Dealing with cremation
April 3, 2022 10:40 AM Subscribe
Help me deal with intrusive thoughts about the cremation process
Someone close to me died recently and will be cremated. I'm struggling not to visualise the cremation process and what feels like its brutality.
I feel like this must be something that other people have experienced, so could you point me to advice on how to deal with this or tell me how you managed to conceptualise and accept cremation?
I'm not religious and this is both what the deceased wanted and the local norm.
Someone close to me died recently and will be cremated. I'm struggling not to visualise the cremation process and what feels like its brutality.
I feel like this must be something that other people have experienced, so could you point me to advice on how to deal with this or tell me how you managed to conceptualise and accept cremation?
I'm not religious and this is both what the deceased wanted and the local norm.
I remember attending my maternal granddad’s funeral, where he was embalmed and laid out for viewing. I walked up to the coffin with my dad and sister, and my dad, visibly shaken, said “don’t do this to me. I want to be cremated.” He died last year, and I and my family were glad we knew his wishes and could carry them out.
When you say “brutality” - no outcome for a dead body is ever going to be something you’d want to happen to a live body. Any method of dealing with a body will ultimately result in its destruction. And for many people, a rapid and near-total destruction is a far more comforting idea than extended artificial preservation of the body, or natural decay.
posted by showbiz_liz at 10:48 AM on April 3, 2022 [13 favorites]
When you say “brutality” - no outcome for a dead body is ever going to be something you’d want to happen to a live body. Any method of dealing with a body will ultimately result in its destruction. And for many people, a rapid and near-total destruction is a far more comforting idea than extended artificial preservation of the body, or natural decay.
posted by showbiz_liz at 10:48 AM on April 3, 2022 [13 favorites]
this is ... what the deceased wanted
There is nothing brutal or cruel about honoring somebody's bodily autonomy.
posted by phunniemee at 11:01 AM on April 3, 2022 [19 favorites]
There is nothing brutal or cruel about honoring somebody's bodily autonomy.
posted by phunniemee at 11:01 AM on April 3, 2022 [19 favorites]
I went through something just like this quite recently.
If you fight to NOT think about or envision it, you may continue to do it, like that old joke "don't think about pink elephants" - now all you can think about is pink elephants.
What's been working for me is acknowledging the process and reframing. Can you maybe work out some sort of your own version of these? Mine look something like this:
1. That body was just a shell for the person I love. They are no longer attached/there. They have been released.[this is a secular concept]
2. The different steps of the process scattered molecules of the person I love into the air I breath and they are now always with me.
The other thing that works, when the intrusive imagery would float up, is overlaying it/adding to it with imagery of holding that person in my arms or surrounding them with a loving light. Basically, give your brain additional context.
I'm sorry for your grief and pain. If nothing else, the intrusiveness will likely fade with time.
posted by Ink-stained wretch at 11:06 AM on April 3, 2022 [3 favorites]
If you fight to NOT think about or envision it, you may continue to do it, like that old joke "don't think about pink elephants" - now all you can think about is pink elephants.
What's been working for me is acknowledging the process and reframing. Can you maybe work out some sort of your own version of these? Mine look something like this:
1. That body was just a shell for the person I love. They are no longer attached/there. They have been released.[this is a secular concept]
2. The different steps of the process scattered molecules of the person I love into the air I breath and they are now always with me.
The other thing that works, when the intrusive imagery would float up, is overlaying it/adding to it with imagery of holding that person in my arms or surrounding them with a loving light. Basically, give your brain additional context.
I'm sorry for your grief and pain. If nothing else, the intrusiveness will likely fade with time.
posted by Ink-stained wretch at 11:06 AM on April 3, 2022 [3 favorites]
This from my wife, who is a psychologist (but not your psychologist, etc.) and has faced this herself:
This is not a clinical recommendation, but I found this process helpful when coping with intrusive thoughts about a loved one's (my beloved mom's) cremation:
Just like for any intrusive thought, I tried to label (for example: "I'm having an intrusive thought about cremation"), label ("this brings up feelings of sadness, revulsion, fear, disgust, etc") and move on ("how can I be kind to myself while I allow these feelings to pass through me/while I ride the waves of these emotions, etc"). This process takes some time but generally helps with not tagging the thought/emotion as a threat, but rather as a workable thing that requires some extra self-compassion. On the other hand, for some reason this line of thinking has been helpful for me: I think about how my loved one (my mom) spent a period of time as a zygote and as a fetus. She had gills or whatever at some point! I do not need to relate to or make sense of that period of her corporeal being, because she wasn't yet herself. She was a bunch of cells with none of her wonderfulness in them yet. And so I don't need to relate to or make sense of the fact that she was a corpse, or that she was cremated, or that her body is ashes. Those things are not her and, just like I don't need to figure out how to relate to or accept fetus mom with gills, I also don't need to do these things for her body after she died. It wasn't her anymore and so I could give myself permission to allow myself to somehow accept that this is what her cells were like now.
