What is a fitting way to mark death? Honoring the deceased

There are many "right" ways, and they have changed over the centuries.

By S. Reid Warren 3d

In his June 16 commentary, "Death be not fittingly handled," Mark Dixon wrote of "the prolonged honor and homage paid" to former President Ronald Reagan at his funeral. He then contrasted that with what he sees as the too-often cavalier nature of memorial services without the body and the coffin "as we dispose of our loved ones as quickly and as discreetly as week-old fish."

Mr. Dixon's column leaves out the wishes of the ones who have died and the wishes of their living relatives. My own parents designated that their bodies be given to medical science. This would allow physicians and scientists to learn more about the results of aging, how colon cancer was arrested in my father 30 years before his death at 86, and how arthritis and other diseases affected their bodies.

I think there is nobility in my parents' gestures to further medicine and science. They honored the living by giving their bodies, in the process giving to society in a way that was uniquely their own. I like to think that Nancy Reagan would have respected their way, because she talks frequently of furthering medical research.

Neither of my parents wanted a memorial service or any sort of funeral. They didn't believe in them. But this year, after my mother died at 95 from natural causes - her mind was fully intact - my brother and I had a family gathering. The few living nieces and nephews of my mother were there, along with my brother and his wife, my wife and me, our two children and their spouses and our four grandchildren. People brought photographs of my parents when they were younger, of my mother as a child, of my mother and some of the relatives at this gathering, and then some of us spoke about my mother. There were loving comments and humorous anecdotes, some irreverent, some sad and nostalgic, but all about my mother and who she was.

It was a lovely occasion and a loving family get-together. Humor was more evident than sentiment, and my only regret was that my mother could not have been there to laugh along with the rest of us. She liked dark humor.

There are many individual ways and many social and cultural ways worldwide to mark the death of someone. There are many different ways in which human beings have marked the events surrounding death, and they have changed over the centuries. There is plenty of room, therefore, for all of us to mark the occasion in our own way.

I don't believe in a god or an afterlife. I believe in life before death. I will follow my parents' example and give my body to medical research. What my family may or may not do after I die is of no consequence, and I will feel nothing one way or the other.

There seems to be an angry or snide aspect to Mr. Dixon's commentary. In addition to using the phrase "week-old fish," he refers to another approach to dealing with a dead family member by saying: "Excuse me, but is there anything this more resembles than taking out the trash?" And in referring to Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of President Abraham Lincoln, both of whom were plagued by clinical depression during their lives, he says: "Mary Lincoln, in contrast [to the composure of Nancy Reagan and Jackie Kennedy] took to her bed and stayed there, thus confirming the nation's already low opinion of her."

During the week that the nation celebrated and honored the life of Ronald Reagan, the nation also "quickly and discreetly" disposed of other loved ones as the dead young men and women from the war in Iraq were brought to Dover Air Force Base under cover of darkness. Not much honor or reverence or national recognition of these lost lives. And they did not have the chance to live four score and 13 years as President Reagan had - only 19, or 22, or 34, or 41 short years, some of them only a few years out of their own childhood.