In my hometown, funerals mean a lot. When my usual work day ends, and there is a case to be made that it actually never ends, and I come home to my family, my grandmother usually briefs me on the recent deaths in Tešanj. From time to time I am expected to attend the funeral and I never feel reluctance about going because to me funerals are essential to life. Last week I also attend one and it got me thinking.
Only when we put text into context, and pictures into adequate frameworks, we can fully grasp the immense importance of births and deaths since those two provide temporal brackets to something that would lose all meaning without them. That is probably one of the underlying reasons for the obligation defined by many religions for people to attend both ceremonies marking the advent of life and it’s worldly commemoration. But what are we really remembering on funerals? It is not the person, he/she is nothing but the trigger, for we are all contemplating the passing of time and our own transience, as we are burying our own inflated egos. So it should be at least.
A couple of years ago my father’s uncle passed away. We shared a first and last name and someone took a picture of me standing next to his grave where his name was clearly visible. I lost the file somehow but I vividly remember forcing myself to take my lesson from this moment in time. I remember a clear thought crossing my mind: all that we ever do for us alone, is gone when we die, but the only remaining thing after us is that which we do for others.
It was not long after that thought that I figured out that pretty much everyone worth quoting came up with the same thought only all of them formulated it better and in a more elegant fashion, however, by scrolling through those quotes I came across an author who was previously unknown to me. John Donne was an English poet, satirist, lawyer and a cleric in the Church of England. He famously wrote “All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and His hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.” It was this quote that drew me to read more of him, and I have yet to stop.
On the other side of the globe it was Ali ibn Abu Talib, the nephew of the prophet Muhammad (p.b.u.h.) who said that all dry eyes come from hard hearts, and that hardness comes from a lot of sins, sins are from forgetting death, and that forgetfulness is from love of this world, and that love is the head of all evils. Therefore attending funerals seems to be the cure for all the mentioned facts but it has to be meaningful, thoughtful and contemplative. Even a dog can be present at a funeral, by standing around the grave, but it takes presence of mind to accomplish any good of this exercise.
Finally, the title of this article is also taken from John Donne. In one poem he acknowledges that death is the killer of all pride and vanity since all die and go to dust equally, but he fears that this will make death proud and announces a new world of eternal life in the hereafter with his brilliant conclusion:
“One short sleep past, we wake eternally, And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.”