JymWrites: Dead And Buried With Lies

Dead and funeral or burial rites are the last ceremonies performed to usher the dead to the next life. It is connected to the final disposition of a dead person’s body, varying from culture to culture, some bury their dead and some cremate them.

Apart from expressing our beliefs, funerals being the means to communicate our thoughts and feelings about the death of someone we loved and providing support for the mourners among others, the greater part of funeral rites are filled with lies and are messing the crucial purposes of burying a dead person.

Funeral rites now are nothing but lies; in most cases, we pretend to be paying our final respect to the dead while what we are doing is the opposite. Funerals are not about the dead anymore, it is more about the living; how we can stage a ceremony that will be the talk of the town. So we invest in big parties and call them funerals.

I remember when my grandmother was sick and needed money to stay at the hospital for treatment, no one had much interest in that, to some point, not even her children and the excuse was with the non-availability of money but when she died, I still don’t know how they did it, how they raised the money to bury my grandmother with. Everything was well-staged to meet standards so as not to disgrace the family name.

I know if we pick 10 funerals, 9 out of the 10 face the same harsh reality of dead people being buried with lies; lies that they are loved, lies that everything is okay with the family that couldn’t invest in him when he was alive but will give everything up just to see him rot in the ground.

There are expensive private cemeteries that we pride in when we want to bury our dead, some of these people may have had troubles paying their rent but will find it okay to buy an expensive rotting place for a dead body. It the value we placed on dead bodies that cost us a lot when we want to buy a piece of land to put the dead body and the same reason coffins are so expensive as if it is the dead person’s carrier to heaven or the next life or whatever we may call it.

I believe there is no amount of dignity that we as humans can place on a dead person that would matter and there is no amount of rest in peace we can say to the dead that will grant them peace in the next life. Our help to them ends the moment they gave up their final breath, our prayers cannot save them from hell or from what they are going to face next.

For example, traveling to Winneba from Oda, there is a private cemetery that promises dignity, peace, and serenity and I was wondering what the dead needed dignity for. The dead lifeless body seeking serenity, what other serenity there is to be dead? And can we really promise the dead peace? Do we have the power to give that to the dead? The answer is no, we can’t, I think we know that but we just decide to burry with lies and hope they find some peace.

It is the time we know that anything the dead faces after their death correspond to the life they lived while alive; the choices they made will give them peace, dignity, and serenity if they lived it right and not some graveyard. So we should stop wasting money and time on dead bodies, we should stop deceiving ourselves that we are giving them the best and start burying them with some respect.

We should try and reinvest ourselves in the funeral rites because individuals, families, and societies as a whole is suffering from the meaningless funeral rites we are staging and encouraging.