Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

The psychoanalyst Otto Rank declared modern love a religious problem. As we grow increasingly secular and move away from the towns where we were born, we can no longer use religion or community to confirm our meaning in the world, so we seize a love partner instead, someone to distract us from the fact of our animal existence.

We do not (and will not) have the resources to properly care for our increasing elderly population, yet we insist on medical intervention to keep them alive. To allow them to die would signal the failure of our supposedly infallible modern medical system.

The victims on these shows are played by young models and actors who are making their rounds on the CSI and Law & Order corpse circuit while waiting to get called for a pilot. They are a far cry from the majority of bodies in a funeral home—old, knotted, and wracked with years of diseases like cancer and cirrhosis of the liver.

When Siddhartha reached twenty-nine he announced his desire to explore the surrounding city. His father agreed but arranged things so that his son saw only young, healthy people engaging in young, healthy-people activities. But the gods were having none of that: they sent an old man with gray hair, missing teeth, and a limp to surprise Siddhartha,

Spending over $100 billion a year on anti-aging products as 3.1 million children under five starve to death.

Albert Camus said it best: “Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.” On the

Really though, there is never a way to leave the past behind. My poor dead witch babies came right along with me.

Looking mortality straight in the eye is no easy feat. To avoid the exercise, we choose to stay blindfolded, in the dark as to the realities of death and dying. But ignorance is not bliss, only a deeper kind of terror.

We don’t need to stop at green or natural burial. “Burial” comes from the Anglo-Saxon word birgan, “to conceal.” Not everyone wants to be concealed under the earth. I don't want to be concealed.