What About the Body?

by William G. Hoy

Undoubtedly, most readers know my perspective on the role of the body in the funeral service; whether in an open casket or a closed one, I want the body present. Therefore, it probably does not surprise most readers that in my Medical Humanities 4372 course, End-of-Life and Bereavement in Health Care, we spend part of several class discussions talking about the body’s role after death. Because these students are mostly pre-med or other pre-health tracks (pre-nursing, pre-pharmacy, pre-physical therapy, etc.) they think a lot about “bodies” in general; by the time they get to my course, they have almost always had anatomy, physiology, and pathophysiology in addition to the usual courses in biology and biochemistry. Let’s just say that for them, they have already learned a lot about how bodies work, how the “works” get fouled up, and what happens when they stop working altogether. Through video and conversation together, we explore the diversity of ways people around the world face the reality of what to do with their dead.

Grant Linnell, is one of these bright, highly motivated, thoughtful students who grew up in Spokane, Washington. In the students’ final exam this semester, I asked them to reflect on what part of our discussion of funerals they found most “challenging” to their previous perspective about funerals and to their own family or cultural customs. Here (with Grant’s permission) is his response:
 
“The anchor that I have found most challenging personally and to the culture within my family is the anchor of the presence of the body. My family and culture has never emphasized this aspect of funerals. Many of my own family members even find this tradition disturbing and unappealing. However, learning about the importance of the body at the funeral not only as an expression of culture but also with its importance in the grieving process has been influential on my perspective. This anchor has challenged me in acknowledging the importance of this custom that I found mostly outdated before. Thinking deeply and understanding this subject has influenced me to push myself and my family members toward keeping this funeral tradition” (G. Linnell, final exam response, Baylor University MH 4372, 12 December 2017).
 
Grant’s changing perspective actually grew out of our class discussions, the students’ readings, and his work on his own “funeral project.” To help these pre-meds grow in their own self-awareness about death and to help them focus on what survivors most need when a person dies, I require students to interview family, roommates, and friends, take stock of their own cultural customs, consider the vast array of memorial options we have discussed, and then develop a plan for their own memorial arrangements in the event they were to die while in college.
 
In his funeral project, Grant wrote that his family custom (and parents’ preference) would be for the casket to not be open during the funeral even if it was present because, in Grant’s words, “they want me to be remembered as I was before I died.” He continues: “Out of respect for my parents’ wishes, my funeral would have a closed casket during the ceremony. I think that this choice along with the option of a visitation of my body, is a reflection of compromise and wanting to honor my family. This is important for me as I understand the significance of having the body present at the service. Having the body present also signifies the resurrection of the body, and that death is not the end of the story, reflecting an important part of my Christian heritage. I believe that giving people the option to visit my body prior to the funeral if they choose to do so is the best way to honor my body after I am dead” (G. Linnell, “My funeral plan, Baylor University MH 4372, 27 November 2017, pp. 7-8).
 
For many years, my area of scholarly interest has been in better understanding the role the body plays in funeral rituals around the world and in history. Groups have developed myriad methods of moving and memorializing their dead. Whether Tibetan sky burials, Hindu cremations at Varanasi, or the traditional bearing of the body the “last mile of the way” in African American Baptist funerals, the body’s role is central to funeral rites around the world. The separation of the body from the ceremony, as has become the norm in many North American white middle to upper income families, is not a “return to a simpler time;” it is, in fact, a departure from cultural history. While embalming and viewing of the cosmetized corpse are not universal, the dead body’s dignified presence in funeral rituals is an undisputable historical fact. When the body is moved to its final rest relatively quickly as in Islam, Judaism, Tibetan Buddhism, and Hinduism, it is actually accompanied by even more elaborate rituals than those practiced by people who, like my family, do the whole traditional-calling-hours-at-the-funeral-home-thing.
 
Historical precedent does not justify continued practice; we quit the practice of bloodletting, for example, quite a while ago. Nevertheless, a custom that prevails for millennia needs to be examined carefully for what factors might justify and explain its continuance from one generation to another. Clearly, I have spent more thinking time pondering this whole concept than most people; here are a few of the reasons I think partially explain why humans of all cultures and ethnicities have kept the body as part of its memorial ceremonies.
 
