Cremation, Funeral Rituals and Customs Around The World
It is being brought to our attention now in some of the political education debates what is going to be taught in schools. “Creationism the Garden of Eden, paradise versus the Big Bang, where are we from and where are we going?” asked William I. Lamers Jr. , of the Lamers Medical Group. “This is what we want to know. “After practicing psychiatry for a few years Lamers was struck by how many people came to him with problems related to death. “Whether it be in the family, unresolved grief after the death of a mother, father, husband, wife, friend or child he found that about 42 percent of the individuals he was counseling had some kind of problem related to death. “A cardiologist sent me a man who he believed to be nuts,” said Lamers. “The man believed he was going to die of a heart attack, though his heart was in perfect condition. After sitting and talking to the man who was married and wanted no children, it was easy to recognize where his problems were coming from. At the age of five the man lost his 42 year old father to a heart attack. I told the man to go home and write a story about what it is like to see your first child. “After writing the story the man realized that he was not going to die of a heart attack and his neurosis went away. “Again and again I was things like this in my work,” he said. “Then I read a study done by two psychologists at Stanford. “The psychologists did a large analytical study of all the people in California state mental hospitals and then did follow ups on their children by using California census statistics. When they graphed the number of serious medical conditions that arose In the children, the number rises drastically when the children reach the age that their parents were when they were taken away and put in the hospital system. “They wrote a paper called Anniversary Reactions and it sensitized us to what goes on when people are exposed to something that has such a severe impact in their life. All of a sudden they are getting to the point where they are the same age when this happened to their parents. “It is significant that what happened to people in the past can have impact on them later even though there is no real apparent reason for it. “We hold a lot of things in our consciousness just under the surface and those things do impact us,” said Lamers. Lamers defined “culture” as an integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief and behavior that depends on man’s capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to future generations. He concentrated on how culture is affected by death and how the funeral is man’s way of regarding death. “In the book, Funeral Customs the World Over, my dad wrote, ‘Man is an animal who buries his dead with dignity,” Lamers said. As a civilized society death is something that has to be dealt with not only from an emotional but a public health standpoint as well. “I believe that all behavior has meaning,” he said. Lamers went on to tell a story about a Russian funeral he attended with a patient. He noticed the people were taking dirt, brought from Russia and placing it in the casket, a tradition that helps his culture mourn and grieve. Grief and mourning are often misunderstood. Today people talk about grief therapy as though it is the answer to all problems. “It has become a fad that grief is an illness and that people need therapy for it,” Lamers said. “Grief is not a disease it is a normal occurrence that happens when a severe loss I experienced. It can be intense but it is something that commonly accompanies death. “Lamers explained that there are three stages in the period after someone dies” separation, transition and integration. Separation activities include procession, transport, display, costume, sacrifice, mutilation, purification and mourning. Transition activities he added are more complex since at this point the person moves on to the spirit world. In integration there are rituals of remembrance, regeneration and eventually getting back into a normal cycle of life. “The funeral as we know it is part of this macro separation, transition and integration. The funeral is a response to a loss and it is organized so that each person has a job to do,” he said. The funeral he explained says something about us as human beings, about our myths, our religious beliefs and about creation. The funeral talks about where we are going and what happens after we die.
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