I guess the most important thing is, try not to "undo" the thoughts or shut them down. You didn't ask for them but here they are. If you can respond to them with a measure of kindness toward yourself rather than secondary panic over having intrusive thoughts, they should hopefully fade out more quickly. Basically, the stance is one of a compassionate side-eye rather than a shut-down or immediate distraction. I am sending you hopes for some peace of mind in the near future. You're definitely not alone in this.
posted by saladin at 11:35 AM on April 3, 2022 [18 favorites]
This is not a clinical recommendation, but I found this process helpful when coping with intrusive thoughts about a loved one's (my beloved mom's) cremation:
Just like for any intrusive thought, I tried to label (for example: "I'm having an intrusive thought about cremation"), label ("this brings up feelings of sadness, revulsion, fear, disgust, etc") and move on ("how can I be kind to myself while I allow these feelings to pass through me/while I ride the waves of these emotions, etc"). This process takes some time but generally helps with not tagging the thought/emotion as a threat, but rather as a workable thing that requires some extra self-compassion. On the other hand, for some reason this line of thinking has been helpful for me: I think about how my loved one (my mom) spent a period of time as a zygote and as a fetus. She had gills or whatever at some point! I do not need to relate to or make sense of that period of her corporeal being, because she wasn't yet herself. She was a bunch of cells with none of her wonderfulness in them yet. And so I don't need to relate to or make sense of the fact that she was a corpse, or that she was cremated, or that her body is ashes. Those things are not her and, just like I don't need to figure out how to relate to or accept fetus mom with gills, I also don't need to do these things for her body after she died. It wasn't her anymore and so I could give myself permission to allow myself to somehow accept that this is what her cells were like now.
I guess the most important thing is, try not to "undo" the thoughts or shut them down. You didn't ask for them but here they are. If you can respond to them with a measure of kindness toward yourself rather than secondary panic over having intrusive thoughts, they should hopefully fade out more quickly. Basically, the stance is one of a compassionate side-eye rather than a shut-down or immediate distraction. I am sending you hopes for some peace of mind in the near future. You're definitely not alone in this.
posted by saladin at 11:35 AM on April 3, 2022 [18 favorites]
What ink stained witch said.
I was with my mother when she died. (In her own bed, of cancer). It was a profound experience because it was, for the first time, that I truly understood that the body is not the person.
My mother was gone. Her body had no presence of her. That fact helped me come to terms with the cremation.
I'm sorry for your loss, and I'm sorry that this is so difficult for you. I hope you can find some peace. Be kind to yourself. Grief comes on us in strange ways, sometimes, but there is no wrong way to grieve.
posted by Zumbador at 11:35 AM on April 3, 2022 [5 favorites]
I was with my mother when she died. (In her own bed, of cancer). It was a profound experience because it was, for the first time, that I truly understood that the body is not the person.
My mother was gone. Her body had no presence of her. That fact helped me come to terms with the cremation.
I'm sorry for your loss, and I'm sorry that this is so difficult for you. I hope you can find some peace. Be kind to yourself. Grief comes on us in strange ways, sometimes, but there is no wrong way to grieve.
posted by Zumbador at 11:35 AM on April 3, 2022 [5 favorites]
Our brains can't really understand death..we see or imagine the body of a beloved person and still want to shelter and care for them as we did in life. We are often imagining that person being hurt as though they were alive. They are there but not there.
It's ok to have these thoughts, it's your brain, which is adapted for being alive, struggling to comprehend the opposite, and to accept a person is truly gone, even if their body isn't yet. And of course you don't want them gone, you miss them and can't help wishing they'd return. That's all part of grief .
The part that remains of your relative now is like hair or fingernails after a trim. Once alive, even beautiful, but now something to discard. The part that was them, the memories and personality in their brain, has stopped existing. The signals have stopped sending, have ended.
