The Living Dead

Hello blog-readers to the latest post of the Great Saundini! If you’re new here, I’d like you to wave your hands and twirl around. Alternatively, you can just ignore my wishes, which may or may not be dying, as you never can tell. Why, only today my mother told me to watch out for a birth-mark on my back, which may or may not be cancer (please note: I do not have cancer). So ignore this wish at your peril. I am merely trying to save you from the overwhelming guilt that you would almost certainly feel! By the by, apologies for people reading this hoping to read about zombies, this is a totally unrelated topic, possibly.

Funerals have always seemed a funny concept to me. For instance, in context with my Christian upbringing, why feel sad if we believe that a person is going to the best place in the universe? Now the bog-standard solution to this, at least the one I quickly learned, was that we mourn loss on the behalf of the people still alive. This seems to make sense for me. Mourners are suddenly having to live without loved ones whom they are accustomed to seeing regularly, leaving a hole in their everyday routine. This even translates to the tragedy of a young death, as the family around them do not expect to lose the years that seem pre-destined for them. However, I wonder sometimes if this reason accounts for all the feelings associated with mourning.

I remember when a friend of mine committed suicide when I was 17.  It was a bit of a shock and it felt like such a waste of potential. He had played in my Steel Band and I had known him since First School. I remember going to his Birthday parties as a boy, playing that cops and robbers game when the robbers have to draw arrows on the floor and the cops have to follow them. He even gave me my phobia of Wasps (not the Rugby Union club that have just made the Premiership play-offs) in one fateful P.E. lesson by over-reacting to being stung. Now I can’t even muster the courage to open a window to let wasps out, instead opting for the ‘waiting outside and hoping everything will be okay when I get back’ method. Anyway, I remember the Will Young hit “Leave Right Now” was played at the end of the service, which I thought was some unintentional black humour. Of course, I didn’t venture to laugh out loud, though I found this funny. Much of the service beforehand however, I spent wondering why I wasn’t more upset about this. True, it was shocking and sad news, but it seemed as though the convention of how I was supposed to be reacting contributed to my actual mood.

I know in this case I was relatively distant from the case, but in other death’s I have mourned the same dilemna and feelings have been present. Culture seems to have a large say over our reactions to death. It was really interesting to hear details of Sylvan Historian’s poetry project last term, particularly in reference to the different culture’s different attitudes towards death. From what I gather from various sub-conscious sources, China, with it’s bulging population, seems to have a lower view of human life than the Western world and this therefore has a bearing on how death is perceived. The Hindu’s, owing to their belief in re-incarnation, do not even allow for mourning as they fear this slows the progression of the soul into rebirth. I can’t remember the other examples, so maybe Sylvan can help me. My proposal however is that maybe our declining death rate and longer life expectancy because of the improvements in modern medicine, alongside our increasing athiesm and emphasis on free-thinking education, is causing us to fear death more rather than less having become so unaccustomed to it.

For me, the Hindu attitude to death seems much more healthy than our own, though some may argue that it is a repressive attitude. My counter-argument would be however that my lack of Hinduism limits me in my understanding and that it could well be that grief is something that is more prevalent in a culture such as ours that nurtures it. Essentially, death is a natural part of life. It’s a cycle. Although we should not neglect the memories of our loved ones, I think we should honour them by remembering the good memories and enjoying them instead of dwelling on sadness and absense. After all, every day seems to me a type of death. We can never get a day back once it’s gone. We’re just left with the memories of it. I will never be able to enjoy the days of courting my fiancee again, though that summer I remember being the most glorious and exciting of my life. It’s obviously better looking back than living through it. That’s the nature of nostalgia. However, I seem to go through life constantly missing out on the present because I look back too much. The unappreciated present, in the meantime, takes refuge in the past and becomes idolised itself. Nothing ever will be the same again. In turn, everyone who dies gets eulogised. Could it be that death is simply a rubber-stamp of the trauma of time passing? If this is true who is really dead out the corpse and it’s mourners?

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