MeganRitter

If you've never been intimately involved with planning for a funeral and taking care of the other details surrounding a death, you might like to know how many retarded things there are to worry about. Should the casket have steel or brass handles? Should the caket liner be white or pale blue? Mass cards that impart no information about your deceased loved ones other than name, date of birth, and date of death. Condolence books that no one ever looks at again, because nobody cares who came to the funeral. What should the ribbon on the flowers say? Mourning in America has become an orgy of ritual, and all of those rituals involve giving scandalous amounts of money to pasty men in dark suits who refer to your loved one as "the remains." Wallace Stevens point about death in battle strikes a chord. The ritual surrounding most deaths, the pomp and ceremony, places a clear threshhold between the person who has died and the people who are left behind. When a soldier dies in battle, there's no one to go through all this fuss and nonsense. A dog tag wedged in the teeth and a plain pine box and it's done. Somehow it feels more natural that way.