Does your family have a ceremony planned for the ashes? It might help to focus on that. My mother chose cremation and we buried her urn with my father in the cemetery. It was a good way to say goodbye. You can choose some poetry or a memory to share. Or a spot to scatter the ashes that they would love.
posted by emjaybee at 11:43 AM on April 3, 2022 [7 favorites]
It's ok to have these thoughts, it's your brain, which is adapted for being alive, struggling to comprehend the opposite, and to accept a person is truly gone, even if their body isn't yet. And of course you don't want them gone, you miss them and can't help wishing they'd return. That's all part of grief .
The part that remains of your relative now is like hair or fingernails after a trim. Once alive, even beautiful, but now something to discard. The part that was them, the memories and personality in their brain, has stopped existing. The signals have stopped sending, have ended.
Does your family have a ceremony planned for the ashes? It might help to focus on that. My mother chose cremation and we buried her urn with my father in the cemetery. It was a good way to say goodbye. You can choose some poetry or a memory to share. Or a spot to scatter the ashes that they would love.
posted by emjaybee at 11:43 AM on April 3, 2022 [7 favorites]
I have no idea if this helps, but many people suffer intrusive thoughts/anxiety about every kind of normal legal final disposition. In some ways, it's all appalling. If you don't want the person to even be gone in the first place there's NO option that's going to make that feel any better. Nothing is comforting, it's all barbaric.
It may be that you are a person who wants there to be A Place. A spot in the ground you can point at and say this is where they are. And because that Place is meaningful to you, the biological processes don't loom so large. Culturally we play into that as well, with the sort of preparation and encasement that we generally do for burials so that people are left with a nice somewhat non-distressing mental image of a hermetically sealed perpetuity.
But the biological details are always pretty brutal, regardless which option is chosen. In the burial option you do at least get left with A Place, but it doesn't take much thinking about it before you realize how problematic that whole situation is over time, with the amount of space it consumes and ultimately the control over how the place is run and maintained is out of your hands.
We have to do something with the envelope that remains after the person is gone. I believe that whatever form that takes, if it is deliberate and done with care for both the decedent and the living things in the vicinity, is a form of respect.
I hope it will help you to know that crematory operators generally care deeply about the sanctity - and safety to others - of the work they do. Even the machinery itself is built with regard to preventing as much accidental indignity as possible. If I don't die in a place where I have greener options, cremation is absolutely what I want for myself because...I hate the idea of littering, honestly. And I love fire. I feel like being reduced to taking up the least possible space - and if there's someone left who wants or is comforted by keeping me with them, they have that option - is a final kind thing I can do for this world.
Grief sucks and can be super weird. For most people these thoughts fade as they get further into processing their loss. There are various techniques you can use to respond to yourself or redirect yourself when the thoughts come, and I don't know which words or ideas might best help you, but I can tell you that sometimes when these come to me I just tell myself: It's okay. As in: it's okay that this thought came, and it's okay to let it go again, and I'm not in any actual danger right now, I am okay, and that this situation will be some kind of okay eventually.
posted by Lyn Never at 11:54 AM on April 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
It may be that you are a person who wants there to be A Place. A spot in the ground you can point at and say this is where they are. And because that Place is meaningful to you, the biological processes don't loom so large. Culturally we play into that as well, with the sort of preparation and encasement that we generally do for burials so that people are left with a nice somewhat non-distressing mental image of a hermetically sealed perpetuity.
But the biological details are always pretty brutal, regardless which option is chosen. In the burial option you do at least get left with A Place, but it doesn't take much thinking about it before you realize how problematic that whole situation is over time, with the amount of space it consumes and ultimately the control over how the place is run and maintained is out of your hands.
We have to do something with the envelope that remains after the person is gone. I believe that whatever form that takes, if it is deliberate and done with care for both the decedent and the living things in the vicinity, is a form of respect.
I hope it will help you to know that crematory operators generally care deeply about the sanctity - and safety to others - of the work they do. Even the machinery itself is built with regard to preventing as much accidental indignity as possible. If I don't die in a place where I have greener options, cremation is absolutely what I want for myself because...I hate the idea of littering, honestly. And I love fire. I feel like being reduced to taking up the least possible space - and if there's someone left who wants or is comforted by keeping me with them, they have that option - is a final kind thing I can do for this world.
Grief sucks and can be super weird. For most people these thoughts fade as they get further into processing their loss. There are various techniques you can use to respond to yourself or redirect yourself when the thoughts come, and I don't know which words or ideas might best help you, but I can tell you that sometimes when these come to me I just tell myself: It's okay. As in: it's okay that this thought came, and it's okay to let it go again, and I'm not in any actual danger right now, I am okay, and that this situation will be some kind of okay eventually.
posted by Lyn Never at 11:54 AM on April 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
I have experienced this about a cremation. It was tough and it was distinctly part of grief in a way I was not expecting, since I am not generally averse to cremains or the funerary process.
