/her death represent for him/her? Yes, So-and-so is dead. But it's a real opportunity, a real chance : now he/she is free. He was sick, she was old, and now, all of the pains and hurt his/her life are gone, he/she won't have to suffer those pains anymore. Death freed him/her. No more pain, isn't what we all want for our loved ones ? That they no longer suffer from their disease, their anxiety, their problems or whatever hurt them and made their life painful ? Shouldn't we be delighted that the person we love is finally completely free, freed from all constraints, all pain, physical or mental, all sadness ?
I'm well aware this approach is quite hard to understand and accept, because it's easy for others to believe: yeah, right, so in fact, you're just happy he/she's dead!
This is so not what it is! Obviously, I'd rather my friends and family never die, but in a way, dying is the best thing that could ever happen to them. For happiness is the absence of pain and when we die, we stop suffering, there's no more pain.
That might be what Sister Emmanuelle meant by "(her) death will be the happiest day of (her) life".
I'm not trying and justify suicide either, saying kill yourself to be happy and stop suffering, I just want to share my vision of things and of what I've experienced.

As a matter of fact, last year, on February 21, a friend of mine died in a car accident 10 days before her 24th birthday, my grand-mother died on June 22, taken away by a rapid disease, in less han 2 weeks, she was almost 80, on September 5, a friend tried to commit suicide, but fortunately didn't succeed (and no, it wasn't a desperate cry for help) and on November 6, at 53, my uncle died after a long illness.
In a few months, I've experienced differents feelings and states of mind, and my relationship with death completely changed to reach the point where I stand now and tried to express above. At my uncle's funeral, whereas everybody was crying, I tried not to smile because I was truly, deeply happy for him : he was finally free and wouldn't suffer from his illness and all of the problems he had.
Out of respect for my family, I didn't revealed my true feelings because many of them, if not all of them, would have been shocked by my reaction and would have misinterpreted. But thinking about him, not about me, was of a tremendous help for coping with his death. I think about him regularly since then and when I do, often, like right now, tears come to my eyes, but I just have to switch to the "right" viewpoint and I'm happy again; I can feel happy thinking about a dead relative who I happened to love very much and who was, to some extent, a role model for me.

Sometimes I wish, not that everybody would be able to act this way, but at least that everybody accepts the way others mourn, as it's a private and personnal sentiment.
The bloke in the first article should have respected his sister's choice, as long as it helped her dealing with the loss of her mother. But he was overwhelmed with his own pain, only focused on the way he felt, and forgot others, even the closest persons in his life, completely oblivious of them and the way they could feel.
Likewise, at my grand-mother's funeral, my red hair and my piercing led one of my uncle, the son of my grand-mother and my father's brother, to decide to no longer speak to me. He did so for almost a year. He believed that my looks were disrespectful to my grand-mother. That's true, she never liked my piercings, but she never stopped loving me nonetheless and never rejected me. But wasn't his behaviour more disrespectful to her than my looks? For it's sure she would have told him off had it happened while she was alive!
But he was having a hard time, perhaps he was angry too, because he might have been feeling forsaken by his mother, they were indeed very close, and maybe he had to find an indirect way to express hios pain, and me and my piercings, we were there !
So if taking it all on me helped him in one way or another, my pleasure!
But it's just the way I see things, I might be completely wrong (it's not unprecedented, it happened once or twice before).

To finish off, I would like to talk about rituals. Overall, I'm against it.
I mean, I believe that mourning being a private, personnal matter, no one is entitled to dictate the way I should behave and mourn. Why should I wear black cloths? Will my pain be lighter than if I'm wearing red shorts and thongs (I do mean flip flops, not the underwear. I'm not that kinda bloke)?
Why don't we ever speak ill of the dead? Are we afraid he/she'll come back to haunt us later? Because nobody is perfect and what defines a person is both their qualities and their flaws. When we talk to a friend about another one, we talk about the whole personality. "He's kind-hearted, but damn he can be such an arse sometimes!", we say. Would his death suddenly change him into an angel? Of course not, and I believe it's important to remember someone the way they genuinely were. There's no disrespect in truth.
And why aren't we allowed to spread our departeds' ashes where we want? Why should I put the urn in a columbarium where I'll never go anyway, since I'll pay tribute to him/her on the Internet? Why should I bury him/her, why is the cost of a funeral this expensive (and unavoidable since it's mandatory to bury or cremate our deads), why does government strictly regulate my pain, why does it tax it? Why do we have to pay a tax to each city the hearse drives through? That we have to pay the burial plot, OK, but having to pay a tax to the municipalities the dead will go through, nonsense! What's behind it? Trying to ward off ill fortune? Having him/her go through another town because if he/she goes through our town, his/her soul will find its way back and haunt the mayor? Bullshit!!!
Why aren't we allowed to bury him/her in the privacy of our garden? Who does it bother?
Why is it so crazy to sit on a grave? The marble of a chimney is just the same as the one on a grave! And it's just marble! We don't sit on the dead's head, we only sit on marble!!! What's the problem? Because there's a dead guy six feet under? He/she won't feel a thing, he/she won't complain, and the soul won't possess us, coming from under, inside our body through ther arse!!
People are offensed, not much because they consider it's disrespectful for the dead, but because they think it's disrespectful for the way they see death and what the appropriate behaviour should be. It's disrespectful to them. But who decided of the behaviour that's appropriate or not? By the way, is this so-called appropriate behaviour universal? Of course not, and rituals are different between cultures and between societies. Death is universal, related rituals are subjectives. Being subjetives, why should I follow them blindly?
The problem is to find the right balance between the respect of the way our family/friends mourn and the respect for ourself, our vision, our own way of mourning.

Fushichô

November 10, 2007