by Bart King
The people would then take this mixture and smear it on their faces. In this way, the dead person was literally still part of the tribe. Then the living people would wash the mixture off their faces and save the water. The dead person’s relatives would then drink the water.
Is this cannibalism? I guess! Cannibalism was also practiced in the Southeast Asian islands of Java and New Guinea. For these people, being eaten wasn’t a form of punishment. It was a show of respect! If an elder member of the tribe were getting close to dying, he would be spared the indignity of a long, drawn-out illness. Instead, someone would stab him with a bamboo knife. His head would be removed. The rest of the body would be cooked and eaten by the whole tribe. But the head was reserved for the young men, who would eat the elder’s brains. Raw.
And on the nearby island of Borneo, families kept the bodies of relatives in giant jars for one year after their death! The top of the jar was sealed pretty well, but the bottom had a bamboo tube that went outside the home. This allowed the liquefied remains of the person to drain away from the house.
The Good News: After a year, the body was moved to a smaller jar and could be stored outside the home.
The Bad News: The body had to be moved to a smaller jar.
The Towers of Silence
You wash your hands before you eat. And vultures do the same thing! Except vultures don’t have hands. And they use poop instead of soap.
As you probably know, vultures eat rotting meat. But to do so, they have to stand on a dead animal’s body. Think of the germs! So to keep their feet from getting infected, vultures poop on them before perching on a corpse.
The Comforts of Home
After burial, a body doesn’t have to be lonely. In Madagascar, there is a tradition that takes place about every five years. If a living person dreams of a dead family member, it’s considered a sign to dig that relative up! In a ritual called famadihana, the body is exhumed and carried through town before being reburied. (In this way, the dead person will remain “comfortable” in the grave.)
Starting in the 1990s, India’s vulture population plummeted. The birds fell victim to a drug fed to cattle. This was a disaster for the people who used India’s “Towers of Silence.” You see, there’s a religion called Zoroastrianism that has been around since 600 BCE. Its followers do not cremate their dead, nor do they bury them in the earth.
Instead, they “bury” their dead in the sky! This is done by carting a dead body up to a high building called a Tower of Silence. Vultures descend on the corpse and eat it.
But once the vultures started disappearing, the Zoroastrians had to save dead bodies and start raising baby vultures! While they waited for the birds to grow up, they set up big mirrors (or “solar reflectors,” if you want to be fancy), which would heat up the bodies and make them decompose quickly.
Most Zoroastrians live in the city of Bombay. So, if the vulture repopulation works, people living in high-rises next to Bombay’s Towers of Silence can look out their condo windows to see vultures feasting on corpses. Just like the good old days!
Tibetans have a similar view of funerals. After a person dies, there are funeral services for three days. Then the body is cut up and placed on a mountaintop, where it awaits the attention of vultures. This process burns no fuel and requires no land.
North American Burials
Now let’s think about a body taken to a funeral home today. One of the first things that usually happens is the body gets embalmed. (This practice is most common in the United States and Canada.) To do this, two cuts are made, one in a major artery and another in a nearby vein. Then a chemical fluid containing formaldehyde, methanol, ethanol, and solvents is pumped into the body through one tube while the blood is drained out the other.
This embalming fluid slows down the decaying process, so while the body WILL still decay, it won’t happen as quickly. It’s a modern mummy! Because the embalming fluid is dyed red, it gives the look of life back to the dead. But oddly, while embalming fluid gives the dead body the appearance of life, it is very toxic for anything that’s actually alive!
That’s only the start, though. Preparing a dead body for a traditional coffin burial takes a lot of work. For example, a dead person’s jaw tends to hang open. You can sew the jaws together with heavy thread. And a person’s eyeballs tend to shrink after death. So to give the eyelids their usual “full” look, funeral home workers tuck little cotton balls under them. Nice.
Also, funeral home professionals are in charge of getting all the poop, urine, and undigested food out of the body. This involves sticking a vacuum tube into the body and, uh, oh dear. Anyway, then embalming fluid is pumped into the stomach, intestines, and bladder. It will stay there for a while, but as the body decomposes, the fluid leaks out of the coffin and into the ground.
