A healthy fear.

Watching everyone dress up on Halloween day and, later on in the evening, trot door to door to knock for candy, I can't help but think of how our culture of candy and costumes has consumed the rituals and lessons the dead used to share with us in more immediacy.

Today we are told to accept death, to fear not, to be joyful for the life we have and accepting of the mortal fate slowly snaking its way toward us. But there is something missing from this view, and it comes with the ignoring of the dead, and what dead really means. Corpses used to be an intimate part of many societies; places were set one last time at the table where cold bodies limped in their chairs and stared with sagging eyes at plates of food; pyres were built, and whole families gathered to watch and sing as they added fuel to the very flames which simmered the flesh off the bones of their loved ones, and boiled their organs one by one into ash; holes were dug out for still cadavers by hand, their bodies lowered stiffly at night, and fires lit, and dances danced, rituals full of agony and pain with masks and costumes to communicate to spirits, and smooth riverstones wept onto the ground as symbols for their immortal sadness. The dead were right there, the worms in their mouth, with their split stomachs, their roiling smells, their jaundiced eyes. The actions of grief from their relatives reflected this uncontrollable force; they tore out their hair, split their knuckles on stones, and cut open their bodies, as if out of desperation to know that they were still alive.

Not so today. Today, we have spotless crematoria which burn bodies behind walls of brick; the mouths of our graves are backhoe-dug, clean-cut and uniform; the bodies of our dead are placed into caskets, dressed up in fine clothes and embalmed against the maggots of decay before being sealed behind mahogany and lowered into the earth. We dab at the tears of our grief with powdered handkerchiefs.

So what have we lost? A healthy fear. How can we be afraid of the idea of the death if we've dressed ourselves up to reflect it in costumes of whimsy? And, if we can not be afraid of the dead, how can we listen to what they whisper to us just behind our ears?
The immediacy of death tells us continually that we are mortal; the fear of death makes us hold on to and suck out of life every last breath of morning air. As death fades away into something perfumed and well-dressed, our lives bend, too, toward apathetic room temperature. We need the extremes on both sides to remind us that death is very present, and, thus, that life is as well.