The English tabloid the Daily Mail reports on Belgium’s Plan to Wash Its Dead Down the Drain, and the paper is not exaggerating. As the subhead puts it: “Bodies would be dissolved in caustic solution… and flushed into the sewer.” The process is called “resomation,” and the article says that six American states allow it.
Compare that with Fr. Rick Frechette’s care even for the nameless and unclaimed dead, described at the end of Matt Labash’s Weekly Standard article, Love Among the Ruins.
Haiti might be the only place where death with dignity entails being buried five-to-a-cardboard coffin. But it is moving and beautiful. Yet, I suggest to Frechette, it seems futile. Why do this? However horrible their lives were, this isn’t going to change that. Why spend so much time and energy serving people who’ll never know they’ve been served?
Frechette thinks about it a long while, then says, “If the dead are garbage, then the living are walking garbage.”
I watch Raphael and Fred working down in the pits. In the heat, they look like they’ve gone for a swim. Their close-cropped hair turns chalky white from the loose dirt falling in around them. They come out of the pits, which are so deep, they need running starts up the sides, and then have to grab someone’s hand above ground to pull them all the way out. Father Rick, his vestments stained with dirt and sweat, takes a spot above the body bags and cardboard coffins. There, he offers the last words these forgotten souls will ever have spoken to them:
The evening has come. The busy world is hushed. The fever of life is over. And your work on earth is left undone. In His great mercy, may God give you a safe lodging, a holy rest, and peace at last. May their souls and the souls of all the faithful, departed to the mercy of God, rest in peace.
July 9th, 2010 | 9:25 am
“If the dead are garbage, then the living are walking garbage.”
If that’s true — and it is — what does that mean Belgium thinks of its dead . . . and its living?
“And it is no bad test of a people’s heart being in the right place, how they care for their dead and for the resting-places of the dead.” John Baines, “Sermons”, p. 149 (1875).
July 9th, 2010 | 11:52 am
“Frechette thinks about it a long while, then says, “If the dead are garbage, then the living are walking garbage.”
One can view this statement, not as an aesthetic proposition, but as a mere theological statement of fact. Synonymous with “all flesh is grass”. It is good for the soul to remember that our flesh is future worm issue, whether we are buried or liquefied.
Our response is not to think ill of the living, including ourselves, but to more diligently seek the redemption of both our bodies and souls. “But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.” Phil 3:20-21
July 10th, 2010 | 5:45 am
Sadly, we seem to live in a world that disrespects, devalues, and cheapens human life. All life has dignity, and tremendous, indeed, priceless, value, as so wonderfully exemplified by Fr. Frechette.
July 10th, 2010 | 6:55 am
Even by the standards of the British tabloid press, “Belgium considers proposals to dissolve bodies and flush them into sewer systems” is pretty sensationalist.
The process is very similar to cremation except it happens with chemicals rather than heat and fire: the soft tissues of the body get dissolved into a liquid while the bones become bleached and fragile so they can be ground up and placed into an urn.
When a body is cremated, on the other hand, the soft tissues get vaporized and released into the atmosphere where they presumably have a tendency to get inhaled by other people or dissolved in rain droplets and recycled back into the ecosystem. The body is mostly water in the first place. What is left in the “ashes” is actually the remains of the bones which then get ground up into a fine powder.
The article does not actually cite any evidence that Belgium is, in fact, considering disposing of the bone ash or liquid residue in the sewage system.
If this strikes anyone as gruesome, I wonder how the same person reacts to the thought of having one’s decaying flesh consumed by bacteria, maggots or worms. Death is not a pleasant thought. I don’t see why this particular process is uniquely horrific.
July 11th, 2010 | 8:23 pm
Any resemblance of this procedure to cremation should make us question the appropriateness of the latter.
July 12th, 2010 | 1:19 am
I know that in Catholic teaching, burying the dead is considered one of the corporal works of mercy, part of our duty to love our neighbors. I may just be too steeped in the traditional approach, but the process of rendering a body into a virtual soup of nothingness does not seem like an act of love to me.
I realize that the natural decay process does often result in the gradual disintigration of all traces of the body, but then there are also skeletons of human burials dating back thousands of years that do remain. When we see them laid out with care, we know this was someone who was cared for, and not garbage. To me that bespeaks something central to our humanity.
As a final aside, the article quotes a prayer said over the graves as: “May their souls and the souls of all the faithful, departed to the mercy of God, rest in peace.”
It’s interesting to read it with this punctuation, but in fact, the actual prayer is: “May their souls and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mecy of God, rest in peace.” (the faithful departed = all those who have died who were faithful to Christ).
July 12th, 2010 | 5:59 am
[...] By nohiddenmagenta Belgians have a unique, and perhaps morally disrespectful, way to get rid of their dead: The English tabloid the Daily Mail reports on Belgium’s Plan to Wash Its Dead Down the Drain, [...]
July 12th, 2010 | 6:36 am
I realize that the natural decay process does often result in the gradual disintigration of all traces of the body, but then there are also skeletons of human burials dating back thousands of years that do remain. When we see them laid out with care, we know this was someone who was cared for, and not garbage. To me that bespeaks something central to our humanity.
Different strokes for different folks. I wouldn’t want to say that Hindus disrespect their dead by cremating them — quite the opposite. Cremation is highly ritualized in India and is just as moving as some of the Christian funeral traditions. Indian Zoroastrians and Tibetan Buddhists leave bodies out in the open to be eaten by vultures. Not the way I’d choose to go but so be it.
The point, of course, is the one thing common to humans is precisely our differences in funeral and burial rituals. The bacteria within our bodies turns us into “soup” and gases over the course of time while worms and maggots and other scavengers feed on our flesh when buried.
The bones sometimes fossilize and remain. I think more commonly they eventually also disintegrate over a much longer period of time until nothing remains. Most of the dinosaurs probably only left traces in the form of the liquid you pump into your gas tank.
July 14th, 2010 | 9:47 pm
[...] Mills published a post at the First Thoughts blog last Friday entitled Rest in Solution, which linked to a Daily Mail article about Belgium’s plan to wash its dead down the drain, a [...]
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