As for coffins, those that were made of wood were once the standard model. It wasn’t uncommon back in the day for a tall corpse to get stuffed unceremoniously into a standard-size pine coffin. What’s that, the feet won’t fit? They will after you break the dead body’s ankles and fold the feet in sideways! Today’s coffins come in a range of sizes (thank goodness!) and materials, ranging from metal to cardboard. And since even Costco carries caskets (really!), people have a wide range of shopping options.
But burial is only one option! Cremating, or burning, a body is another ancient tradition that’s been gaining popularity in modern times. In fact, about a third of Americans and half of all Canadians choose to be cremated.
Falling Off the Horse
While we’re used to the idea of burying bodies in cemeteries, one Mongol tradition worked this way: After the funeral was held, the person’s body was put on horseback. The funeral crowd then followed the horse until the body fell off, and that spot was where the person was buried.
In India, open-air funeral pyres are still common, but in places like the United States, high-tech ovens do the heavy lifting. First, the cremation oven heats up to as high as 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s darned hot, but it will still take anywhere from ninety minutes to three hours for the body to be incinerated to seven pounds of ashes. People have found a number of ways to store or return these ashes to nature. One company attaches the ashes to a large biodegradable balloon that drifts away on the wind.
But for some people, cremation raises concerns about global warming and air pollution. Consider India, where bodies are traditionally burned with wood. Since India will soon be the world’s most populated country, huge forests must be cut down every year just to provide the fuel for the tens of millions of cremations taking place over just a few months’ time.
Don’t Chew on Your Pencil!
An artist named Nadine Jarvis makes pencils out of the body’s ashes left over after cremation. She can get almost 250 pencils out of an average body’s cremains. That’s almost a lifetime supply of pencils for family and friends!
But what we usually think of as a “traditional” burial (with steel caskets, formal cemeteries, and embalming fluid) only dates back to the late 1800s. The oldest and most traditional burial style is actually this:
When somebody dies, you bury them. The end.
Today, this is sometimes called a “green” burial. There is no embalming. If a coffin is used, it’s made of biodegradable material like wood, recycled newspapers, bamboo, or even woven banana leaves. This type of coffin decomposes in six months to two years. The body can also be wrapped in a shroud made of cotton or some other natural fibers. A green cemetery looks exactly like a park, because there are no roads or manicured lawns! Some green cemeteries also ban headstones or grave markers. No worries, though. At places like California’s Forever Fernwood cemetery, the family is given a Google map with the GPS coordinates of their loved one’s location!
Boy, if there’s one thing I’ve learned here, it’s that death can be a huge hassle for the relatives of the person who passes away. So to be considerate to my loved ones, I’ve decided to spare them this anguish. “How?”
you ask? Simple: I’ll just live forever! (Isn’t that what happens when you take a Flintstones vitamin every day?)
Giving Life to Your Death Scenes
Actors love playing juicy scenes where they can ham it up. (Now that’s gross: juicy ham!) And one of the juiciest acting jobs of all time is playing a death scene.
Let’s say you’ve landed a part in a local theater production of Mary Poppins. Since you know that a good actor always improvises, you’ve decided to give your character a death scene. That means you have some important decisions to make! For instance, a good actor should be able to answer these three questions:
Who is my character? (Answer: Someone who is going to die.)
What does my character feel? (Answer: He feels the icy hand of death on his brow. Or maybe on his neck. Look, it doesn’t really matter!)
What does my character want? (Answer: He wants to die, I guess. And if it isn’t too much trouble, a Fig Newton would be nice.)
Boy, this is going to be the best death scene in the history of Mary Poppins! Let’s break down exactly how it’s going to work:
The Lead-Up
Locate yourself onstage so that the audience can’t miss you. Nothing is worse than dying off to the side of the stage where nobody will notice.
The Last Moment of Life
Decide whether to go for a quick ending or a long one. Of course, long, drawn-out deaths are very tempting. That’s why actors love playing the part of Hamlet. After being poisoned, Shakespeare’s character says, “I am dead, Horatio.” Six lines of dialogue later, Hamlet adds, “Horatio, I am dead.” Then eighteen lines after that, Hamlet cries out, “O, I die, Horatio!” And still he goes on for another five lines!
