Rituals of Death, Grief, and Connection

Photo by Yoksel 🌿 Zok on Unsplash

I first learned of the Towers of Silence as an undergrad - all those years ago - in one of Barry Michie's anthropology courses at Kansas State University. As I sat there listening to Dr. Michie describe these structures built for excarnation of human bodies after death (via vultures in many cases), with the practice’s religious and ecological connections, I probably experienced some combination of morbid curiosity and naive etic superiority. I was a 19ish year old white American male from southcentral Kansas. But what I remember most was the fascination; it was something so different from my own narrow experiences growing up.

You can experience some of that fascination via 99% Invisible’s two episodes on the topic - an appropriate listen for Memorial Day weekend, at least tangentially so. It's a wonderfully told story, if somewhat sad, laying out how a specific cultural tradition surrounding death and grief over time became beautifully integral to a complex ecological system. And how the decimation of a keystone species via economic growth, development, and power imbalances disrupted this complex ecosystem and subsequently the associated death rituals and normative ways of grieving for many in this story.

• Towers of Silence - here you’ll find the story

• Towers of Silence: Vulture Conservation - A bonus episode providing some of the nerdy ecological details.

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Many of my early memories associated with death are tied to Memorial Day. While the focus is honoring U.S. military personnel who've died while serving, for many families it's a day to decorate the graves of any family member or close friend (while still honoring those who served). Every Memorial Day my sisters and I would load into the back seat of our parents’ Chevy Caprice Classic, and we’d head down highway 54 from Cheney to the cemetery at Haviland, KS, with dad at the wheel.

While we’d decorate the graves of great grandparents and other family members, the grave of my parents’ stillborn daughter, the sister my siblings and I never got to know, always received a bit more attention, a bit more time. Over the years, my own experiences of these cemetery visits progressed from wanting to run around and climb over the headstones to eventually wondering more about who these people were, how we were connected to them, and what they meant to my parents.

After the ritual decorating, we’d spend the rest of the day with our extended family - basically my grandma’s siblings and all of their families - many of whom lived in and around Haviland and many of whom we’d initially see that morning at the cemetery. The afternoons were full of catching up while dining on the plethora of dishes and pies everyone brought; and amongst all of this was the telling of our family’s stories.

As I got older and members of my grandparent’s generation began to pass on, I started seeing the connection between our U.S. Midwest protestant funeral rituals (initially saying goodbye to someone you love in a Church with other members of your extended family, lowering them into the earth, and breaking bread together while telling stories of the departed) and our U.S. Memorial Day rituals. They’re both part of the grieving process. An individual, upon their death and through the stories we tell, begins to transition into their family’s collective ancestry, reinforced through these Memorial Day rituals. This occurs as our brains and hearts slowly adapt to the new reality without their physical presence. And as my sisters and I got older, we too began to tell stories.

At least this is what the process seems like to me.

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But for this Parsis community in India, their ability to grieve, specific to their cultural and religious traditions, has been disrupted; their brains can no longer adapt as easily to the new reality where their loved-one is no longer physically present. From their perspective, their loved ones partially remain for a longer period of time after death (years and gruesomely in some cases) - neither fully present nor fully absent. How are their brains supposed to adapt?

And if you’re too hung up on the process of excarnation to feel much empathy or see how this disrupts their grieving process, take a step back and think how strange, or even offensive, the process of embalming a loved one must seem to those unfamiliar with it. It’s always seemed a bit strange to me. And excarnation, at least as this Parsis community was able to practice it during it’s prime, was certainly more sustainable.

Not surprisingly, this has lead to a decrease in those practicing these death rituals, even as they continue struggling to address the underlying environmental issues as well as come up with alternatives to the vultures. The Towers of Silence story continues to unfold, their fate, along with the vultures, uncertain.

This is the first Memorial Day without my dad. Yet we won’t be visiting his grave or gathering with extended family. It’s a tradition that my wife, Michelle, and I haven’t maintained. Though in our case the culprit wasn’t an ecological disaster but simple physical proximity - we lived in another state away from family for the first half of our marriage. Nor did we embrace it again after moving back to Kansas, and so it’s not part of our kid’s life experiences (both of whom are now adults).

When I was younger, the absence of these ritual visits to family graves every year didn’t seem like a great loss. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve begun to wonder how this might have impacted Connor’s and Cyrus’s ability to feel connected to a greater whole as well as their past. Maybe even how they grieve. As our own stories continue to unfold, perhaps our family needs some new rituals, an alternative to the annual Memorial Day trek.