While coming up with our own traditional death ‘systems” and post-modern/digital death “systems” in class, I began to wonder about what other sorts of wacky death traditions people have.

Although we came up with some gosh darn wacko potential startup companies in class (shoutout to our plant a corpse company!), these definitely took the stakes and raised them even higher…

Funerals don’t necessarily have to be somber events. These memorials and traditions are heavy on quirk.

1. The last hurrah

Miriam Banks was the life of the party—even at her own funeral. When she passed away in June, her daughters honored her memory by recreating apart scenef amiliar to friends and loved ones. Instead of a coffin, the deceased sat at a table with a cigarette in her hand and her favorite beer and whiskey in front of her.

2. Highway to heaven

Billy Standley was so fond of his 1967 Electra Glide cruiser that he spent the last years of his life planning his burial on the motorcycle. When the fateful day finally arrived, a team of five embalmers prepared Standley for his final ride, mounting his body on the bike and dressing him in leather biking gear and a helmet. He led the procession to the cemetery.

3. Go out with a bump and grind

In Taiwan, some people hire strippers to appease wandering spirits and liven up the occasion. The dancers stay somewhat modestly dressed, but they are not shy about jumping on caskets or giving mourners lap dances.

4. Funeral Processions in New Orleans

In New Orleans, the dead go out in style with some jazz, dancing, and a procession that lasts into the evening.

5. The end of the road

George Swanson was buried with his Corvette in 1994. Car enthusiasts might find the Corvette’s death more tragic—the car only had 27,000 miles on its odometer.

6. The #Funeral Live Tweet

When publicist and Twitter addict Michael O’Connor Clarke died of cancer, his friend Mathew Ingram shared an online play-by-play of the memorial service. Ingram lost a few followers along the way, but Clarke’s family in Ireland appreciated the gesture.

Works Cited

Green, Amanda. “12 Strange Funerals and Funeral Traditions.” Mental Floss. N.p., 11 Jan. 2016. Web.

All images courtesy of iStock unless otherwise noted. 

Brophy describes the necessary balance in horror films between comedy and horror stating:

Caitlin Doughty is one of my new favourite YouTubers of all time. Doughty is a mortician who runs a YouTube channel dedicated to normalising death and exploring the myths and misconceptions surrounding death in Western cultures.

After releasing a Buzzfeed video discussing these myths and misconceptions, Doughty presented a TedTalk on the same subject.

For example, Doughty debunks the myth that dead bodies are contagious and potentially harmful to the living.  Doughty claims that this is completely false; our detachment from death is what led to this sort of problematic thinking. In fact, in a remote village in Indonesia, the families mummify the dead and hang out with the corpse for years to come. They take the corpse outside, bring it to breakfast, and tuck it in at night in bed with the kids. Families and friends bring the corpse snacks and talk to the corpse, because they believe that the corpse appreciates the offer and can hear the living. These corpses still function as solid members of the family and the community.

This level of intimacy with the dead, however, is non-existent in the West. The West has a broken relationship with death, which according to Doughty is a new phenomenon that occurred within the past century. In the past one hundred years, we have outsourced death and transferred the rituals from the hands of the family to the hands of professionals. Nowadays, people are either buried or they are cremated.

Even talking about death has become a sort of taboo reminiscent of the sex taboo in the earlier centuries. The trending Buzzfeed comments went along the lines of:

“I’m pretty open minded, but this is so weird”

“This girl really creeped me out”

“You’d be crazy to play with a dead person like a doll. Seriously, that lady needs to see a psychiatrist.”

According to Doughty the shocking part isn’t the troll-nature of these commenters or that people believe these things. The shocking part is just how quickly culture changes. This sentiment brings to mind the photographs we looked at in class that people would take with their dead loved ones. People wanted to remember their loved ones and paid extra money to have some proof of their fleeting existence. Even then, wakes were held in the privacy of the home. To us, it seemed weird and unsettling, but to those families it was meaningful and completely natural.

Doughty states that the death care industry is a multimillion dollar corporation that is not interested is handing the reigns back to families. To help this sink in, imagine just for a moment how painfully obscure and unnatural our funerals have become.

For example, let’s investigate chemical embalmment. Chemical embalmment swells up the skin and makes it look puffy and wax-like. All of the insides are hardened and nothing “natural” is left. The body being buried is more of a shell of the person, with the outside fully intact, while the insides are extracted and destroyed. Furthermore, the corpse is slathered with a full face of make-up and buried in an expensive article of clothing. Natural corpses, on the other hand, don’t exactly look as if they are asleep – they look dead. Still, they look natural. There is no painful shade of coral on your dead uncle’s lips combined with a tacky combover and veneers.

The most important message I took away from this TedTalk is to take the time to sit with the deceased and look after them. If someone I love passes away, then I want to be able to respect their body and take care of them on my own. This is someone who is important – not someone who is meant to be immediately carted to the funeral home or to the oven.

Brandy Vela

Brandy Vela’s bedroom is covered in Post-it notes. “You will always own a piece of my heart,” says one. “You will never be forgotten,” says another.

Vela committed suicide by putting a gun to her chest while her family begged her not to.

Cyberbullying

Works Cited

With recent developments in all technology, military technology has followed closely, producing more and more unique answers to warfare. Countries around the world are spending billions of dollars competing for military power. Some of the most sophisticated and in turn terrifying military advancements come directly from the US. The notion of fighting a war from your backyard is something truly remarkable and questionable.I personally did not think something like drone warfare existed until a few months ago. I heard about it, but I did not understand what it actually meant.  In just the last few years around two and a half thousand people were killed by drones. Despite the many advantages drone warfare adds, it remains a questionable topic due to the ease with which it can be applied, and how little needs to be sacrificed. Originally, one of its main purposes was to put a soldier in the situation that would allow him to operate without fear, which would save the life of civilians. However, this purpose fails as results showed  that hundreds upon hundreds died since U.S. military introduced drones to the warfare. This technology allows soldiers to have a wrong perception of war, in many ways trivializing the topic. You have a remote control that allows you to kill people without any connection to the aftermath. In the article Death by Robot by Robin Martinez, a robot is asked to give a dose of painkiller to a woman that suffered from two broken ribs. Although the robot is not capable of deciding whether or not a woman really needs painkillers, it still must make a decision, bringing about a problem. When we, and we definitely will, start using AI to fight our wars, the ethics of warfare will need to be entirely rewritten.

Peace,

Duka