funereal karaoke

So I woke up this morning with the melody of “Sins of the Father” running through my head together with the line “God said don’t send me your tinhorn prayers” and stuck on an image from a dream: There’s a secret door in the top of the freezer that leads up to some sort of attic but one has to climb up into the freezer and this is complicated because it’s frozen over and everything is covered in frost. The attempt to chip away at all this cold white stuff reveals a woman underneath it all, upright in the freezer. Is she dead and frozen? I don’t think it was related to the other image I can remember: standing in the railway yard working on my vertical leap while waiting for the big volleyball match with Duke to get underway. Oy.

When I get to work I read this essay on changes in American funerals by celebrity undertaker Thomas Lynch in the Times:

For many Americans, however, that wheel is not just broken but off track or in need of reinvention. The loosened ties of faith and family, of religious and ethnic identity, have left them ritually adrift, bereft of custom, symbol, metaphor and meaningful liturgy or language. Times formerly spent in worship or communion are now spent shopping or Web-browsing or otherwise passing time. Many Americans are now spiritual tourists without home places or core beliefs to return to.

INSTEAD of dead Methodists or Muslims, we are now dead golfers or gardeners, bikers or bowlers. The bereaved are not so much family and friends or fellow believers as like-minded hobbyists or enthusiasts. And I have become less the funeral director and more the memorial caddy of sorts, getting the dead out of the way and the living assembled for a memorial "event" that is neither sacred nor secular but increasingly absurd - a triumph of accessories over essentials, stuff over substance, theme over theology. The genuine dead are downsized or disappeared or turned into knickknacks in a kind of funereal karaoke - bodiless obsequies where the finger food is good, the music transcendent, the talk determinedly "life affirming," the accouterments all purposefully cheering and inclusive and where someone can be counted on to declare "closure" just before the merlot runs out. We leave these events with the increasing sense that something is missing.

Lynch is right, I suppose, but he seems to miss the point. The problem is not, as he says, that we have abandoned an older set of rituals for a new inadequate set, but that culturally, on some level, death itself has been removed from life. For most of us, it’s the visceral reality of death that is missing. We’ve got plenty of representations but it’s not the same thing. But this did not happen because we've swapped sets of rituals. That's a confusion of cause and effect. Funerary practice in America is just trying to keep up with the realities of culture and the market.