Funeral Rituals Quotes

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.

Apparently one of the most uncertain things in the world is the funeral of a religion.

I’m always feeling death, and that is a part of life. When you know a lot of people, you will always experience death.

On a day of burial there is no perspective--for space itself is annihilated. Your dead friend is still a fragmentary being. The day you bury him is a day of chores and crowds, of hands false or true to be shaken, of the immediate cares of mourning. The dead friend will not really die until tomorrow, when silence is round you again. Then he will show himself complete, as he was--to tear himself away, as he was, from the substantial you. Only then will you cry out because of him who is leaving and whom you cannot detain.

The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die.

When I was 7 years old, I put on shows for everyone at my grandpa's funeral. I was always the little entertainer.

When it comes to death, we know that laughter and tears are pretty much the same thing. And so, laughing and crying, we said good-bye to my grandmother. And when we said goodbye to one grandmother, we said good-bye to all of them. Each funeral was a funeral for all of us. We lived and died together. All of us laughed when they lowered my grandmother into the ground. And all of us laughed when they covered her with dirt. And all of us laughed as we walked and drove and rode our way back to our lonely, lonely houses.

For days after death hair and fingernails continue to grow, but phone calls taper off.

Chopin--Two embalmers at work upon a minor poetthe scent of tuberosesAutumn rain.

You see mock death in movies every day, but when it really happens, you're not used to it. Most things in life, you get better the more that you do them, but this is one of those things you don't really want to get any better at.

They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds. I put this book here for you, who once lived So that you should visit us no more.

Medicine for the dead is too late

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral.

Indians do not hinder the progress of their dead by embalming or tight coffining. When the spirit has gone they give the body back to the earth. the earth welcomes the body-coaxes new life and beauty from it, hurries over what men shudder at. Lovely tender herbage bursts from the graves, swiftly, exulting over corruption.

The other mammoths were as protective of the dying as they were of newborns, and they gathered around tying to make the fallen one get up. When all was over, they buried the dead ancestor under piles of dirt, grass, leaves, or snow. Mammoths were even known to bury other dead animals, including humans.