What helped was remembering that I had also felt the same thing for a person who was buried. Even though I was a full-grown person at the time, I couldn't shake the intrusive idea that they were cold, that they needed a blanket. At the time, I felt silly. I now realize it was part of the grieving process -- the brain literally "struggling to comprehend the opposite," as emjaybee says. And when I had trouble with the cremation, it was much the same.
Whatever happens to our bodies is generally brutal, as Lyn Never says, unless we get to be bog bodies or natural desert mummies, and even then you gotta be in some pretty rough circumstances. There's comfort in knowing that, in a way -- that there's no magic self-care technique you're missing or bootstrap you're not pulling on, that this is hard and will be hard for a while. Knowing that makes it easier to make it easier on yourself, paradoxically.
posted by Countess Elena at 12:10 PM on April 3, 2022 [5 favorites]
What helped was remembering that I had also felt the same thing for a person who was buried. Even though I was a full-grown person at the time, I couldn't shake the intrusive idea that they were cold, that they needed a blanket. At the time, I felt silly. I now realize it was part of the grieving process -- the brain literally "struggling to comprehend the opposite," as emjaybee says. And when I had trouble with the cremation, it was much the same.
Whatever happens to our bodies is generally brutal, as Lyn Never says, unless we get to be bog bodies or natural desert mummies, and even then you gotta be in some pretty rough circumstances. There's comfort in knowing that, in a way -- that there's no magic self-care technique you're missing or bootstrap you're not pulling on, that this is hard and will be hard for a while. Knowing that makes it easier to make it easier on yourself, paradoxically.
posted by Countess Elena at 12:10 PM on April 3, 2022 [5 favorites]
I have happily arranged my own cremation! I think it a good thing, to be cast into the sea and return to the cycle of life. No worries about scary graveyards, woo woo! The idea of burial horrifies me and I would love my remains to embrace the sea! Can you think of a better celebration of life than return to Mother Ocean? I can't.
posted by SPrintF at 1:17 PM on April 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by SPrintF at 1:17 PM on April 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
Possibly this is just personal but the phrase "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust" holds a lot of meaning for me. We are all born from the ashes of a dying star and in returning to ashes we return to our roots. Being cremated is very important to me.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 1:49 PM on April 3, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 1:49 PM on April 3, 2022 [4 favorites]
Make a list of topics/ questions that are interesting to you and distracting. Keep the list with you on paper and/ or on your phone; when you're aware of an intrusive thought, tell yourself I'm sad about friend, who chose cremation, but Friend is gone and that is Friend's wish, then give yourself an alternate topic. My brother had PTSD and wore a rubber band on his wrist; he'd snap it as conditioning to stop intrusive thoughts. He found it effective.
I had thoughts about my father's body decomposing after he died. There's no part of death that is really tidy or easy. The thoughts we have about their ending are part of processing the reality of their death.
posted by theora55 at 2:25 PM on April 3, 2022
I had thoughts about my father's body decomposing after he died. There's no part of death that is really tidy or easy. The thoughts we have about their ending are part of processing the reality of their death.
posted by theora55 at 2:25 PM on April 3, 2022
When my best friend died a few years ago -- way too early; fuck cancer -- I actually found some relief by watching YouTube videos made by Caitlin Doughty, aka "Ask a Mortician." She has a couple that specifically talk about what happens during cremation. I think I found it calming to understand that morticians are professionals, and because of specific safeguards there's no possibility of getting someone else's ashes mixed in with your loved one.
This may be too much and you may not want to watch them, for sure! But they helped me.
posted by BlahLaLa at 2:59 PM on April 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
This may be too much and you may not want to watch them, for sure! But they helped me.
posted by BlahLaLa at 2:59 PM on April 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
Similar to what I’m reading from SPrintF and Tell Me No Lies above, I have deep positive feelings about cremation. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed: to me, cremation represents a beautiful transformation of some part of the matter that housed a person into light and heat, into the stuff that can travel out into the vast reaches of the universe. That energy, in the most scientific sense of the word, will be part of our universe forever. I’m so sorry for your loss, and I hope you find relief for these thoughts.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 3:00 PM on April 3, 2022 [6 favorites]
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 3:00 PM on April 3, 2022 [6 favorites]
tell me how you managed to conceptualise and accept cremation?
