A death in the family...

Last week, my grandmother passed away. I know everyone's initial response is to say something like "oh, I'm so sorry to hear that..." or to offer a hug, but I don't really understand the pleasantries involved with death. I find them awkward, strange and usually forced. I don't like the fact that when someone dies, it is often made out to seem shockingly tragic or overly dramatic. All in all, I find the general human response to death to be significantly more disturbing than the actual death itself. Any time I have experienced the death of someone close, I generally see it a natural part of life but maybe I'm weird, I have no idea. I should also mention that I don't attend funerals as I find that dealing with other people’s emotions is significantly more difficult than dealing with my own but I may be a robot so… I suppose I was lucky as my parents were quite logical about the entire thing...we even ended up having a chat about the importance of the whole DNR thing as the family had to make the call on removing my grandma from her life support. The whole event got me thinking about the whole process people experience when someone close dies...and then I thought about the purpose of graveyards. As I've mentioned before, I don't really get the concept of cemeteries...what does burying someone in the ground and then occasionally visiting the site have to do with anything? Is it supposed to jog our memory of the person? Trigger emotions? Give you a depressing place to go cry when your life sucks? What is the actual purpose of a grave site? Do we actually need a grave to elicit our true feelings towards someone we knew? I just don't get what burying a loved one (or anyone for that matter…) is supposed to accomplish...we used to have epic burials with fires and monuments and singing and celebration...now we get slowly lowered into a perfectly dug hole in the ground, preferably on a cold, windy, and possibly rainy day, for added dramatic effect. What's the point? It's not like your uncle Dave really LOVED Oak Bay Cemetery and begged the family to be buried there...so why do it? Is it because that's what people do and we're creatures of habit? It doesn't seem like most people even know anymore. When I lived in Japan, I had the pleasure of experiencing an entire year of holidays that I didn't even know existed. I was pumped...new rituals...let's see what you've got Japan! But often, I was sadly disappointed...when I would ask (in poorly formed half-english, half-Japanese sentences) why people were celebrating a particular holiday, a lot of people didn't even know. To me, it's mind-boggling to not know EXACTLY why you go out and buy a specially made (and expensive…) foot-long maki sushi and eat then whole thing while facing east. Or why you throw beans in the corners of your house on a certain day. Or why you spend hundreds of dollars on a huge broom-cornucopia looking kind of thing that gives you better luck depending on its size. Why would anyone do those things without fully understanding why they're doing them? Habit? Kind of like burying people...if the real reason is lost, why continue to do it at all? Why continue to perform rituals, as the band Against Me! so bluntly put, "...until the meaning has become an imitation of itself, an impression of an original defeats the f****** purpose"? Maybe I'm missing something but it doesn't make much sense to me. I suppose we are some strange creatures and the entire burial ritual actually meant something in our past, but what does it actually mean in our current society? Luckily, my grandmother had asked to be cremated and the family was fortunate to avoid the theatrics of a routine funeral scene. I say, let them go...life is already filled with enough depressing stuff that we don't need to mark places of mourning with rituals we no longer understand. I'll remember the stuff about my grandma that I want to remember, for as long as I want to remember it, and I certainly don't need a funeral based on ancient rituals or a hole in the ground to do it. End rant…