Peoples attachment to cadavers?

[dmarker]

I've always found the practice of pre-funeral viewings to be barbaric. At my great-grandmother's funeral I kept hearing my relatives commenting on her appearance.

"Doesn't she look great? I think they did a wonderful job on her."

Ummm...no. She looks dead, and she smells like formaldehyde to boot.

I've actually been at viewings where people posed for photographs in front of the open casket. That's just plain bizarre to me.

Speaking of postmortem photography, check out this creepy archive.

I noticed that most of the pictures are of children and babies. Child mortality was pretty high in those days and I bet many parents had pictures of children who didn't make it.

 

[AtheistArchon]

- It's a throwback to Superstitious Man (arguably not too distant from Modern Man, I admit). For all the years we knew the person, we knew the body; the body spoke, interacted with us, and contained the personhood of the deceased. We instinctively compare personhood to the body, makes perfect sense to me.

- For example, these are "my hands". I control them, they perform various tasks, and a person helped or harmed by them will absolutely connect my personhood with the hands that did the work that made the impression. We feel with our bodies, we measure with our bodies, and naturally, we think with them as well. It's kind of hard to grasp that the dead body no longer contains the person we loved... especically when it's made up to look alive.

- I'll be creamated. I don't want my ashes hanging around in an urn either, tell the mortician to dispose of them and be done with it.

 

[Bubbles]

- It's a throwback to Superstitious Man (arguably not too distant from Modern Man, I admit). For all the years we knew the person, we knew the body; the body spoke, interacted with us, and contained the personhood of the deceased. We instinctively compare personhood to the body, makes perfect sense to me.

- For example, these are "my hands". I control them, they perform various tasks, and a person helped or harmed by them will absolutely connect my personhood with the hands that did the work that made the impression. We feel with our bodies, we measure with our bodies, and naturally, we think with them as well. It's kind of hard to grasp that the dead body no longer contains the person we loved... especically when it's made up to look alive.

- I'll be creamated. I don't want my ashes hanging around in an urn either, tell the mortician to dispose of them and be done with it.

Actually, that sounds more like modern materialism than ancient superstition to me.

I think that there is a destinction to be made between things like celebrity funerals, carrying of relics, etc. and going to the funeral or keeping a possesion of a loved one. The psychological need that the two actions fulfill is, I think, very different.

 

[Dragonrock]

I always thought that the time between the viewing and the burial was to give the person time to wake up in case they weren't dead. I thought that was where the term "wake" came from when it was used to refer to the drunken bash that the Irish like to throw whenever someone kicked the bucket.

 

[daenku32]

Because dead can't say: "What did I supposedly say?"

Or

"Why are YOU here?"