A Certain Kind of Afterlife

A couple weeks back, in my Death and Dying class, we watched a documentary entitled, "A Certain Kind of Death." It was probably the most frightening movie I have ever seen. It follows coroners, autopsy people, and basically all the government services that process dead people. They were following people who had no living family or friends nearby to make the phone calls, do the cleanup, go to the funeral, right to the crematorium. Unflinchingly honest, this documentary showed even severely decomposed bodies. At multiple points I nearly lost my breakfast and at other times I could only watch through trembling fingers. 

Thank God, and knock on wood, I have never seen a dead body up close and personal. Rotting, black flesh, eyes and nose caving in, maggots in their orifices... it was extremely disgusting. And at the end, they showed bodies at the crematorium, with blood and other fluids dripping everywhere. The technicians put the body in the oven like a pizza, then open it and with a rake break up pieces of bone. Then the bone pieces get ground up in a blender. And if the remains go unclaimed for years... they have to make room for new boxes, and dump them all into a hole in the ground. Clouds of ashes, pieces of people floating through the air... this movie was nothing short of horrific. And yet, it is reality.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. 

Everyone I know, their heads will one day be black and maggots will crawl from their shrinking lips and their orifices will ooze body fluid into the earth. My friends. My professors. My brother and sister. My parents. Me. 

That day we watched the movie, I had already planned to go to the nursing home to visit some people from church. I already knew I needed to go, but I felt even more sure about the decision after this chilling documentary. But the whole time, in the back of my mind, I thought: one day these gnarled hands gripping mine will go pale and ghostly and then rot away. And the rest of my mind suppressed the thoughts, knowing that my contemplation of death would show on my face, that people in the nursing home need hope and life, not death, spoken to them.

And as Christians, we have the greatest hope in the world. We do not deny our bodies will become ashes and dust. We know that isn't the end. The clouds of ash, the clouds of people will turn to flesh. The rotting corpses will turn to fresh, shiny life. We believe, as the creed says, in the resurrection of the body. 

What must that mean to my old people, whom I love, whom I pity, who stand on the precipice of death so far away from me in my naive youth? The ones with wheelchairs and walkers will run again. The ones who can't hear or see anymore will behold the face and voice of God. 

A physical, literal resurrection of the body, not a spiritual heaven but a coming new heavens and new earth... after watching that documentary, I think I understand a bit better. Death is horrible, it's disgusting, frankly. I thought of Martha, who told Jesus Lazarus' body would smell. In that culture, death was more frequent and more public without hospitals and coroners and funeral directors. But death is always unsanitary. Belief in a certain kind of afterlife, the biblical one, in which we will live a perfect, embodied, healed existence, means we can have hope even as we look on the grisliness of death. 

And after that horrible Friday, Jesus' body turned that awful translucent, pale color, his tongue lay askew, the hands that healed the blind were like rancid meat...

All so that won't be the end for me. Or for you. 

If you can stomach it, it was a good documentary. But keep some tissues and a trash can and a Bible handy.