Then he dies. (Surprise!)
“I die, Horatio!”
As your character’s life flutters away, consider some of the following moves:
The Slow-Motion Windmill: A slow-motion death is always cool. (And who doesn’t like windmills?)
“Why? Why? Why?”: Cry it out with feeling and wonder. Optional: “Why, why, why bro?”
The Dramatic Fall from a High Place: Almost impossible to perform in slow motion.
The Last-Second Shrug: Right before you drop dead, look out at the audience and give them a shrug along with a look that says, “You win some, you lose some!”
The First Moment of Death
In the entire history of acting, there must have been a time when an actor did a really good death scene and then actually died. (“Take a curtain call, Timmy! Uh, Timmy?”) If you’re concerned about this happening, have the director bring in a stunt person for this part of the scene.
Aftermath
You’d think life would be easy after passing away. Not so! You have to decide whether to shut your eyes or to leave them open. Leaving them open will give your corpse a creepy look that will surely distract the audience from the living actors onstage. While this may sound good to you, remember that it’s hard not to blink, twitch, or laugh when you’re lying there with your eyes open.
But whether your eyes or open or shut, you’re probably going to have to lie there for a while until someone pulls the curtain. During this time, try not to breathe too obviously. And avoid sitting up and high-fiving cast members to celebrate your skills.
Oh, last thing: with all that you’ve learned in this book, you might try doing something that would actually happen to a dead body. Don’t do it! Audiences have been known to demand ticket refunds when actors decompose onstage.
Epilogue
I’ve traveled the world looking for gross stuff, and it hasn’t always been easy. After stepping on sea cucumber puke in the South Pacific and having to flee cannibals in South Carolina, I decided to take a break and do some hiking in the Swiss Alps.
Ah, Switzerland! What a clean, mountainous country. The Swiss people are so clean-cut, it’s hard to imagine any of them wiping a runny nose on their sleeve. And as I hiked on perfectly maintained Alpine trails, I came upon an incredible panorama!
No, not the snow-clad mountains. I’m talking about the six naked backpackers who were clad in nothing but hiking boots!
My first instinct was to run screaming, but I decided to play it cool. (Nothing is worse than having nudists think you’re uncool.) So, maintaining eye contact, I walked forward.
Male Hiker: I can see that you are shocked by our appearance.
Me: Me? Shocked? [Nervous laugh.] Well, maybe a little.
Female Hiker: Ah, but look at this beautiful natural setting. Is it not a paradise?
Me: Uh-huh.
Older Male Hiker: And what did Adam and Eve wear in paradise?
Me: Uh, Adidas sweatsuits?
Older Female Hiker: No! They wore nothing. They were innocent children of nature, without the need for shame or personal electronic devices. They saw that the human body is nothing to be ashamed of.
Really Old Male Hiker: That is why the French call being naked “au naturel.” In Germany and Switzerland, we call it the “free body culture.”
[At this point, I’m thinking, “Look what gravity does to the human body!”]
Me: Do your “free bodies” do other things besides hike?
Really Old Female Hiker: Yes, we sunbathe, and we also take part in sports like canoeing and horseback riding.
[Here I get woozy imagining naked horseback riders. I hope they put a towel down over the saddle! Then a question comes to me.]
Me: Hey, if naked hikers don’t wear clothes, what do you keep in your backpacks?
Male Hiker: Trail mix! Would you like some, Mr. Uptight American?
As I munched on nudist trail mix and the naked hikers walked off, I realized how small-minded I’d been. Maybe they were right! There’s nothing wrong with nudity. I’d been brainwashed! So, slowly at first, and then with greater confidence, I removed my clothing. And then I hiked proudly down the trail with my head held high!
That is, until I came upon a group of elderly women out for a jaunt.
“Disgusting!” yelled one woman.
“It’s horrible!” cried another.
“Why is that man wearing underwear?” asked another. (Yes, I’d chickened out and left my underwear on.)
“Good afternoon, ladies,” I said. “I can see that you are shocked by my appearance. Ah, but look at this beautiful nature. Is it not a paradise?”
“It was paradise,” pointed out another, “but you really need to do your laundry.”
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