Amorning lark sang at Mary Borovich’s funeral last month. We all stood with heads bowed by her grave at Hollister’s Calvary Catholic Cemetery. And during the middle of a prayer given by a priest, the little bird suddenly let out a sweet-throated warble.
It seemed perfectly appropriate. Perhaps the shrill notes served as a sign from Mary that she now listened to a choir of heavenly angels. Or so we, her friends, would like to believe.
Funerals are for the living much more than for the dead, of course. These rituals give us psychological closure. They help us deal with our emotional grief when someone we truly cared about has left our lives.
But funerals – burial rituals – also help us come to grips with the greatest mystery we face. After our mortal bodies stop functioning, will we exist somehow beyond this earthly sphere? And what might it be like in that Great Beyond?
Like almost everyone else, I’ve often wondered about those questions. I guess we’re all in the same quandary, because the puzzle affects us all so personally. We’re all going to die. We all know that. But we don’t have a real clue what to expect after that moment of our death.
Early humans at least 115,000 years ago seemed to sense there might be an afterlife. Perhaps when members of the tribe died, the others noticed something was a bit strange about those persons. The dead weren’t simply sleeping. Their bodies felt cold and stiff. And after a few days, they stank and flies began to buzz.
Something was definitely different. Life had left. The body had once contained some essence making up the person, but that essential life force was now gone. The scary thing was, no one knew where it went – or if it might return.
Over time, humans developed the idea of a soul to explain that mysterious energy fueling life. And perhaps with the optimism of seeing loved ones again, humans also began to develop the belief of a realm after life. We are a hopeful species.
Neanderthals were the first humans known to bury the dead with rituals suggesting a religious belief. Perhaps bodies were first buried as a practicality. After all, you couldn’t have Uncle Fred’s corpse putrefying there in the cave. What might the neighbor Neanderthals think?
But you also didn’t want to just toss the physical remains into a hole as if they were this week’s garbage. So, to honor folks like dead Fred – and keep their souls from coming back and pestering everyone – burial rituals developed.
The Neanderthals positioned the body in a fetal position, then placed food and tools and jewelry in the graves. Pine boughs and flowers were also sometimes added. Then stones were placed over the body – probably to keep animals from rooting it up.
Certainly mourners invoked some kind of formal farewell, most likely led by a shaman priest who knew the proper procedures and prayers to send the soul off.
Every culture puts its own spin on the traditions of dealing with the dead, but no one can beat the ancient Egyptians for funeral rites. Their elaborate rituals and massive pyramid tombs went a long way from throwing some corpse into a hole in the ground.
For the last 2,000 years or so, much of the western world’s view of the afterlife has focused on faith in an everlasting bliss of heaven and an everlasting agony of hell. The Church during the Middle Ages rose in political power by this heaven/hell-carrot/stick teaching of what to expect beyond. Few questioned the notion. They feared God’s – and the religious authorities’s – possible punishment.
Mary Borovich was a devote Catholic taught to believe in heaven and hell from the nuns at schools in Watsonville during her childhood years. Those early religious lessons certainly sank deep into her psyche.
One sunny morning earlier this year, when I visited her at Hollister’s Mabie Skilled Nursing Facility where she stayed, we sat outside in the patio. She asked me what I imagined conditions might be like after death. I wasn’t sure what to tell her. From her rapidly declining health at age 87, she certainly knew her end-time approached. She had pondered the question a lot.
I can’t recall exactly what words I told her, but I said I really didn’t believe in death. We’re not bodies with a soul. We’re souls with a body, I believe. Our bodies are essentially a “package” for our immortal spiritual essence to get around the physical realm in. It’s made up of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, iron and some trace minerals – nothing too exotic. And all that package material completely changes every year or so. Thus, we’re really not our mortal bodies.
I told her that when the body dies, I thought the soul might experience something like a birth – a release into a much grander existence than we can possibly imagine. Perhaps, the soul is a spark of the divine, and it’s allowed after death to adventure through the entire Cosmos as its new playground.
She smiled at my wild ideas. And I felt good that maybe they relieved her mind a bit. That was the last time I ever saw Mary.
At the end of her funeral service, the funeral director nodded to two cemetery workers. One man squeezed sealing compound around the rim of the small urn holding Mary’s ashes. He placed the lid on top, made sure it was set, and then he and his helper gently lowered the box into a freshly-dug hole in the ground.
As I watched, I knew that dust wasn’t what had made up Mary. That dust was merely the ingredients of her package. I believe that at the moment of her death, her true essence was set free to explore the Universe.
And perhaps unseen, Mary Borovich had encouraged one little morning lark to warble out a snatch of tune to tell her friends she was still near.
