Desi Anwar

Yesterday I attended two different social events in one day: a funeral and an engagement party. Unlike other occasions we normally mark, such as birthdays, these are occasions that have a deeper and wider significance to the people other than the person involved. Funerals in particular, remind me of the fact of being human.

Humans thrive on ceremonies. Ceremonies are ritual observances to mark specific events that remind them of being part of a society or tradition. We, as a specie after all, are social animals. Animals on the other hand, have fewer ceremonies, mainly focusing on mating rites (funny little bird dances, weird sounds that are supposed to attract the opposite sex), territorial claims (peeing on trees) and for more complex social groups, choosing the leader of the tribe.

We humans have a handful of them. Though they may differ in forms and degrees, depending on a particular society’s culture and traditions, they mainly centre on the marking of occasions deemed important to the person’s life (birthdays, coming of age, graduation) or the society’s (weddings, funerals, baptism, circumcisions etc.). Whatever the form, these ceremonies, now largely superficial and more often than not, necessary and tiresome obligations are created to reinforce our position in the natural order of things – our vertical (religious, spiritual, natural) relations and our horizontal (family, group, society, other fellow humans) relations. They may not be to our taste or comprehension, but we indulge them all the same, much like the furniture we inherit from our grandparents. You don’t have the heart to throw them away and yet they don’t really go with anything else in the house. So we keep them covered and dutifully dust them when the families come to visit. When we fulfill these obligations, therefore, it is mostly in order to make others feel that they too are fulfilling their obligations and so on in a circle of social charades.

An engagement is touching because it rests on an optimism of the prospects of happiness and the fulfillment that a marriage will bring. Although many cynical words have been penned on the evils of marriage, nevertheless engagements between the young are almost like gifts that adults indulge their children on their Christmas and birthdays with. To fulfill their sense of obligations and to shield them from the truth of real life and adulthood that is not so romantic. (I haven’t heard of engagement parties for second or subsequent marriages) So let us celebrate the marking of the occasion when parents dutifully execute their parental obligations and allow the children to also undergo the trials and tribulations of a married life because ‘courtship to marriage is a very witty prelude to a dull play’ (William Congreve, 1693) and that ‘it is possible, though not very probable, that there may be joy in marriage,’ (Lord Chesterfield, Letters to his son, 1774).

Out of all our social or religious ceremonies (as a matter of fact the origins of all our ceremonies are religious in the sense that they bind us to some higher power, whether deities, nature or the law) the one that I find (morbidly) interesting and worth going to are funerals. A funeral is perhaps the only gathering in which (if it’s your own funeral) you’re the centre of the party and yet you’re not there to enjoy it. While a birthday marks the successful passing of another year walking the planet, the funeral I like to think is the culmination of that success – the triumph of having passed what Shakespeare called as the trials and tribulations of life before earning one’s diploma and graduate to a higher level of existence.

And when you attend someone else’s funeral, it is in effect, to pay tribute to the person’s efforts of having lived his life on earth and to learn from that person’s achievements, the successes and also the failures. Funerals for me is an important ritual because they remind us the living that life is nothing more than a schoolroom in which we learn our life lessons and try to graduate to the next level. To be sure we mourn the departure of our loved ones but this is generally for egotistic reasons and short-lived. For the dead person himself it is a triumph of having faced the many challenges that life brings, the freedom from a physical existence with all it’s pain, suffering and constraints of mortality and the realization of one’s true essence: a divine projection of a divine potential. Hence, as such, it is a moving (but not tragic) occasion, a solemn but not morbid celebration and a happy (in it’s real sense of meaning of being in the flow of fulfillment) event. It is after all the pinnacle of our earthly life; an ending that we have rehearsed for throughout our existence. To quote Thomas Fuller ‘The first breath is the beginning of death.’

The Writer is an Indonesian Journalist.
See also:
http://quotidian.desianwar.net/