Comment: Burying your dead without religion
The proportion of people who don't identify with a specific faith is growing. What does this mean for the future of funeral rites?
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Vanitas Philippe de Champaigne, circa 1671
26 Aug 2014 - 9:38 AM
By Jemma Green
If you're interested, there's a tattoo parlor on the island of Oahu in Hawaii where an artist named Dodge may be able to give you a tattoo that incorporates a dead body—literally. “You simply take the cremains, or the ashes, and you mix them in with the ink, and then you ink that onto the person," explained Candi Cann, a professor at Baylor University and the author of Virtual Afterlives: Grieving the Dead in the Twenty-First Century, which came out in June.
"It’s really not that different from wearing a piece of jewelry that your grandma gave you: You’re not wearing the piece of jewelry—you’re wearing your grandma.”
For most of human history, religious ceremony has helped people deal with death, providing explanations about souls and the afterlife along with rituals to help the living deal with their grief. Not all religions do death the same way. "There are certain denominations within Christianity and certain religions in general that do a better job of remembering the dead," said Cann. "Like the Catholics: There’s a very set calendar for remembering, and it’s still tied down to the religious calendar."
Tattooing yourself with a dead person's remains is one new way of memorialising death in the absence of faith, she said. "As society becomes more secular, and people are more and more turning to that 'spiritual but not religious category,' they’re forming their own do-it-yourself ways of remembering the dead."
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