Last week I visited the cemetery in Hastings to see where my paternal grandparents - Alma and Peter Bridgeman who died in 1980 and 1983 respectively - were buried. I hadn't visited for some years so it took us a while to find their plot amongst the rows and rows in the Orchard Road cemetery - or "graveyard" as my daughter, who has clearly overdosed on spooky novels, insisted on calling it.
Encountering tangible symbols of death is always a sobering experience. Many headstones commemorated people who had lost their lives in the Napier earthquake of 3rd February 1931. There were soldiers who'd died serving their country and there were far too many dead babies from long ago - including one headstone that listed six infants who'd died in six consecutive years. The casual observer can only guess at some of the tragedies that lay behind the precisely etched words.
Unsurprisingly, this visit ignited thoughts of mortality and raised the issue of whether burial or cremation is preferable. While different religious faiths and cultural belief systems have guidelines on how a deceased person's body should be processed, I like Jerry Seinfeld's take on the subject:
"People used to want a big, thick granite stone, their names carved... with a chisel. 'I was here, dammit!' Cremation is like you're trying to cover up a crime. 'Burn the body. Scatter the ashes around. As far as anyone's concerned this whole thing never happened.'"
Cremation found favour when it was feared that the world was going to run out of room in which to bury bodies. With the population explosion came the idea that we'd all eventually have to be buried standing up unless we changed our ways. The prospect of fruitlessly clawing the inside of a coffin if accidentally buried alive and the idea of worms tunnelling through rotting corpses further helped cement cremation's image as the most civilised option.
