ARE PRESTIGIOUS FUNERALS NECESSARY?

This is an article for adults

 Every dead person requires a fitting burial and a befitting funeral but should we carry out this duty at the expense of the living? To try to answer this question, we will take a look at how we celebrate ceremonies for our dead.

            When a person dies, the first thing the family often does is to put the body in long storage in the mortuary so that his funeral can be well planned. Sometimes no consideration is given to the money at the disposal of the bereaved family for the funeral; so-and-so must be well buried. Period. So the expenses start right at the mortuary. And this, irrespective of the maybe hard life that the deceased led and nonetheless perhaps the lack of finance for adequate medical care which hurried the dead to his grave.

            Next, messages and messengers are sent out to inform relatives and friends living near and far of the tragedy. This is quite fine. But what beats my imagination are the relatives who come to take up residence in the house of the departed at the expense of the bereaved family. These “exceptional mourners” must be fed morning, afternoon and evening whilst maybe they couldn’t afford even a single decent meal in their own homes. Someone joked and precisely so that it is the death of a person which makes some people take three meals a day. So while the body is burning up money in the cold storage, the living are doing the same in the home of the deceased.

Before the dead body is brought home, canopies must be hired; chairs too must be brought in and drinks must be bought. These days some people even hire funeral cloths. To show their pain, the family may buy a dark-coloured cloth and tear it into pieces and tie them to their wrists and/or around their heads. This is a means of exteriorising pain but is it necessary to tear a new cloth into pieces in order to show one’s affliction? Is this not tantamount to tearing up money? Can’t some living person use the cloth or the money which was used to buy it?

Prior to being laid in state, a wake-keeping ceremony is held. Instead of this being a moment of empathizing with the bereaved family, wake-keepings today have become social gatherings at which bereaved families further burn up money and time and energy. I wonder why we don’t give the same attention to matters which will take us out of underdevelopment. Fortunately some families no longer organize wake-keepings for their dead.

 Innovation is a good thing, but I find it difficult to accept it in our laying-in-state ceremonies. The dead are made to sit, stand or lie in the traditional sleeping position. It wouldn’t have mattered much if only one of these forms was used for a dead person. Instead a body is laid in state sitting; next, its clothes are changed and it is made to lie down and so on. Why do we trouble our dead so?

When a corpse is placed in the coffin, the relatives of the dead give him “gifts”. This practise was understandable in the days when our people believed that the dead person was going on a journey to the ancestors and therefore needed certain articles to do so. But now that our idea of life after death has been modified by Euro-Christian culture and Islam, do we still need to place cloth, money, food, gold, cooking utensils, or toilet articles in a coffin? Can’t we modernize the system and instead give these articles to the needy members of the family who will really make use of them here and now?

Apart from the relatives, the in-laws of a dead person also perform the ritual of giving money, ring, handkerchief, cloth and other things to the departed. As in the above case, it would have been alright if these items were kept for the living. We must accept the fact that this ritual does absolutely nothing for the dead. One may argue that no dead person has ever come back to confirm which of the traditional, Islamic or Christian affirmation tells the truth about life after death. But that is another question. The important consideration is that all three systems stress that the dead enter a spiritual life. Based on this, I believe sincerely that the dead do not need material things which are only useful in this earthly life.

In our society the burial of a person is not the end of him/her. For a week after the person has been laid to rest, the relatives of the deceased mourn him. Instead of going about their duties to develop themselves and their countries, the relatives sit in the house of the departed ostensibly whiling away their time. In the days when food was plenty and we had a lot of time to burn, this was maybe okay. But today, in a world struggling to go beyond the age of computers when things are already being done at supersonic speed, this tradition is antimony of our own interests. The earlier we buried our dead and the earlier we went about our business the better for all of us.

In developed countries, the day of burial is also the day of the final funeral rites, if such a thing exists there at all. But that is not the case in Ghana. Another day is singled out to remember the dead. This may be a few days after the burial, but it is not uncommon to find funerals celebrated months or even a year after the burial. Sincerely do the dead need all these considerations in order to lie peacefully in their graves? Your answer is as good as mine.

As if that was not grave enough, we again observe the eighth day, the fortieth day, one year’s anniversary and other anniversaries of a relative’s departure to the yonder. And at each of these moments our duty to the living stalls and the dead receive precedence. Ask yourself: is this what we call having one’s priorities right?

In the olden days drumming and singing normally characterized funeral rites. These days one may hire a live band to perform or a group to play music on cassettes and/or CDs. The bereaved again provide drinks, hire chairs and canopies. Of course, sympathizers make donations to offset the expenses, but sad sad sad: after balancing the account of some funeral celebrations, all that remain is debt and crisis. Can we, citizens of a nation undergoing development which needs the prosperity of each of its sons and daughters to build a strong national wealth, afford to be unnecessarily indebted because of a relative who has long ceased to exist? Should the departure of a maybe miserable life create more miseries for others? And even if the departed was not miserable, should we burn money?

It is evident from the summary description above that funerals are one of the rites that take up a lot of our time, money and thought. But as a nation in transition we need the time and the money and the ideas to support nation building. We Africans in general and Ghanaians in particular should henceforth learn to “let the dead bury their dead” and concentrate more on the living who rather need our attention. Let us bury high-spending funerals now by burying our dead quickly and by celebrating their funeral rites once and for all.

(Written 19^th June 1998)