Closure?

I don't know about that. My siblings are coming to my place today. We're going to plant a tree and scatter the ashes of our parents. My father actually died in 2011, and my mother died last August, just over a year ago. I've had the ashes in the cardboard boxes from the crematories ever since. There didn't seem to be any hurry to do this. We had events for their friends and family in due time, this is just something my sister wants to do now.

 

Many people -- actually throughout history almost everyone -- are very particular about how to process corpses and honor the dead. Elaborate burials go back to the paleolithic, and probably started earlier than any surviving evidence we have found. Humans are probably not the only animals that are aware of their mortality -- elephants seem to be, and perhaps some other mammals and birds have an idea of it. But we are also almost certainly the only animals that don't actually believe they are mortal. The compulsion to believe that some sort of essence endures, and must be properly treated and honored in order to exist in comfort, is nearly universal. 

 

A strange irony is that the people who believe most fervently in an afterlife are also the most insistent that death must be deferred at all costs. They're the ones who won't allow the doctors to withdraw artificial life support from their brain dead relatives. I'm not sure what to make of this. I had the health care proxy and power of attorney for my mother, and with the full approval of my siblings our instructions were to make no heroic efforts to prolong my mother's life. No hospitalization, no artificial feeding, only measures to relieve any suffering. She had no quality of life in the end, and prolonging the mortal husk would have been pointless. But the people who most claim to believe most fervently that death is just a passage to a better state of being are precisely the people who would condemn me.

 

Perhaps you can explain it.