Our blog prompt this week is to explore what would be included in our own burial and thus how your identity would be expressed or how other's might express our identity through a burial. Kinda a morbid theme, eh. I'm not entirely comfortable with that sort of discussion, so instead I'm going to write about how I feel about burials at this moment in time.
Reflections of how I feel about my own burial:
I am not sure how I'd feel about my own burial. Growing up, as a young child, I heard stories about my mom's family plot and felt a sort of attachment towards this site. The attachment was due to many reasons, but the one I can share is that this connection came through seeing how much my mom missed her parents and her own close connection with them led me to feel a connection towards having a burial connected to them as well. Maybe this was because I was a young kid idolizing my mom and never knew her parents and felt that this would create some sort of closer bond. I'm not sure how I feel about my death or burial anymore. I guess I have those feelings I mentioned above still deep within me, but I don't have a deep desire for a certain type of burial.
Exploring the idea of certain types of burials... with a focus on the how a close friend was buried:
On another topic of burials and death, I've had past loved one's in my life die. It was not easy to go through and one death in particular was very difficult. My friend who died wanted to be cremated and her ashes scattered in all the places she loved. Her partner on the other hand did not want to allow this and instead wanted her buried. In the end she was cremated and some of her ashes were to be scattered and some to be buried in a cemetery. Being witness to hearing about how my friend's cremation/burial was happening was troubling to me. I knew, as did those involved, how she wanted to deal with her death. However, it was interesting to see how difficult it was for other people in her life to view her death and thus how death should be treated in their eyes. They struggled with what cremation and the scattering of her ashes represented for them and were troubled by her not being buried. It bothered me that my friend's wishes were not being met fully. However, I think death is an emotional event (or at least this death was highly emotionally difficult) and decisions about ceremonies and the act of treating one's body in death is not an easy experience to go through.
Starting to sum things up on my current feelings surrounding death:
Thinking about my own death or loved one's dying is not easy. I think before this class I never thought of how burial or the treatment of death and the actions that take place in burials (or whatever act associated with death) could lead to examining identit(ies) of how that person was seen in death and how the community viewed death. For me, until now, death and the actions surrounding the treatment of loved one's who have died lead to actions of remembering the dead as an event that took place around the time they died. Then after death, their memory would be kept kept, but thinking of what future people thought of the ceremony or any sort of grave/etc was not a large factor. Thus, this class has lead me to think about the treatments associated with death more deeply, yet I still do not have concrete feelings about burials within my own life.
