I discovered something I had no prior idea about today. Steel and concrete burial vaults as a common practice in graveyards; because “You want the best protection available for your loved ones.” I think someone should point out that they’ve already lost that battle.
Apparently, amongst other things they’re supposed to prevent subsidence - which doesn’t seem like such a problem to me, particularly since there’s obviously extra soil from the hole in the first place.
Emporers, kings, queens and even Presidents etc have always done it. Some because they believed they were really coming back, needed some good shit to see them through to the afterlife etc. And some just because they were “important.”
But it struck me as really odd that you would want to seal a coffin in a watertight concrete box with a 200 year warranty, so that the skeleton will be swimming in it’s own juices until the thing breaks, centuries down the line.
Doesn’t it show a somewhat inflated sense of self-importance to build a tomb designed to be sealed for decades if not centuries? And an inability to accept the basic fact that they’re dead and rotting back into the soil sooner or later?
It seems somewhat decadent (no pun intended) to pour so much money and resources into a hole in the ground. And ironically, enclosure of the coffin to protect it from the inevitable seems to indicate precisely the opposite of closure (acceptance of reality and moving on) that funeral rites are supposed to bring.
At best decadent, at worst a big con by a funeral industry, crazy waste of money and resources and psychologically messed up. Cardboard coffin please.
Not a romantic bone in your to-dust-too-soon body, eh?
WHEN my grave is broke up again
Some second guest to entertain,
—For graves have learn`d that woman-head,
To be to more than one a bed—
And he that digs it, spies
A bracelet of bright hair about the bone,
Will he not let us alone,
And think that there a loving couple lies,
Who thought that this device might be some way
To make their souls at the last busy day
Meet at this grave, and make a little stay?
In Taiwan they start with sealing the full wood and a ton weighing coffin … they better do, because the corps is left at the house for about month … rot and stink will already part of the deal … but hey not short of money to make it in the afterlife, they pack 759,000,000 ghost$ worth of fake money under the body … probably to absorb the bodily juices that otherwise would leak on the kitchen floor … have some popcorn …
Plasticization is another matter. It’s the concept of doing all that and then throwing it in the ground that seems particularly bizarre. I can understand interesting/odd things being done with corpses by rich eccentrics. Jeremy Bentham is at the top of the stairs at UCL, although his head is elsewhere. But persuading regular people that pouring their money into the ground for the sake of the dead is a social norm to be obeyed strikes me as vaguely immoral. You can’t take it with you!
Some of us may criticise ghost money as both irrational and wasteful/polluting - me, for one. But spending a lot of money on a substantial coffin and then putting it in the ground isn’t so different. It seems to have something to do with face. A last, ostentatious display of wealth on something completely unnecessary.
Seems they also put real jewels and stuff. About a month ago I saw on teh news that an angry mob of relatives were complaining their ancestors tombs had been robbed. They had packed off millions of nts worth or pearls and gold necklaces and stuff with dear Auntie or Uncle. :s :loco:
Perhaps, but who do you hold when afraid? I don’t how care how close to death I am, if you’re around, you ain’t getting nothing. [/quote]
:snivel:
Say it ain’t so! You mean you’ve been leading me on this whole time?
Overly ostentatious graves look like fear in the face of their own later certain death on the part of the mourners - or the dead person if they specified this. Or society if it is a social norm.
have some popcorn …