I was never super opposed to cremation but I was always kind of more interested in burial. I liked the idea of someone becoming a skeleton and somehow always being in a place seemed to have a positive association for me. Then my father died and was cremated AND we buried his ashes and that seemed to be the right thing. I put some of his ashes in a film canister and I carry them with me and I like being able to do this.
When my mother died in 2017, her wish was to be cremated and the people at the cremation place were incredibly kind and nice. They asked if we wanted to include anything with her when she was cremated. We were allowed to watch if we wanted to (we did, for a bit) and it felt less like a "someone gets taken away and you get a box of ashes back" situation. We had her memorial service later and told people if they wanted some of her ashes, we'd give them a sealed container. Some took us up on it, most didn't. We didn't put it in people's faces, just had it as an option. Now I have a little vial of her ashes and I carry them with me. I like getting to have a small part of my parents with me all the time. I know this isn't how a lot of people manage the creation of loved ones, but it worked well for me.
posted by jessamyn at 2:55 PM on April 4, 2022
I was never super opposed to cremation but I was always kind of more interested in burial. I liked the idea of someone becoming a skeleton and somehow always being in a place seemed to have a positive association for me. Then my father died and was cremated AND we buried his ashes and that seemed to be the right thing. I put some of his ashes in a film canister and I carry them with me and I like being able to do this.
When my mother died in 2017, her wish was to be cremated and the people at the cremation place were incredibly kind and nice. They asked if we wanted to include anything with her when she was cremated. We were allowed to watch if we wanted to (we did, for a bit) and it felt less like a "someone gets taken away and you get a box of ashes back" situation. We had her memorial service later and told people if they wanted some of her ashes, we'd give them a sealed container. Some took us up on it, most didn't. We didn't put it in people's faces, just had it as an option. Now I have a little vial of her ashes and I carry them with me. I like getting to have a small part of my parents with me all the time. I know this isn't how a lot of people manage the creation of loved ones, but it worked well for me.
posted by jessamyn at 2:55 PM on April 4, 2022
If you are a certain kind of person, Mary Roach's Stiff (not linking in case you are not that kind of person), which talks about what happens to bodies after death, is what you should go read. (What kind of person? The kind with intense anxiety about illness who goes and reads ebola books on purpose because knowing is less-bad than not-knowing.) Some of it is kind-of gruesome, because she pulls no punches and dead bodies are not pretty. But she goes over a whole variety of things people do with bodies after death -- embalming, natural burial, cremation, organ donation, med school cadavers, flash freezing, diamond-creation, composting, donations to science of various sorts. It left me with both an appreciation of how gross bodies are, and how very many ways we honor our fellow humans' bodily remains, and how beautiful and moving those all are -- even when they're super-gross.
This is super-niche, but cremation is by far the most common kind of disposal of remains in the UK (77%), but not even half in the US (45%). A lot of US seminarians in Anglican and Methodist churches accept an appointment for 1-5 years in the UK upon graduation, to experience living in another country, and because UK clergy shortages are currently more acute than US shortages. US clergy in those denominations who go to serve in the UK get specific education in cremation, because in large parts of the US it is still really uncommon for Christian funerals, but just 100% the norm in the UK. It is not at all unusual for US clergy (especially if they're 25 and fresh out of school) who go to the UK to be really uncomfortable with cremation, and to need assistance in dealing with the transition -- psychological, ethical, and cultural assistance. If you know any clergy in those denominations, they might be able to point you to some help.
