“Each year burial waste includes the use of 77,000 trees, 1.6 million tons of reinforced concrete for vaults, and enough embalming fluid (4.3 million gallons) to fill over six Olympic-sized swimming pools, according to GBC. Then there’s the chemical leachate of heavy metals, like arsenic from sealants and lead, copper, and zinc from caskets, and atrazine (‘banned in Europe, and one of the most widely used herbicides in cemeteries’). The effects of contemporary burial practices refract out, degrading the integrity of the body, wounding those who care for our outsourced dead, imperiling the land meant to receive us, and, as ecosystemic violence will, wrecking the integrity of relationships among all while obscuring the existence of those relationships entirely” (Purpura 2019: 260).
Purpura calls US death practices a “resistance to direct return,” where human bodies even after life build fences, walls, caskets around them in order to separate from nature. “Only humans are foolish enough to believe we should or even can launder our energy into crypts or caskets that will preserve us,” a friend of Purpura’s writes (ibid.). What is striking about Purpura’s piece on death is that it shows that practices of waste, indirect violence (“13 percent higher death rate for embalmers” (ibid.)), and human exceptionalism are so entrenched and accepted within American culture that even in death, our most vulnerable time, these problems are rampant. Is there any part of Western societies that remains untouched by these human centered-trends?
For this final piece on the series of death and mourning I ask readers only to use these posts as thought experiments on how we want to define our reactions to death. Death and our responses to it are full of cultural nuance. Of course, we must be respectful of everybody’s personal practices upon the death of loved ones and community members, but that doesn’t mean we can’t think about our own reactions to death in a critical sense. As we see in this post, death is environmental and medical. We have also seen that it is social, religious, and political, but most of all it is inevitable. Death is inevitable and sad and if handled poorly can be truly destructive in both mental and physical ways. So the question is, then, how would you like to handle death?
References:
Purpura, L. 2019. Imagining Burial. Emergence Magazine 1, pp. 257-261.
The Edited Jottings of an Amateur Anthropologist 