Via The Daily Undertaker, here is a non-fiction story by a writer named Marie Mutsuki Mockett entitled “Letters from a Japanese Crematorium”, as published in the online version of the literary magazine AGNI. It is a deeply personal story, but it is also a very interesting peek inside an element of Japanese culture that is generally kept private. Mockett is a Japanese-American, and the story conveys the duality that comprises her heritage as someone from a culture but not really of that culture.
The story appeared in the Spring 2007 issue of AGNI, and Mockett wrote about it here on her own blog, which includes many of her own photographs of the trip. I have borrowed her photo of the entry into the crematorium itself above. On her front page it says that her first novel, entitled “Picking Bones From Ash” is due out next year. Keep your eyes peeled.
The Daily Undertaker has a post today about the British government considering a proposal to allow open-air funeral pyres in response to requests from the large Hindu community in the U.K. The Times article dates back to April of 2007, but the issue has been brought back to the forefront of the news in the U.K. as a lawsuit filed by a Hindu spiritual healer against the city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne will come before a High Court judge next month.
Ritual open-air cremations have been a part of Hindu death rites for 4000 years, and there are presently a million active Hindu and Sikh religious adherents in the U.K. Conventional enclosed cremations are not only completely legal in Britain (as in the U.S.), but more Britons are now cremated after death than are buried (here in the U.S., it is somewhere around 25%). While some argue that there are safety and environmental concerns associated with open-air pyres, for the most part the debate has focused more on the cultural integration of the Indian population in the U.K. However, Patrick (the Daily Undertaker blogger) cites this 2003 CBS News article that details how authorities in India itself are beginning to have concerns about the environmental impact. Of course, in India there are many more funeral pyres than there would be in the U.K., but the practice is beginning to be viewed as archaic in Indian society as well as among the British Indian population.
Patrick wonders, as do I, how many people in the United States would latch on to open-air cremation as yet another way to personalize one’s final ritual. Surely there would be Star Wars fans requesting to be dressed up like Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker as well as plenty of requests for Viking boat pyres. Long ago I decided that I want to have my remains cremated, but I have to admit the appeal of being set adrift in a flaming Viking warship while my mourners cry “OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOODDDDIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNN!!!” certainly has some dramatic appeal.
Surfing around for stuff over the weekend, I came across an interesting blog called “The Daily Undertaker”, written by an actual funeral director named Patrick McNally from Madison, WI. His posts are all related to death and funerals in some manner, but just from the posts on the front page it seems that his eye scopes a broad range in that subject area, from the practical bits of the funeral business to virtual funerals online to the aptly-named “undertaker ant”.
Of the posts I read, the one I liked the best was this one about visiting a room at the former Oregon State Insane Asylum where the unclaimed cremains of dozens of inmates are kept and cared for. The room, christened the “Library of Dust” by the othert inmates, is the subject of a book of the same name by a photographer named David Maisel (who also took the photo above). On Maisel’s website you can see some of the individual images of the small copper cans that contain the cremains, may of which have corroded or discolored over a period of decades.
Bravo to Patrick for finding this interesting work, and also for his other great posts; I’m looking forward to seeing what else he has to offer.
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
