where do you go?
Sorry, I can't help the melodrama. I don't mean, "do you go up to a big bright light in the sky", I mean, where does the hunk of meat that used to be you... go? The second half of this summer has been a strange one, and while I haven't been to any funerals, I've spent more time in hospitals, elderly care homes and so on, than I have ever done before and it's put the whole idea of getting old, going a bit mad, and finally passing on at the front of my brain.
Death is surrounded by such mysticism, such taboo, that we very rarely talk about it - I even felt a bit sacriligeous, a bit offensive saying that you get old, go mad, and then you die... Seeing my old Gran in the 'home'/waiting room, its an unspoken thought that goes around all heads in the family. What happens when... what do we do about...
So in our minds we have a huge mental block, a stigma of death - completely understandably. But there are a lot of us around... and so a lot of death going on, a lot of the time. The biggest of individual events has no special significance to the civil authorities, regardless of how much respect and sympathy they are ordered to have. They have a job to do. When you die, a process starts.
Say the average life expectancy is 75 years. Thats 900 months. 27375 days! Does that sound a little or a lot to you? You might get a few more years than that, hopefully you won't get less. But (and this maths has some holes in it I know, but I can't be bothered to research the death rate) if we've got a population of 58million, then your 'last day' is going to happen to over 2000 people per day. That's a lot of meat. 154 tonnes of dead humans A DAY to be brutal, in the UK alone.
You can't be kept around too long, or you'll start to smell, and they have a rule book about Health and Safety, and preventing diseases. So you have to be disposed of fairly soon. Its a Harsh Reality.
When you look at the figures you realise how big a physical job this all is... burial, cremation etc etc. And you start to realise that it MUST be a horribly organised, factory-like process. The individual story of each person disappears into the production line. Health and Safety rules apply - rather than being carried by 6 sombre pall bearers, you're wheeled on a stainless steel trolley. Trolley? Can't be any steps then, and one of your mourners might be in a wheelchair, so you glide along on automated ball bearings.
You're being cremated... most people are. You have to be a pretty committed religious addict these days to be buried. And so, you are outsourced to the local crematorium, owned by Death Corp, a multi-armed multi national, more likely to be called Memoria Inc, or Elysium Ltd... They own 200 hundred crematoria across the country, and have a bulk gas contract with Shell's LPG department to maximise profits. They're hedged against future price rises from North Sea gas to lock in future profits...
And environmental rules and targets apply to everyone, especially civil buildings. So in crematoria now, they have HEAT RECLAMATION... I will not explain, but wonder where the warm glow from the underfloor heating is coming from during the service? (This, unsurprisingly, doesn't happen in Germany...) Teaching them how to be efficient for once, but that might be pricking their collective memory a little too far. It keeps costs down, you only need one heating system and ticks lot of green boxes when you go into planning...
Then there is the form of the building itself.
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