Gravedigger man

I was drawn up short this morning when reading The New Yorker (12 March 2007). After blithely saying in the previous blog that I wasn't too bothered what happened to my earthly remains, I read: "The obsession with burial and what to do with bodies once life has fled is a defining human trait." The author Adam Gopnik suggests it is as much a subject of poetry as love or jealousy and points to it as the central subject of The Illiad and of Sophocles' Antigone. He is right. Indeed I can think of no other animal that fusses over the the carcasses of its dead.

The New Yorker piece is largely about the death of Anna Nicole Smith, the former oil millionaire's wife whose remains have been battled over in court by her mother and boyfriend. Anna Nicole has now been buried but if the appeal succeeds she could well be dug up again, in an obsessional tug of war. Gopnik quotes Antigone: "It is the dead/ Not the living, who make the longest demands/ We die forever."

Clearly there is something elemental about this concern with the hereafter and corporeal remains. But I have a feeling that I am not alone in thinking that the ritual of leaving, the sense of occasion, the marking of the moment are becoming increasingly important in people's minds. As we are loosing the conventional rituals, there is more scope for adapting them to suit yourself, more scope for creativity and choice. Perhaps it is a sign of our increased narcissism that we want to register more of our worldly character as we leave the world behind.