the hardest thing

By Francis Robert

open caskets are for suckers.

i have attended a lot of funerals in my line of work. a lot. A ton of them have been open casket. I find it horrifying. I know a lot of people find it gives them a sense of closure or whatever, but to me, I just see a lot of meat sitting in a box. I have seen people I know, not intimately, not family, but people I knew. And it does not help. It just looks... cold. And fills me with dread.

the whole business of being dead, I mean, he chemicals, the caskets, the liners, the biers, the plot, the headstone, the service, the limo... holy crap. It's like this enormous expensive really sad prom. Not to mention the food and the venue for the viewing or wake. How did it come to this? Funerals were once a time of honor for the dead. Burning a fallen comrade as they floated majestically against the waves. Even the old wakes were events to reckon with. the services surrounding the dead were a way of comping, but all of our modern mechanisms seem so sterile and horrifying.

I mean, I want my funeral to not even have my body. I don't get it. What is the obsession with the body? Do we not believe people? I am not being flip, is that really it? Is there some part of us that just refuses to believe the person is gone until we see them lifeless? Let me tell you too, you really are lifeless. I see these people who I knew in life, and they look... dead. Not sleeping, not whatever, they look dead. Like the life has gone out of the very skin cells. It's really kind of incredible.

We all want to be remembered. We all want people to wail and cry and shout and laugh and get drunk and eat and be merry at our passing. We want stories good and bad, told about us. We need that. We human. We all gonna die. It's just a matter of when and how.

Old Article, Still Relevant...

Divestment call 'bold and beautiful'
Christopher M. Tweel, Greensboro, N.C., Reprinted from "The Layman" on Tuesday, December 7, 2004


The call to divest from multinational corporations with ties to Israel was one of the boldest and most beautiful moves the church in general has made for a long time. The action only strengthens my feelings that the Presbyterian denomination is one that is filled with people who make a habit out of study and prayerful consideration on important aspects of faith.

It does pain me however to read some of the comments of other lay people who feel that the church's decision was in error and that, in fact, Israel's position and "right to defend" itself were not being taken into account before the decision was made.

To those, I would ask, or better, plead that they follow the footsteps of those who made the decision and rely on their own research to come to conclusions before passing judgment on the General Assembly. By that I mean more than what Fox News and CNN can piece together and spoon feed to the American public.

To date, 3,492 Palestinians have died since September 30, 2000. Compare this to the 986 Israelis who have died in the same span. Fully 20 percent of the intifada victims were Palestinian children. Consider also that while some organizations resort to terrorist tactics the large portion of those deaths have been civilian casualties while the Israeli losses have been almost entirely within the ranks of their armed forces.

Think also of the numerous American peace workers who have been killed by Israeli armed forces. Rachel Corrie, the American girl who refused to move when an Israeli Defense Force (IDF) Caterpillar was going to tear down her host family's home. The bulldozer simply drove over her, crushing her to death. A sniper shot Brian Avery, from North Carolina, in the face, while he was trying to carry two children off the street during a tear gas attack by the IDF.

Over and over again IDF and the Israeli government have proven to be callous and unwilling to find a solution that acknowledges the Palestinian people as having the right to life, and to a quality of life that all people all people deserve. Israel breaks international rights laws over and over and the UN has condemned its actions more than once. Most recently, the UN voted unanimously (with the exception of the US) that the Wall in Israel was an apartheid action and the World Court declared it unlawful to continue.

Yet the Israeli government ignores them, and the US has yet to withdraw its support-encouraging injustice with its silence.

The action by PCUSA is a bold and brilliant stand that makes exactly the right statement to the world and our own country. We recognize that the situation in Israel and Palestine is complex beyond measure and has been raging for 50 years and more. Yet we as a church will not support oppression – even when that oppression may be described as "deserving." This was never the way of Christ. And that will never be the way of the church that follows him.