It is but natural if death evokes fear of disruption in our lives, but it is a reality that confronts everyone sooner or later, with the loss of a dear one or with threat to our own lives. Down the ages and across the societies there have been efforts to assist individuals and families to find meaning in death so as to secure social stability. However, the confrontation and imposition of cultures in a globalized world do not always make this objective easy for every individual who has to face death, or for others who have to bear its consequences.
There has been much interest among social scientists in the West since the 1950s in analyzing the phenomenon of death and its social impact. Among these prominent social scientists are Edgar Morin, Alberto Tenenti, H. Feifell, Geoffrey Gorer. Gorer, a British sociologist published a seminal essay entitled “The Pornography of Death”, motivated by his own personal experiences, starting with the death of his father who was among the thousand and more passengers of Lusitania, a liner that was sunk by a German submarine on 7 May 2015. Gorer remembered how people kept a studied silence in his presence and treated him with special attention. But when he told his teacher one day that he could no longer look at flowers or relax, the teacher shot back in reprehension and asked him to stop being morbid.
In 1961, his elder brother Pierre, a renowned doctor, developed a cancer. He was not told about it; only his wife was informed. But she had grown accustomed to getting annoyed by her husband´s complaints about his health. This probably increased his depressions and led to his death much faster than expected. The body was then cleaned and dressed by professional personnel who then invited the family members to see “how lovely he looked”, almost as if he had come alive. The American way of handling the dead did not enthuse the family of British intellectuals.
The body was cremated, but the widow did not attend the Anglican religious funeral service and refused to be present during the cremation. She was educated to hide her feelings in public. As a result, others were left with no opportunity to convey their condolences, or even to communicate with her to avoid upsetting her. In a short time she could no longer bear the isolation and entered a severe depression. This led Gorer to undertake his study about the modern taboo about bereavement in the West.
A growing preference for cremation in the West seems to be in keeping with its exaggerated rationality, avoiding thereby the need of visiting a cemetery or burial space, partly as an expression of disbelief about afterlife, but also as a way to get on with the routine of life without stopping to ruminate over the loss. This is a major change from the public attitudes in the early western modernity, when burials were taken out of the Church precincts into cemeteries in the mid-19th century. Some of these were turned into veritable open air museums with family tombs, as an expression of the bourgeois classes seeking to assert their new earned wealth and status, but also their concern for health and hygiene, since traditional burials inside the Churches were endangering the health of the faithful who frequented them for rituals.
The Christians in Goa have accompanied the changing mentality of the West, though at their own pace. The period of bereavement is still largely respected, and it is not uncommon in the rural areas to hear a close relative of the deceased wailing in the early hours of the day break during weeks following the death. It is believed that at the start of the day, a bereaving person feels with greater intensity the loss and absence of a dear one.
The Hindu community of Goa always maintained its custom of cremation at a musundi (cremation site) using firewood, and since more recently in a crematorium with a furnace. I can recall several deaths since my childhood till more recent years. The earliest was a classmate Basilio Pinto, at the age of 7. It convinced me that I was living on borrowed time and should not waste any of it. This and other cases have remained etched in my memory and helped my personal growth, correcting some of my attitudes in life and making it more meaningful for myself and useful to others. In this lies the dialectic of life and death.
There can be situations that may require a life sacrifice, in solidarity with fellow human beings. Such brave cases are recorded in the Nazi concentration camps where some individuals offered their lives to save some others from gas chambers. For a Hindu guided by Bhagvad Gita it is the nishkama karma (actions that do not hanker for results at all costs) that prepares for moksha, ensuring a death without agony.
(Teotonio R. de Souza is the founder-director, Xavier Centre of Historical Research, Goa (1979-1994). He presently resides in Portugal, where he is a Fellow of the Portuguese Academy of History since 1983, and retired as Professor and Head of the Department of History, Universidade Lusófona. Tweets @ramkamat)
