Body

Early this summer, a discovery was made that something fundamentally unethical and disrespectful had been going on at the Burr Oak Cemetery, near Alsip, Illinois. At least 300 bodies were illegally exhumed and dumped in a hole so their original plots could be resold. Then 2 more cemeteries in Illinois went under investigation for similar operations.

 

While I thought it was immoral, dishonest, corrupt, and all the other words that describe ethical misjudgment, it also brought back an old question I had had when I moved to this country: why is body so important?

 

With all due respect to the dead, why do we even need to keep bodies? I know all three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) and some other religious traditions believe in resurrection, but do we really have to keep the physical bodies? Isn’t it a bit too 3000 BC, when the ancient Egyptian Pharaohs believed they would need their bodies to come back to? Hadn’t our spirituality advanced since then? If the decomposed bodies literally came alive on the Judgment Day, it would look more like a B-horror movie, closer to our idea of Hell, than anything we would look forward to or wish for the dead or for us. The dead are very likely a lot better off without the cumbersome bodies, even in cases where the deaths were unexpected and they died young and healthy. They can fly without their bodies anchoring down! Why would they want to come back to rotting bodies and toils on earth?

 

I first saw an American vast cemetery, stretching for blocks and blocks, when I visited Dave’s parents who lived in a northwestern suburb of Chicago. I remember thinking, as I drove past the gargantuan burial ground, “What happens when all of those plots are filled? Come to think of it, why aren’t they all filled yet?” How many people had there been on earth since the ritual of burial started? It’s not as if technological advance is making us immortal: death is one thing that happens to everybody with 100% certainty. I knew that most people in America would be buried underground after death, and that meant one person needed a piece of real estate at least as big as himself when he died. An image of the earth’s crust saturated with decomposing bodies came to my mind.

 

Then about a decade later I learned about something really upsetting: embalming. We had HBO for a short time for free and I got promptly hooked on “Six Feet Under” (great marketing ploy, those free periods). I couldn’t understand what they were doing in their funeral home basement at first: what is that liquid thingy in the pump? Can it be, Oh My God, they are pickling the body with that liquid, just like those frogs and fish in glass jars in science labs at school? Goodness… And look at those caskets! They look as though bomb proof, not something that can decompose easily. But wait, there’s more! Concrete vault! So the body is preserved with all those chemicals, put into a casket that seems impossible to break down, then put down within a concrete vault that protects it and the casket from… what? Worms?

 

The image I had had earlier became grimmer. The earth’s crust was now saturated with concrete, metal and plastic, entombing half-decomposing bodies that were denied return to nature.

 

The Crusaders wanted their bodies embalmed for burial closer to home, so did soldiers during the Civil War. Now it seems the main reason for body preservation is for better viewing by family and friends. I’ve been to a few wakes since I married Dave, whose family is Roman Catholic, and if the casket was open I heard many people admire and say things like, “Oh, he looks like he’s only peacefully sleeping.” Many experts seem to think that a successful viewing is helpful in grieving process. But wouldn’t it be harder to let go of the deceased if the body looked like “peacefully sleeping”? Wouldn’t it be human nature to wish him to wake up if his body looked as if it might give out a yawn any minute?

 

Japanese funeral ritual is very different. It starts at home. My father is the eldest son and, following the tradition, my grandparents lived with us. When my grandfather died, his body was sent home from the hospital and laid on a futon in his room. While funeral directors built an altar in our living room and as flowers started pouring in, my family and I sat at Grandpa’s side. His hands were tied together in the prayer position on his chest: they looked swollen and somewhat blue. A white cloth was laid on his face, but we took it off and looked at him. His face was also somewhat blue. I saw cotton shoved in his ears and nostrils, and wondered if they did the same to his other holes in his body. They had sewn his mouth shut, but it shifted a little and I could see thread through his slight grimace. His whole body looked rigid. I had lived with him for 16 years, and it was abundantly clear that the person I loved, who had taught me how to spell my name in kanji (Chinese character) and from whom I had inherited so much—love of good food, knack for gardening, agile fingers, enzymes for breaking down alcohol in body (which many Asians lack)—, was gone, not there in this body anymore. There was no “looks like he is sleeping” here at all. The body was empty.