I would add to this, Catholics were not allowed to be cremated until 1963, and cremation remains MUCH less common in places that are traditionally Catholic, and lots of Catholics -- including my parents -- are ethically okay with it but personally uncomfortable with it because it was forbidden when they were young. That was common in a lot of Christian denominations before WWII, and a lot of people who live in historically-Christian countries or communities have residual discomfort about cremation because it only became common in the last 40 or 50 or 75 years where they live. The theory of the ban was typically that you were going to be bodily resurrected at the Second Coming, and God might not resurrect you if your body weren't all in one piece, which started to seem less and less sane as we learned more about decomposition, and actively immoral as organ donation became possible. Like, surely if God can reassemble somebody's dispersed molecules from 325 CE, God can cope with your cremation in 2022 CE, and surely God can deal with making you a new heart if you donate your heart so someone else can live! Anyway, if you live in a historically-Christian culture, it might be helpful to think about how fast those norms have shifted, and why they shifted -- both scientific understanding of what happens to bodies after death, and an affirmative desire to save lives through organ donation. And that it's really normal to be uncomfortable with that historically extremely fast shift in cultural practices around death! Practices around death are often among the slowest to change, because it invokes such an intense discomfort in us as human animals who respect the remains of our dead and ritualize how we handle them (us and elephants!). "Since WWII" is a wildly accelerated timeline for Westerners to get used to the idea of cremation, and it is totally okay and normal to feel discomfort about it. Culturally, that's yesterday. Homo naledi was burying people in caves 300,000 years ago; 75 years ago, we decided cremation was probably okay. That's SO SO FAST. It's wild to expect us to adjust that fast, when burial is one of the most fundamental defining aspects of our genus.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:14 PM on April 4, 2022 [2 favorites]
This is super-niche, but cremation is by far the most common kind of disposal of remains in the UK (77%), but not even half in the US (45%). A lot of US seminarians in Anglican and Methodist churches accept an appointment for 1-5 years in the UK upon graduation, to experience living in another country, and because UK clergy shortages are currently more acute than US shortages. US clergy in those denominations who go to serve in the UK get specific education in cremation, because in large parts of the US it is still really uncommon for Christian funerals, but just 100% the norm in the UK. It is not at all unusual for US clergy (especially if they're 25 and fresh out of school) who go to the UK to be really uncomfortable with cremation, and to need assistance in dealing with the transition -- psychological, ethical, and cultural assistance. If you know any clergy in those denominations, they might be able to point you to some help.
I would add to this, Catholics were not allowed to be cremated until 1963, and cremation remains MUCH less common in places that are traditionally Catholic, and lots of Catholics -- including my parents -- are ethically okay with it but personally uncomfortable with it because it was forbidden when they were young. That was common in a lot of Christian denominations before WWII, and a lot of people who live in historically-Christian countries or communities have residual discomfort about cremation because it only became common in the last 40 or 50 or 75 years where they live. The theory of the ban was typically that you were going to be bodily resurrected at the Second Coming, and God might not resurrect you if your body weren't all in one piece, which started to seem less and less sane as we learned more about decomposition, and actively immoral as organ donation became possible. Like, surely if God can reassemble somebody's dispersed molecules from 325 CE, God can cope with your cremation in 2022 CE, and surely God can deal with making you a new heart if you donate your heart so someone else can live! Anyway, if you live in a historically-Christian culture, it might be helpful to think about how fast those norms have shifted, and why they shifted -- both scientific understanding of what happens to bodies after death, and an affirmative desire to save lives through organ donation. And that it's really normal to be uncomfortable with that historically extremely fast shift in cultural practices around death! Practices around death are often among the slowest to change, because it invokes such an intense discomfort in us as human animals who respect the remains of our dead and ritualize how we handle them (us and elephants!). "Since WWII" is a wildly accelerated timeline for Westerners to get used to the idea of cremation, and it is totally okay and normal to feel discomfort about it. Culturally, that's yesterday. Homo naledi was burying people in caves 300,000 years ago; 75 years ago, we decided cremation was probably okay. That's SO SO FAST. It's wild to expect us to adjust that fast, when burial is one of the most fundamental defining aspects of our genus.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:14 PM on April 4, 2022 [2 favorites]
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- Remind yourself that death is NORMAL and everyone has felt this way. Everyone has lost someone, everyone has a body that has to go somewhere. It is normal and healthy and proper for a body to be cremated. The person is helping make space for other people. See it as their last act of generosity to have their body changed in a quick, compact way. If someone is buried, that's also not great to over-think - in that case I would frame it as a natural, slow way. The point is that ALL ways have beauty in them.
- Tell yourself, "This is an intrusive thought and I don't need to think this right now. I will put it aside and think of it later this summer if I want. Death is normal, grief is healthy, and I don't need intrusive thoughts right now; I just need to be cozy and calm."
- Be really physically comfortable. Wear jammies, cozy up under a soft fuzzy blanket, drink tea, be warm and cozy. Eat comforting foods.
- Take care of my body - drink lots of water, have a shower every day, and especially get lots of sleep. Emotions are mostly made of physical chemicals (adrenaline, cortisol, serotonin, etc) and your body will do its best work to process and regulate them -- when you're asleep.
- Zone out with a calm phone game. Something like I Love Hue Too or Bejewelled or Blokudoku even Tetris - it just has to be on a slow mode that doesn't speed up (you don't need more stress chemicals). Whatever it is, play it lightly and slowly, don't compete with yourself or look at your score. Just zone out.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 10:46 AM on April 3, 2022 [5 favorites]