Not that this is anything to do with 9/11 or anything, but I’m increasingly astonished at how the British public’s approach to dealing with mourning has changed over the past three decades:
- From my youth I’ve no memory of roadside floral displays lasting more than a couple of weeks where someone’s been knocked over on a road; that some displays are being topped-up on a monthly basis is particularly recent.
- Certainly it’s only been in the last decade that I’ve encountered crosses / cruxifixes installed by the side of the road where more-than-usually tragic accidents have occured; there are at least three of them in/around Yateley, one nailed to a tree which killed the driver.
I am not sure what’s changed to bring about this loss-of-stoicism, but I have begun to wonder about the media’s role in changing peoples’ perceptions of how they are meant to deal with grief and loss.
The point at which I felt Britain had tipped over the edge was the Alder Hey scandal, in which (to summarise) without parental consent – and/or without transparency – organs were removed from babies who had died under surgery, and these were retained by the hospital for various (and somewhat ill-defined) purposes.
I don’t condone the hospital’s actions – lack of transparency and lack of parental consent is a terrible liberty to have taken in such circumstances – but I was shocked by the reactions of afflicted parents, some of whom insisted upon full burial services for (say) the heart of their child, whom had been interred some years previously.
They felt a need to go through it all again. This made me wonder “why”, and led me to a though experiment:
Were I a modern, tabloid-reading Christian, and if I had lost an leg in a motorcycle accident, assuming I survived, that limb would certainly be disposed of as medical waste, and I probably wouldn’t get any say in its disposal.If I died, the leg would probably be stitched onto me, and the result would be buried as a whole.
If my leg were transplanted onto someone else – ie: if I predecease my leg – then when it eventually does die as part of the other person, I suspect there won’t be any mention of “me” at the funeral service. Avoiding such embarrassment may be why organ donors are generally anonymous, but again the point is driven home that my leg is not the same as “me” with regard to funerals.
So what if instead I predecease my leg, and instead if a transplant it got kept alive in a vat, like the head of Richard Nixon in Futurama? Or even kept dead and pickled in formalin, like the brain of Einstein?
Would people fret over funerary honours for my leg?
I think not.
…but the latter is awfully close to what happened at Alder Hey; to me all this goes to prove that funerals are for the living, and this encroachment of ever greater and longer elaboration in mourning reflects some deeper cultural shift in Britain.
“Brood upon the past, think only of fear and loss. That’s the proper way to behave in New Britain.”
As for me? if there’s anything left, drop it in a basket, park it here and plant something over the top – a birch, or poplar maybe? I’d like an oak, but they’re a bit hackneyed, so pick something deciduous and under-represented, good for nesting birds.
Something hard to kill.
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