First, the body’s presence makes the fact of death far more real. While a large photo at the front of the room puts the focus squarely on the deceased, it may do less to help us acknowledge the changed set of circumstances that has gathered us in this place at this time. Most of us do not show up to our faith community’s gathering place on Tuesday morning at 10 except for one purpose: somebody died. In a culture that has created dozens of euphemisms for dead (passed away, gone to glory, stepped into the great beyond, etc.), we are perhaps in need of reminding that death is not optional for the human species; the mortality rate continues to hover around 100%.
 
The data on the value to the grief process of seeing the body is clouded by the scarcity of studies and their relatively small size. Nevertheless, the studies that have been conducted generally point to the value of seeing the body and this importance becomes greater in unexpected deaths. Moreover, the written perspectives of clinical scholars in the bereavement field such as J. William Worden, Therese Rando, and the late Catherine Sanders are unequivocal in supporting the role of funerals with bodies present and available (Hoy, 2013).
 
Second, the body’s presence reminds us that death is both an event and a process for mourners. We record an official date and time of death on vital records like the death certificate. However, the moment of death is actually much harder to pinpoint than this documentary requirement demands; the cardiovascular and neurological systems actually shut down at different rates. Even more than this, however, is that for family and friends, death is a process as we psychologically relinquish our bonds with the physicality of our loved ones. This is not done as a one-step process, evidenced by the widower who refers to his now-deceased wife in the present tense for hours or even days following her death. As Arnold van Gennep (1960/1909) first explained, ritual invokes the process of liminality, a threshold, if you will, when we are at least in the minds of those who love us, neither fully alive nor fully dead.
 
Third, the body reminds us that the life we celebrate at memorial ceremonies was an embodied life. We are not ethereal spirits floating around, volunteering at hospice, working at our careers, and rearing our children. We are flesh-and-blood vessels of those spiritual tasks. If it were not so, we would simply dispose of our dead like we do any other worn out items or leftover trash; we would simply haul our dead to the city dump. It is fascinating to me that in studying more than 150 cultural groups on all six inhabited continents over an historical span of more than 10,000 years, I have yet to find a group who dealt with its dead in any such cavalier way.
 
Though not Roman Catholic myself, I find the faith practices around funerals to be theologically informative for my rather free-spirited church ways; Baptists sometimes remark that we are not part of organized religion but rather disorganized religion. In its official document for U.S. and Canadian Catholics, The Order of Christian Funerals, the Roman Catholic Church (1989) says these words:
 
“The Christian faithful are unequivocally confronted by the mystery of life and death when they are faced with the presence of the body of one who has died. Moreover, the body which lies in death naturally recalls the personal story of the faith, the loving family bonds, the friendships, and the words and acts of kindness of the deceased person. Indeed, the human body is inextricably associated with the human person, which acts and is experienced by others through that body. It is the body whose hands clothed the poor and embraced the sorrowing” (§ 411).
 
Around the world, humans have found diverse ways to deal with their dead but in summary, no cultural group ignores their dead (except for some white North Americans mentioned above). The presence of the body, the act of going the full distance with our dead, and the physical act of committing their remains to the fire, sky, water, or earth seem vital to the transition of seeing our dead transformed from living presence to living memory. Hogue (2006) pointed out, “Rites of passage, including funerals, are ways we human beings navigate radical changes in life and activities by which we mark our journeys with God and with each other. I (argue) that the funeral assists both the living and the deceased in consolidating the experiences of the past, including loss. Funerals help us mortals move into a new future with new relationships established between the living and the dead” (p. 3)
 
 
References
 
Catholic Church. (1989). Order of Christian funerals. Prepared by the International Commission on English in the Liturgy, a joint commission of the Catholic Bishops’ Conferences. New York, NY: Catholic Book Publishing Corporation.
 
Catholic Church. (1997). Order of Christian funerals: Appendix—cremation. Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications.
 
Hogue, D. A. (2006). Whose rite is it, anyway: liminality and the work of the Christian funeral. Liturgy, 21(1), 3–10.
 
Hoy, W.G. (2013). Do funerals matter? The purposes and practices of death rituals in global perspective. New York, NY: Routledge.
 
van Gennep, A. (1960). The rites of passage (M. B. Vizedom & G. L. Caffee, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press (original work published 1909).
 
The Author: For more than three decades, William G. Hoy has been counseling with the bereaved, supporting the dying and their families, and teaching colleagues how to provide effective care. After a career in congregation, hospice, and educational resource practice, he now holds a full-time teaching appointment as Clinical Professor of Medical Humanities at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.