Emily Stuart: Graveyards

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I’ve never understood why we bury the dead. Why do we care so much about a cold pile of decomposing tissues and organs that we literally dress it up, put valuable jewelry on it, and make it look less dead just to bury it in the ground on a creepy stretch of land reserved only for putting bodies in the ground. Additionally, we buy flowers, expensive caskets (so the dead body won’t be eaten by other things… even though its dead), a tombstone (to mark the location of your loved ones rotting flesh), and hire grave keepers to preserve and honor the dead. We also hold weird rituals and traditions such as wearing black, holding our breath in a cemetery, and not walking or dancing on graves. And that’s just the western world.

So you see, I find funerals very strange, and the graveyards themselves even stranger. Graveyards are typically are accredited a heightened sense of supernatural, like a portal between the land of the living and the afterlife, where you can maintain a connection with the loved one that was buried there. I really don’t understand this. The thing you put in the grave is not a person, not a soul. It was a pile of decomposing flesh. Yet, our rituals have caused these places to become scared—holy ground.

As I drive past cemeteries I think of the countless families, money and time put into maintaining this “resting place” for the dead and I wonder why we are so focused on this life, when another more beautiful one lies beyond the pointless death rituals our culture holds. Vanities of vanities; all things are meaningless under the sun.