 

When the altar was ready, the funeral directors lifted Grandpa’s body and put it in a wooden coffin lined with dry ice. It was a very simple, rectangular box. The altar was prepared so Grandpa’s head would point north, the same direction the Buddha’s head pointed when he died. We put money for the Sanzu River crossing fare, a little knife to ward off evil spirits, and a pack of Grandpa’s favorite cigarettes in the coffin. A priest and guests arrived for the wake, sutra was chanted and incense was burned. Many guests remained for a while to get “cleansed” with some sake and sushi. Relatives stayed up all night to keep vigil.

 

The next day was the funeral Number 1. Grandpa was the founder of our family business, so he got a company funeral a week later. We received his kaimyo—name after death—from the priest. My mother said we had paid the temple a hefty amount to get a good name. After a similar ceremony as the wake, the funeral directors moved the coffin to the middle of the room. Starting from friends and distant relatives, people put flowers in the coffin and said final good-byes. The close relatives put flowers last. The funeral directors put a lid on the coffin, and gave us a few fist-size stones to pound nails in. One of my aunts collapsed at the sight of his coffin being nailed shut.

 

We all followed the hearse to the crematorium. We gathered around a kiln door, and watched Grandpa’s coffin go into the fire. We waited for 2 hours, sharing memories, sipping tea and nibbling sweets in a tatami-floored waiting room. Then we were called back to the kiln. His bones were on a gurney-like stone contraption that had sent his coffin into the kiln. The funeral directors commented how strong and healthy his bones looked. I remembered how my grandmother’s bones had looked: she died from a rare form of blood cancer 6 years earlier, came home in a closed coffin, and her brittle, thin bones looked brownish at the core where her ailing marrow had been. We picked Grandpa’s bones and put them in a ceramic urn, starting from feet to head so he wouldn’t have to rest upside down in the grave. We use chopsticks to pick up bones: this is the only occasion in Japan that two sets of chopsticks are allowed to pick up an item together, or an item can be passed from one set of chopsticks to another. At all other times, these are major faux pas. Chopsticks and bridge in Japanese share the same sound (different intonation, but when you write them phonetically they are the same, hashi). So bones passed from chopsticks to chopsticks are seen as soul crossing over a bridge to the other side. After a bit of skull part was placed on top, the funeral director put a lid on the urn, set it in a wooden box, covered it with white silk and gave it to my father. We drove home on a different route than the way we came, so Grandpa’s soul (or any other soul) wouldn’t be tempted to follow us home.

 

Grandpa had another funeral in his second wooden box, and then finally was interred. We have a family grave at a Buddhist temple nearby. The plot is about 3’x2’, barely large enough for a tomb and a place to kneel in front, but I was told we were lucky to have one. The first one who went in the small crypt under the tombstone was my father’s older sister who died as an infant. Then Grandma, then now Grandpa. My parents will go in there too, when their time comes.

 

After interment the memorial continues on till 50th anniversary, including every 7th day until 49th, then 100th day, then 1st year, 3rd, 5th, 7th, 13th year, etc, anniversaries, in addition to annual obon, when we welcome back our ancestors’ souls for a week. All these rituals are geared toward calming the souls so they won’t be tempted to come back. We don’t want any of the ash-and-bone-piece people walking around. When the week of obon ends, we burn a small handful of hay in front of the house so the spirits can ride the smoke up to heaven. We also have a little altar in the house; we pay our respect, give offerings and pray for them daily. Japanese ghosts are notoriously grudge-y and nasty, so we want to make sure the souls of the dead are happily over there.

 

In Japan, death is closer to home, literally. It’s more part of life, not the opposite of life. And I think we face death more straight on. Death doesn’t look like “only peacefully sleeping.” Death is death, the end of physical body, whether or not you believe in afterlife or soul or any of that stuff. I think it’s more respectful to face it as is than to make it look like something else.

 

But whether we try to preserve the body or cremate it, as long as we utilize grave we can’t solve the problem of burial ground shortage. It seems inevitable to me that it will come to pass, sometime in the future, a time when there would be no more room left on the surface of earth for farming, housing, or anything else but graveyard. In his novel, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” Jonathan Safran Foer writes about this, too:

 

“Isn’t it so weird how the number of dead people is increasing even though the earth stays the same size, so that one day there isn’t going to be room to bury anyone anymore?”

 

I thought, whoa, he is concerned about the same thing!

 

 “…So what about skyscrapers for dead people that were built down? They could be underneath the skyscrapers for living people that are built up. You could bury people one hundred floors down, and a whole dead world could be underneath the living one.”

