End result

Humans throughout history have had varied and notoriously weird takes on death.  Today's been rather full of it, in ways.  This morning I was reading C. S. Lewis' A Grief Observed, which is the published edition of the journals he wrote after the early death of his wife from cancer.   And then one of our hamsters died this afternoon (Requiescat in pace, Charley Pattertwig) and we held a funeral, and we watched an episode of the Cosby Show in which Rudy's goldfish dies, and my anthropology professor was talking about these royal tombs he helped excavate a few years ago in South America.

So it got me to wondering (as if my day wasn't already morbid enough) why people do the things they do to dead bodies.  I mean, physically disposing of remains makes sense.  But then people hold funerals.  And I don't see anything wrong with funerals at all, but they are kind of curious phenomena to me.  What real purpose do they serve?  It's strange that everyone has something for which they want to be remembered, as if the being remembered was the important thing.  It's odd that people imagine a graveside is the somehow the best or the most appropriate place to do that remembering.

And why do people wish to be buried with things?  Especially all of those ancient royal families.  Clearly they believed in an afterlife, or else they wouldn't have taken civilizations' worth of wealth and thousand of fellow human beings literally to their graves with them.  It's odd that everyone thought the afterlife, whatever it be, would be stratified the same way as this life.  Nobody ever wondered if they might come into the afterlife the same way as this life—that is, out of a womb and absolutely penniless?  That somehow material objects transcended some cosmic boundary, even though obviously people's bodies didn't.  If I were dying, and I believed I was going to an afterlife very similar to the present, would I be afraid to die alone?  Probably.  So, why did they slaughter hundreds of servants and cattle to take with them, instead of a family member (that probably would have gone over poorly) or a lover (that might not have been the reputation they wanted to wake up with, I suppose)?  And if I were a servant in this life and my dying king had me executed five minutes post his death, so I could share his large and dank and expensive tomb, what would I do if I did wake up "on the other side"?  I would run, that's what.

It boggles me, frankly, to think about how very different people's minds actually worked pre-Renaissance, in societies where independence wasn't taught and pursued as a crucial goal of someone's life.  "The divine right of kings" really meant something transcendent to people, and people used it in ways that weren't necessarily meant to get people to respect "the Lord's anointed".

Death is something people have never understood, and do not understand, and never will.  Obviously, I have beliefs about death, but I still "know" next to nothing about it, aside from the purely corporeal aspects, and even modern science has raging debates over that.  Death is a bizarre phenomenon, which makes sense, considering it wasn't meant to be at all.  I don't know where this post is going/has gone.  It's just something I've been thinking about today.  Eh.