Green Burial

In the essay “The Embalming of Mr. Jones,” (1963), Jessica Mitford is describing a procedure of embalming of a corpse. She writes that people pay a ton of money each year, but “not one in ten thousand has any idea of what actually takes place,” and it is extremely hard to find books and any information about this subject. She assumes that it must be a reason for such secrecy, and may be if people knew more about this procedure, they would not want this service after their death.

The Egyptian people were the most successful ancient civilization. For example, they created the pathway to the afterlife like passing challenges. Also, they were the ones who made the tombs with gold and jewels to show respect to one’s death. Lastly, Egyptians made Pyramids which are one of the biggest things in this world and still to this day historic landmarks.

Dead?" AlterNet. In this article, Frankie Colmane looks into how dead bodies are treated in the United State even after Mitford's expose of the funeral industry was published. The article takes both a philosophical and scientific issue with the procedure of embalming sighting proven negative effects to human beings and the environment. Colmane shows that even though people are aware of the malfeasance and misappropriations of the funeral industry following pieces like Mitford's, very little has changed. Therefore problems that have been discussed in earlier works should not be forgotten. Rather they should be continually brought up until the issue is solved. During the 1800s, embalming became common practice because the dead family member would lie in state within the home for a period of days or weeks until it would be buried (Colmane 2010). The article shows the duplicity such as when "funeral directors were arguing forcefully against charges that their mediation between the living and the dead translated into social obstruction that barred the stricken from facing death with maturity, realism, and honest" (page 2). This article will be used to illustrate that things have not changed with funereal practices despite the publication of Mitford's essay.

Purpose: To inform readers about human composting as an eco-friendly alternative to traditional burials, while acknowledging social and religious resistance. Subject (what we’re

As I searched for an editorial to write on, the Op-Ed, “What Our Cells Teach Us About a ‘Natural’ Death,” immediately caught my eye. It may have been due to recent events that left death on my mind, or the alien combination of ‘natural’ and ‘death’. Nonetheless, Warraich’s piece snagged my attention. His article provides an interesting interpretation of death and human relations towards the sore subject, and gives a sound argument to support it.

No one can escape death. It’s one of so few unavoidable certainties in our lives and has held an important position in every human culture since time immemorial. Of course, this position has is different from culture to culture, and shifts over time. This is particularly evident in western culture. The shift is discussed at length in two essays: “Behind the Formaldehyde Curtain” by Jessica Mitford, and ‘The Fear of Dying’ by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Both explore different aspects of these themes – Mitford’s essay being deconstruction of a the uniquely North American process of embalming, and Kübler-Ross’ being an indictment of the clinical depersonalization of contemporary western attitudes toward death. Each utilize many different tools as writers, such as rhetorical modes. Rhetorical modes they share are exemplification, description, and compare-and-contrast.

With the graveyards filled to capacity, some resorted to throwing their dead into the dark waters of the Rhone. Eventually, mass graves were dug and provided a place to dump the corpses. In London, such burial pits sometimes proved inadequate to receive the dead, with bodies overflowing their layered stacks within the trenches. (684)

Some of the main topics in a large number of poems are life, death, war and love. The two poems Men in Green and Beach Burial have a similar topic of war and its effects on people. David Campbells Men in Green is about a group of Australian soldiers experiencing war in Papua New Guinea while Kenneth Slessor's Beach Burial is about the loss of life through war regardless of what side you are fighting for. Men in Green's form is a dramatic monologue whereas the structure of Beach Burial is an elegy. Similes are used frequently in Men in Green and Beach Burial regularly uses onomatopoeia and the language gets harsher as the poem goes on. Even though these two poems are both about war, there are many differences including the atmosphere, use of

A wooden marker was generally used with no identification of the deceased. “Little thought was given to marking the grave site because the gravedigger seldom expected to be able to protect and maintain the site.” In the 1840s, as people began to settle into the Dallas area, burial practices changed. These early pioneers buried their loved ones in unorganized, isolated places usually on the family’s land. Occasionally, the spot on the family farm might even be shared by a neighboring family. Family burial sites can be found all around Dallas in random places, such as the Letot, Daniel or Caruth family cemeteries. However, these sites are actually considered plots rather than cemeteries as they were not designed for perpetual care. The notion of protecting the dead was not a concern at the time and certainly not in the manner as it is

