The principal argument for burial over cremation would seem to be that one avoids being cremated. It’s difficult to imagine ever being dead enough not to feel the fiery blast of the crematory furnace. And even if frosty logic prevails and one reasons that “I” won’t be the corpse being charred—no “I” being in existence any longer to experience any pain (or anything else)—there still remains the image of one’s loved ones being slid into the roaring oven and emerging as amorphous embers. We might not be there to feel self-pity at our own blazing transformation and ashy end, but how can we avoid horror and sorrow when our family and friends are one moment cherished intimates and the next moment flaming, bubbling flesh? At least when a coffin is resting underneath the earth we know that a relatively intact facsimile of our parent or spouse or child rests there, and not some powdery proxy. This is why people are often buried in their favourite clothes or along with a cherished or emblematic object or with photographs of their surviving loved ones: we’re saying goodbye to all that they once were. We’re saying goodbye to them. They might be sealed up inside a $6,000 bucket and there might be formaldehyde in their veins and an autopsy scar might run the length of their chests, but they’re in there. Admittedly, it’s not much comfort, but it’s some. And at times like these, some is something.
But then there are the worms. Those busy, busy worms and insects and other subterranean trespassers that are as patient as they are persistent. It might take several generations of maggoty discipline and steady burrowing, but the worms always win. A Sterling Deluxe Stainless Steel Casket with an immaculate white silk interior or not, mother’s kind face will eventually be a mouldy meal for the first arrivals to make it through the casket to what’s left of the meat and bones. Cremation at least cheats the worms. And if life really is ashes to ashes, dust to dust, why not bypass middleman Time and get on with the job at hand as soon as possible? Whether scattered across the water or launched into the wind, merging with the universe sure as hell beats waiting around to become creepy-crawler feces.
So what’s the final tally? Who wins how we should ideally end up? As in life, so in death, there is no clear winner. Burial or cremation would seem to equal six of one, a half dozen of the other. Perhaps the only correct answer is akin to the one the ailing elderly sometimes give when asked how they’re feeling: Take my advice, they’ll say. Don’t get old. We laugh, we almost understand, we nod in sympathy. But people grow old. And people die. And here we are back where we started.
But maybe the question goes deeper than what inevitably degraded form we wish to end up as. Perhaps it’s really about how important it is to the individual to concretize (sometimes literally) their desire to be remembered. Like the church benefactor whose generous philanthropy is sometimes subconsciously connected to the desire to get a better seat at the foot of God when his or her time to celestially ascend arrives, the purchaser of the biggest, most expensive, most ostentatious tombstone or mausoleum in the cemetery believes they’re buying remembrance. Someone who has a grave that large and/or expensive must have been someone special, a fact that future generations simply won’t be able to overlook or forget. When it comes to immortality, size matters.
Except, of course, it doesn’t. Nothing does. You don’t need the wise preacher of the Old Testament to tell you that all is vanity and that nothing and no one is remembered for very long. Toppled, broken gravestones scrubbed all-but-blank by decades of season after indifferent season are lesson enough. More than illustrating the futility of the human longing for immortality, an old cemetery reminds us of human beings’ colossal arrogance. “The smaller the mind, the greater the conceit,” wrote Aesop. The bigger the tomb, the larger the delusion.
So what’s to be done? To leave instructions for our remains to be scattered and thereby escape the sin of a shamefully prideful monument to selfhood predicated upon egoistic illusions of immortality? Good for you and whoopdefuckingdo. Ashes in the sea or bones at the bottom of a hole, we’re all poor Yoricks, of whom those who do manage to remember us for a little while might well ask, “Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar?”
Silence. End scene.
Psychologically, epistemologically, existentially—all the signs testify to how difficult (if not impossible) it is to wholly comprehend one’s own eventual non-existence. Even the most contemplative of us ends up tripping over our intractable ego on the way to full comprehension. When it comes to grasping the truth of our own annihilation, Ivan Ilych’s dilemma is uncomfortably familiar: “The syllogism he had learnt from Kiesewetter’s logic: ‘Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal,’ had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself.” The most logical logic simply isn’t—can’t be—logical.
There’s no such roadblock to understanding when it comes to the death of someone close to us, however. Particularly someone we love. Here, to say that a great deal of imagination isn’t necessary to grasp death’s devastating reality is to commit a cruelly absurd understatement. Our death might always remain a mystery to ourselves, but our wife’s or husband’s or partner’s couldn’t be more obvious. It means pain. Mental, emotional, physical pain. It means sorrow. For their loss of their life, for our loss of them in ours, for a world that can never be the same. It means anger. At them for dying, at life for taking them, at us for being useless to do anything about it. It means stunned insensibility and piercing rage and every unpredictable, exhausting variation in between.
Novelists need to be good fabricators. Life, no matter how rich and interesting to the individual, is rarely compelling enough for the purposes of the novelist. You make things up so that your book makes more sense. I wanted the central protagonist of my novel I Was There the Night He Died to be a man standing at life’s ground zero, all of the comforting certainties that had once been so sustaining—work, love, family, chemical self-medication—having collapsed around him. I pulled from my own life certain experiences with loss and lost direction, but the fundamental damage done to Sam Samson was the death of his wife, Sara, in an automobile accident. Thankfully, my wife is still alive, but I remembered a story a high-school friend told me many years previous when I bumped into him while home visiting my parents. I’d heard that his young wife had been killed a year or so before in a single car collision, and when we had a chance to talk at the bar where we ran into each other, two things stuck with me—stuck with me for more than twenty years, when I came to write my novel.
He told me he said goodbye to his wife at 8:30 in the morning before they both set off for work, and that he was making arrangements for her gravestone by five p.m. that same day. One more chilling lesson in the terrifying capriciousness of everyday existence: everything in its place and everything acting as it should until you’re suddenly selecting the slab of marble that’s going to sit on your wife’s head for eternity. “We plan, God laughs,” goes the Yiddish proverb. With Gods like these, who needs the devil?
He also told me that when he returned to their empty home after the funeral, his first impulse was to tell her about it. Part of this is obviously habit—wanting to know what time it is, we instinctively look for the clock hanging over the kitchen table although we were the one who moved it to the other side of the room last week—but part of it is because there was a reason this was the person we lived with and chose to spend our life with and trusted beyond all others. “Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking together in the same direction,” wrote Saint-Exupery. Talking to someone who isn’t alive anymore isn’t nearly as odd as not continuing to need someone to rely on and confide in and who sees the world the same way we do.
A