Dealing With The Dead
Dealing with the dead is a simple way of putting it, but coming to terms with how our loved ones are prepared and buried is something that no one wants to think about. Although I’d like to be involved in the process of preparing my loved ones for burial, I think it’s a moral dilemma on whether or not I’d be able to push a button and cremate my loved ones. I suppose after learning more about the embalming process it can certainly seem like the better of the two, but it makes me really uncomfortable to even think about putting my loved one in the ground, let alone sending them into a fiery pit of darkness for the rest of eternity.
Caitlin Doughty touches upon working in a crematorium and the emotional baggage that comes with that. She explained, “it becomes just a reality of your workplace because if you really took it in, in the sense of thinking, ah this is the dust of a man who is no longer here, we are all mortal.” Doughty believes that humanizing the crematorium industry is important because it’s just as sacred as anything else involving a dead loved one. While she’s working and she finds ashes on her body she recognizes that she has the ashes of someone who was just alive and someone who probably had a purpose-filled life. It’s difficult to handle that emotionally but it’s important to recognize that as human beings, appreciating the cremation of a body is really important. Doughty does this process alone. She sends strange, decomposing bodies through the cremation process alone. That is something that needs to change. Just as if we were following the process of preparing a body for burial and viewing, we should be more involved in the cremation and burial of bodies as well.
After exploring the three pieces involving embalming, cremation, and fast food production it has truly changed my perspective on the world around me. Although in a few months when I have moved this out of my point of view and don’t remember, I feel as though these things stick with me and will stick with me for the rest of my life. Regarding embalming, Mitford spoke a lot about hidden funeral costs, unnecessary procedures, and ultimately the sketchy added labor hours of the mortician. One thing that didn’t surprise me was that these costs would be there. Mitford explains,” This is coupled with an additional forty hours of service required by members of other local allied professions, including the work of the cemeteries, newspapers, and of course, the most important of all, the service of your clergyman. The 120 hours of labor are the basic value on which the cost of funerals rests.” (Mitford 42) Although some costs are placed there to hike up the bill, the cost of a funeral is exactly what I’d expect from Mitford’s description. A overall pricy and long process. Similarly, Michael Pollan when speaking about the preparation of fast food throughout the country. I already knew that McDonald’s wasn’t the healthiest or generally safest food to consume because of additives, poor preparation, and overall nutritional facts, but what surprised me was that fact that chemicals that could potentially kill if take in high quantities are involved in the preparation of McDonald’s food. Pollan writes, “ TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e, lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food: It can comprise no more than 0.02 percent of the oil in a nugget. Which is probably just as well, considering that ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause ‘ nausea vomiting, ringing of the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation and collapse.” (Pollan 114)
(Note: An hour was spent on this)