Painful as it may be, such experiences brings home the finality of death. Something deep within us demands a confrontation with death. A last look assures us that the person we loved is, indeed, gone forever.” (108) Cable finishes his essay by asking, Tim if his job ever depressed him. Tim in reply says, “No it doesn’t, and I do what I can for people and take satisfaction in enabling relatives to see their loved ones as they were in real life.” (108) After reading this essay I feel as though sometimes we don’t understand death so therefore we do not talk much about it. By reading about what goes on after your loved one dies and is sent to these places to be prepared and ready for burial, it helps to understand why morticians and funeral directors do what they do. Knowing that someone enjoys taking the responsibility in providing that comfort in a sorrowful time makes me appreciate these people in these occupations a bit

the graveyard of her brother, when she steals: The Gravediggers Handbook, Death tells us the

We usually think of crypts as graves or coded messages, similar to the letter in Have His Carcasse.  The notion of a crypt, however, contains a deeper psychological meaning.   Crypts deal with the ideas of introjection and incorporation.  These concepts identify the alternative ways in which the psyche handles trauma.  When the psyche introjects a trauma, the trauma melds into the subconscious.  If the psyche successfully assimilates the trauma, it unites with the rest of the psyche, much like a cube of ice (the trauma) melting in a glass of water (the psyche).  Incorporation occurs when trauma embeds itself into the psyche, but remains separate and, therefore, separable.  If we return to the idea of the psyche as a glass of water, incorporation resembles what happens when a Ping-Pong ball (the trauma) drops into a glass of water.  The ball remains a lump in the psyche. Jacques Derrida wrote about the crypt “sealing the loss of the object, but also marking the refusal to mourn . . . I pretend to keep the dead alive, intact, safe (save) inside me, but it is only to refuse, in a necessarily equivocal way, to love the dead as a living part of me, dead save in me, through the process of introjection, as happens in so-called normal mourning” (“Foreword” 17). The tomb stands then as an incorporation of the trauma of death.  We physically mark the place of rest as a mirror of our inability to assimilate that trauma

Today the society is looking for ways to ease life and to find solutions for problems which oppress our lives and make it hard to live through. Because of many reasons, the traditional burials in this century are becoming a problem. (Prothero,2001). The fact that they cover a lot of land to build cemeteries and other things that are attached to these traditional burials is enough for us to search for a practical solution. About a century ago the term "cremation" was unknown to many people. It is believed that it began to be practiced during the early Stone Age and still exists today. Since that time cremations have been made all

Burial has long been considered an important component of death; it is the mourners’ final encounter with the recognizable, substantial body of the deceased. Every culture has to determine how to deal with the physical remains of the dead, to find a way to honour their memory, and to go on living in a society that is now deprived of one of its members. Burial traditions and practices have developed throughout history and around the world to meet this human need. This paper will examine Jewish death and burial practices from the Old Testament, the Gospels, and other New Testament accounts, as well as archaeological evidence from first century Palestine; this evidence, when compared to recent arguments against the burial of

Memory makes us. It is, to an extent, a collection of unique and personal experiences that we, as individuals, have amassed over our lifetime. It is what connects us to our past and what shapes our present and the future. If we are unable remember the what, when, where, and who of our everyday lives, our level of functioning would be greatly impacted. Memory is defined as or recognized as the “sum or total of what we remember.” Memory provides us the ability to learn and adjust to or from prior experiences. In addition, memory or our ability to remember plays an integral role in the building and sustaining of relationships. Additionally, memory is also a process; it is how we internalize and store our external environment and experiences. It entails the capacity to remember past experiences, and the process of recalling previous experiences, information, impressions, habits and skills to awareness. It is the storage of materials learned and/or retained from our experiences. This fact is demonstrated by the modification, adjustment and/or adaptation of structure or behavior. Furthermore, we as individuals, envision thoughts and ideas of the present through short-term memory, or in our working memory, we warehouse past experiences and learned values in long-term memory, also referred to as episodic or semantic memory. Most importantly, memory is malleable and it is intimately linked to our sense of identity and where we believe we belong in the world.