Homework 48- Families thoughts on the care of the dead.

For this homework, I interviewed my mother and father. I basically conducted the interviews for my parents the same way I asked them what the first thing came to mind when I said “care of the dead”. My mom had an interesting thought about this: “Caring for the dead is actually respecting the life of the person. You have to make sure you’re honoring the person the way they would have wanted.” My dad had a different type of response talking about how the phrase care of the dead is very general. That it could mean the body, or the idea of the person. Caring for the dead doesn’t literally have to mean the way the body is treated. “It is almost unnecessary to do what we do to bodies, they don’t need to be preserved like they are because the body is dead. If anything, it’s some type of spirit that lives on of the person.”
I also asked about the part religion plays in the process of caring for the dead, as every funeral from my family has involved a service at a catholic church. My mom said that most of the people in our family are very religious (we’re Irish), and they themselves request a service at a church for after they die. In our family, it is just granting the wishes of the person who has become deceased. “If somebody wants to be cremated or buried without a special service they can.”
I didn’t feel comfortable asking my parents about the deaths they had to deal with lately because there have been a lot of them. I did ask how they wanted to be cared for when they die. My mom said she wasn’t sure yet but if she died now she, “wouldn’t mind either cremation or a funeral.” That she feels like if she’s dead it shouldn’t really be up to her. She doesn’t have control over it. She just wants to have her ashes sprinkled in her favorite place in Pennsylvania if she is cremated. My dad said that he wants to have a traditional funeral and to be buried in one the family plots. He said, “that’s just what feels right.” Which makes sense to me. Most people I know do that.



I feel like nobody I interviewed had more then just a little knowledge on these topics. Which I expected considering I know close to nothing. I think that it fits into the idea that death is a taboo topic. Nobody wants to really discuss the care of the death because they feel wrong discussing death. That’s why I felt uncomfortable asking about the care of the dead within my family. That’s why I didn’t feel comfortable asking more about these topics.
The biggest divide I see in these interviews is about what “care of the dead” means to each individual. It isn’t like Birth or Food where there is a basic definition of each. Care of the dead is a broad topic and the way different people look at it is based off of their definition of it.