 

In Japanese metropolitan areas, something called “o-haka no manshon”—grave apartment—is starting to pop up. These are buildings about 10 stories high, converted or built as vertical graveyards. In the building, graves come in variety of sizes and prices: some are as large as outdoor graves or altars at home, others are smaller than coin lockers, just large enough for an urn to fit snugly. Compared to conventional outdoor graves, it can be a lot more economic way to “bury” the dead, and it’s virtually maintenance free. (And as with everything else in Japan, some graves come with a little electric gadget; a LCD monitor to show pictures, videos and messages!) I don’t think the idea of living on top of the grave would appeal to many Japanese people, but the grave apartments could go up 10 floors and down 2 floors below ground, for instance. We can’t dig too deep because of earthquakes. But this is already 11 times more burial space than if it were a traditional ground-level cemetery on the same piece of land, and if you think about lockers that are stacked 8 or 9 rows from floor to ceiling, wall to wall, that would be a lot more “plots.” These grave apartments offer eternal up-keep of the grave for a fee, but if that option wasn’t taken and the lease wasn’t renewed, I imagine it wouldn’t be too difficult to properly dispose of the urn and re-lease the spot.

 

I’m not quite sure why we keep the urn of bones and ashes in Japan. It’s not for resurrection, that’s for sure. Maybe it’s for the living, to have a certain spot to visit the dead. But it can’t be at home. We are not supposed to keep the urn in the house for more than 49 days after the death. It is said that after the death one must go through various gateways every 7 days. The first obstacle is the Sanzu River, a river that separates the world of living and the afterworld. The living relatives hold a memorial on the 7th day so the river’s current would calm down and the dead would have easy crossing. The 49th day is the most important of all, for it is the day the dead is judged by the Great King Enma, the terrible ruler of the nether world. He will examine all the deeds done by the dead during her life on earth, good and bad, and determine which of the 6 worlds she will enter. The king is kind of a badass version of St. Peter. If he deems the dead bad, she is sent to one of indescribably horrific hells. But if her living relatives’ prayer reaches the king, she is pardoned and allowed to be reborn in heaven. I don’t know if the living relatives are really bribing the King or the temple is taking advantage of us, but that’s how it is said to work. If we keep the urn at home past the judgment day, the soul cannot proceed to appropriate place in the afterworld and has to linger around the living. That would result in the aforementioned grudge-y ghost.

 

I find it very interesting that, in both Japanese and American culture, people talk of afterlife and souls, and then in the same breath talk about final resting place. If we believe in ever-lasting afterlife, that the dead person’s soul goes on living after her physical body dies, why do we need to make a big deal about where her body rots or being stored?  Sure, it is nice to have a place to visit and pay respect to the dead. But we can do that anytime, anywhere. Plant a tree instead of buying a stone. When my beloved cat Jojo died after loving me back for 19 years, the vet asked me if I wanted his ashes. I’m so glad I said no, because honestly I wouldn’t have known what to do with it. David Sedaris scattered his cat’s ashes in his living room because she was never an outdoor cat, and since he didn’t know what else to do, he vacuumed her right up. That’s what I would have done with Jojo, too. I don’t know where Jojo’s ashes are now, probably mixed up in the soil somewhere in a landfill, but I feel that’s better than going nowhere in an urn at home or occupying precious bit of land called grave. At least his body is going back to nature. And his spirit is running and chasing little balls in the Summerland, free of his arthritic old body. I am looking forward to being reunited with him when I’m there.

 

I think the funeral industry is taking advantage of grieving people all over the world. And if I may be so bold, it’s because we don’t know what to do with the body. There are a lot of extreme emotions and uncertainties surrounding death, and if there is a ritual to follow, that’s tons easier. We want to cover all the grounds—resurrection, preservation, respect, merit points, afterlife aides, status—, but every single item comes with a hefty price tag. We don’t want to feel guilty, so we go with the suggestions from religious leaders and funeral directors. We also equate, helped by whispers from the funeral directors, money we spend on the dead with our feelings of love and respect to her. But didn’t we learn that money can’t buy love?

 

This is what I want when my body expires: I want every body parts of mine that are usable be harvested and used, then I want anything that’s leftover be put in a cardboard box and buried in a forest somewhere. It doesn’t matter where; I just want my body to become part of nature. But if that’s illegal, just send me to a crematorium. Scatter my ashes in the living room then vacuum me up.

 

And if it turns out that we indeed needed bodies after death, I’ll come back as a grudge-y ghost and let you know.