HW 55 - Culminating Project - Care of the Dead

Flyer That I Distributed in Brooklyn College:

Interview with a Brooklyn College Undergrad

Me: What Is Embalming?

Student: The process of preserving a corpse for a funeral.

Me: Do you think there is an ulterior motif for families embalming their loved ones?

Student: Death frightens most people so an ulterior motif for embalming someone could be to make it look as if the person was just sleeping.

Me: Why do you think death frightens people?

Student: Same reason every think that is unknown frightens people. It is human nature to be afraid of things that you do not know everything about.

Me: Interesting… You say death is something unknown, but haven’t we been dealing with death since the beginning of time?

Student: Just because we know what it is, does not mean we understand it. We know death exists, we know that we are all going to one day be reduced to dust one day but we’re still afraid of it. I think another reason why we are so afraid of death is because it is inevitable. A person will be more afraid of something that he (or she) knows is coming than something that he (or she) is completely unprepared for.

Me: How would you like to be taken cared of when you die?

Student: I never really thought about it… I would probably want to be cremated since almost everyone in my family that died has been cremated. That is the only method of taking care of the dead that I am familiar with.

Me: What would you want to have done with your ashes?

Student: I would want my ashes to be in an urn in my family house as a sort of “Oh there’s him!” thing.

Me: That will probably be incredibly creepy if your descendents actually say that, but anyway, thank you for your time.

Interview with a High School student from California

Me: What Is Embalming?

Student: I am not sure but is it something to do with preserving a dead person’s body in optimum features? I know President Lincoln was embalmed when they moved his body from state to state.

Me: Yes it is to preserve a dead body. Why do you think people do this?

Student: Maybe so the body will look less scary when they have a funeral for the dead person.

Me: Do you think that is the only reason?

Student: That’s the only reason I can think of…

Me: Okay, could you give me some pros and cons of a standard funeral?

Student: I’ve only ever been to one funeral and I remember it to be very loud and noisy. I was confused as to how someone would mourn the dead person if there was so much discussion about other things going on. I guess that is one con; a lot of people are usually invited to a standard funeral so the mourning process is not as good as it would be if it was a quite family only funeral. One pro that I noticed in the funeral I was a part of was that everything was flowing very smoothly; it looked and felt like as if it was planned by professionals. I did not feel a slight inconvenience the entire time.

Me: How would you like to be done with your body when you die?

Student: I would want to be buried. I have read many books about zombies and played many video games so when I die, I would like to think that there is a possibility that I will be resurrected as a face eating nightmare.

Me: It is funny that you see death as sort of a joke, while others consider it to be very serious and even frightening. Why do you think that is?

Student: Death is something that everyone will go through. There is no point in being scared of it. If you’re scared of something that you cannot prevent, then you’re just wasting your breath. I think of death as a joke mostly because everyone else thinks of it as something very serious. People need lighten up about death because like I just said, there is no point in being scared.

Me: I’ll send you a PDF of a flyer that I hope you will read and find it informative. Thank you for your time.

For the culminating project for the COTD unit, I decided to do something that I had not done for any of the other units; I decided to do something as an activist. Since I read Grave Matters as my unit book, there were a lot of summaries of major methods of taking care of the dead available to me. I decided to make those summaries even shorter so it would fit into one sheet of paper as a flyer. I live right next to Brooklyn College so I decided to go down there and give out the flyers I made and ask some students about some questions about taking care of the dead. Many of the students’ responses were generic and bland so I did not include those in my blog post. I posted one student’s interview which I thought had many insightful responses. For the second interview, I decided to interview my friend who lives in California and attends the same grade as I do. In his interview, he shares his experiences in a funeral that he attended. He did not know too much about taking care of the dead, since it’s a tabooed topic in the United States, so I forwarded him the flyer I made and after he had read it, he said that he had learnt some things that he was previously unaware of. Mission Accomplished.

I tried to make the flyer as simple as possible because people do not usually like reading long flyers that have a copious amount of detail. Short and Sweet. I was very happy when I walked back to my house and I did not notice a single one of my flyers littering the floor by students who were bored. I did not check the garbage bins but I am sure that none of the students threw out their flyers. They probably all kept it and are going to put it up on their refrigerators and maybe even write a blog of their own about it.