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Second, I want to plant your bodies like seeds.
There is a cemetery a couple of miles from our house that the kids find fascinating. It is on Bunker Hill Road, just off the old King’s Highway, which dates to the mid-eighteenth century. This old graveyard is one of the few places I know where you can stand for fifteen minutes and hear only natural sounds. Cars hardly ever drive by on the dirt road and there are no houses within several thousand yards. I think that the kids like the graveyard because they enjoy thinking through what death is all about. They read the gravestones carefully and think aloud about who the people might be who are buried there. We talk about the families that are buried there as if we knew them—the Howards and the Sewalls, for instance—and the relationships between the great-grandparents, the grandparents, the children, and the great-grandchildren. The bodies that are tucked in their coffins and placed snuggly in the ground there, are planted as memories and foundations for what might come in the future.

The New Testament, of course, says that the Lord will return and our bodies will be resurrected to meet him in the air. Christians have interpreted this passage literally for millenia. Medieval and Renaissance artists depicted realistic pictures of body parts emerging from the mouths of beasts, raising from the ground and the waters, and reassembling in the air on the way to the clouds. I have no such visions. But after you die, I will see your body as a planting, like a new tree, to create new life—in the natural world and also in our human and Sweeney family.

Third, I would like to let God be God.
Even if we separate the soul from the body at death, your body remains the sacred vessel (not a ‘prison,’ as some mystics have said) for your soul here on earth. It was composed out of the earth, as we know from Genesis, and to the earth it should return. Cremation takes into our hands what the earth can easily and fruitfully accomplish on its own, in its time.

An elegant woman in her 80s recently came to a talk that I gave. The subject of the talk was embodied prayer, and she was moved to introduce herself to me afterwards.

"I want to tell you a brief story," she said. "I have a very good friend who died last year. She is about my age and we have been friends for decades. I know each of her nine children, and then their children. Most of her family still lives within easy driving distance of her home.

"The day that she died, her children gathered together in her home. They were not just sad, grieving. They washed her body." At this, the woman telling me the story began to cry.

"Her nine children encircled her body and washed it, lovingly. They told stories about their mother and they laughed and they cried. Then, someone called the funeral home and the hearse came to pick her up. The children, some of them in their sixties, carried their mother to the car and as it drove away to the funeral home, they stood in the street and waved."

Somewhere, William Blake said that dying was simply like passing from one room to the next. Blake died on his deathbed, singing, his biographers say. I believe that death is like that, too. And when it happens to you, I think you will soon find yourself in song.

Please don’t worry about the mess you leave behind. I would like to be bothered with tending to it.

Copyright ©2003 by Jon Sweeney

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