Death Culture in a lot of the US is so depressing and isolating. I know this doesn’t speak to every culture’s tradition and experience bc there are so many people and cultures in the country, but largely this is what I see.
People afraid of death. Not of dying, but of the concept and precense of death.
When someone dies, it’s spoken about very quietly and very privately, almost like it should be a secret.
Viewings and funerals have sanitized atmospheres, where you walk into a funeral home and very quietly tell the nearest family member that you’re sorry, and they say thank you, and you leave quickly, just as quietly.
People don’t explain death to their children, or they even hide it (replacing dead pets with identical ones, usually with fish or hamsters).
Worst of all, when the process is all over, when the body is in the ground or an urn, people stop talking about the person as if their memory is a taboo.
It has been eight years since my dad died. Eight. And people still avoid bringing him up around me. Sometimes they’ll even apologize if they mention him. If I meet someone new and mention he died, eight years ago, they say “oh I’m so sorry” and avoid saying anything ever again that may reference me having a dad.
It’s like when someone dies here, people want to pretend they never lived.
I’ve never understood this sort of culture, because on my mom’s side, we’ve always been super open about death. When a family member dies, we stand up by their body at the wake and tell lively stories about them. People laugh loudly and cry freely and share the most noble and most hilariously embarrassing moments they hold dear to them with the person we lost.
At the house we eat all day, but we can never eat enough, because more and more people bring more and cook more. We drink, and we even play instruments and sing, and we tell more stories.
And we tell the children what death means. And we don’t stop talking about the person once they’re in the ground.
If I miss them, I can message a family member and share a memory and feel better again.
So it always astounds me when someone asks me about my parents, and the way I watch them absolutely clam up when I say my dad died when I was in high school. I see in their eyes the way they silently make a note to never bring him up again.
Of course, if I ASKED them not to, that’d be one thing.
But I can’t ignore that we live largely in a society where death is a secret thing. A scary and inappropriate topic that happens behind closed doors. A dirty fact of life that we deal with as quickly as possible and can’t wait to wash our hands of.
I think it makes it harder for everyone. I hate that I feel I can’t bring up my own father, who raised me for seventeen years, without making Polite Company visibly uncomfortable.
Death is part of life. It’s going to happen to all of us, and I’m grateful to know that when it eventually happens to me, my family will laugh and cry and sing and eat my favorite food and drink my favorite drinks and tell embarrassing stories about me and my memory will stay with them because they’ll never lock it away in some secret little drawer deemed impolite and scary and dark.
There are so many cultures that process death in much healthier ways, and I’m not saying we should take heir traditions, but I think we should follow their example.
As it is, death is an isolating experience. We need to start talking about it.
Death isn’t evil, or inherently bad, or mysterious. It just happens. And it hurts. And it’s hard and sad and difficult to navigate. But all of those things are better managed when we talk and remember.
Change of plans. Probably best that my local spirit shrine
wait until the spring anyway. My amazing wife came up with a better idea.
I was born in the suburbs of Chicago, but Michigan will
always be home to me. When I was a kid we had two homes. No, we weren’t rich,
per-se. We were certainly better off than a lot of people, but it was a
testament to the power of solidarity that at one time the American middle-class
could afford a summer home. My grandmother, who came over from Poland as a
little girl, worked for thirty years at General Foods in Chicago. No college
degree, a woman alone in the workforce, but they had a union. The union
demanded that the workers got as much of their fair share as possible. Can you
imagine? I’m glad for the advances in civil rights this country has made, but
racism and sexism are still rampant, and we have lost so much in terms of
worker rights. But I digress.
Our second home was in a place called Sister Lakes. I still
dream about it. Those endless summers spent swimming in the lake. I never knew
how lucky I was.
But my grandmother, a woman who based her identity on work,
died shortly after her retirement. With the pension gone, my mom worked three
jobs to try and keep what we had. A losing battle. She wore herself down to a
nub. Unable to work anymore, she sold the house in Illinois and retired to our
home in Michigan.
I resented it so much at the time. Moving from the city,
after going to one of the largest high schools in the state of Illinois, to a
high school with only three-hundred students. That was a culture shock. I’m
glad for it now, because I can see both perspectives. I know why people in
rural areas think the way they do and I appreciate the more cosmopolitan attitude
of the city. I can talk to people with different backgrounds and relate to
their struggles.
I ended up living in Michigan for twenty years, most of it
in Kalamazoo. Even that far inland, one thing, one power, one spirit remained a
constant—Lake Michigan. I imagine people who live near an ocean understand what
I mean. You seldom look at it, don’t even know it when you’re under its domain,
but you feel it. It has gravity. It effects the weather and the seasons and the
air you breathe. Only the gods themselves rival its power and influence.
A strange thing happened when I moved to Indianapolis a
decade ago. I was never a navigator and always had a piss-poor sense of
direction. But as soon as I moved to Indianapolis, I always knew which way was
North. I could feel the gravity. My blood called out to it. I soon realized
that I always had a sense which way Lake Michigan lies.
Maybe I’m too big for my britches. Maybe I shouldn’t be
trying to build a relationship with a spirit so powerful right now. Yet I feel like
the Lake is family. One of my ancestors. My grandmother bought that house
because all of her friends and family bought houses in Michigan if they
could. So maybe it is family. Maybe this is the bridge for me, the link between
ancestor veneration and the spirits of the land.
Next Sunday, my wife and I will drive to Lake Michigan and
bottle up some of that water so we always have it near. There will be a ritual.
I don’t know what it will be yet. All I know is that as I sit here and write this,
tears flowing down my face, is that I want to go home.
In some ways, writing a book is like a waking dream. You carry it around with you for so long. The process takes months, sometimes years, and completion always seems out of reach. It’s a long hard slog.
I am so ecstatic right now because I just received the artwork for my upcoming book – Emergent Magick: Rebuilding Our Tribes Through Ritual and Meaning.
Much love for the magnificent Clinton “Toast” Burkhart for all his hard work creating this lovely art.
he’s finished! i made this clay statue of Sobek out of sculpey and acrylic paint. there is a core of aluminum inside the torso to make baking more even, and the crown is 3 separate parts glued together, and then glued on top of his head. on the underside is his name painted in hieroglyphics. i wiped away the paint partially after applying it to get a sort of worn look to it, and i may spray it with a glossy finish to give it the illusion of a fired-clay piece. after finishing it i had a short dedication ritual where i let it waft in some frankincense and said a few short words.
