HW#52 - Third Third of the COTD Book

Precis

What happens after you died? Is there any life there? Society has been altering the whole life after death situation. We want this as a "forever" thing that is why funeral homes and other death related concepts keep the traditional going. Change how people understand death. Like religion used to do.

Quotes

The point of Fernwood is fantasy, a dream of pushing up giant redwoods from below, feeding them with your own hard-won carbon atoms, the afterlife as compost.

If people will pay a million dollars to be buried in a family mausoleum what will they pay to be buried under a three-hundred-year-old oak tree?

The reason funeral homes cant make a connection with their community is not that the community is scared to talk about death, it's that the funeral home is scared to talk about death. That's why funeral homes embalm people, put make-up on them and pretend they're alive. Here we're very realistic. Dead people should look dead.

Death and destruction made more life possible.

The idea of forever works as a sales tool, but in reality, of course, it's a myth.

I think the funeral industry is ahead of the curve, they're at the level of Disney.

Analysis

After reading the book Curtains, i see death is many different ways now other than the mindset i already had on two things. Everybody wants to believe that there is life after death but we never really knows what happens. I think that one of the reason we go all out for funerals and such things because we believe that there is something besides the human life to prepare us in the after life. This relates back to the birth unit becuase we grew up with all these social norms on how the baby should be born it was c-sections vs. natural and hospital vs. home births. In the death unit it was burying someone vs. cremation and then everything else in between. Both of the units display the the existent of permanence.