All Flesh is Grasse

You wouldn't expect me to enjoy humanist funeral services very much. Perhaps 'enjoyment' isn't the right word for funerals anyway, but you know what I mean. I've been to a couple and always find them 'thin' compared to Christian funerals. I haven't warmed to any of the officiants who've taken the ones I've been to, but that's probably no worse than Christian ministers of different sorts. Of course you daren't, daren't so much as suggest any negative feelings, because what can you do with them? But what I most dislike came in front of me on Wednesday. That afternoon I took a funeral service at the crematorium and noticed a folder on the table where I was putting my things. This turned out to be the notes left by the officiant at a humanist funeral earlier in the day. Usually humanist funerals spend the vast bulk of their time waxing lyrical about the heroic achievements of the deceased, but there was no trace of a biography in the notes, so I assume somebody else had read a tribute or something of that sort. Instead there was a passage from Lucretius's De Rerum Natura and some heartwarming statements along the following lines.

For those of us who hold that the individual life concludes with death, it is nevertheless not the end. ... Arnold may be gone, but he lives on in your memories.

It is nevertheless not the end? Yes it is. In any commonly understood sense, for Arnold it definitely is the end. This particular celebrant didn't say 'his life returns to the earth', as I have heard on other occasions, but it doesn't do that either. At best, the incinerated remains of the minerals that made Arnold's physical body return to the earth, but not 'his life', his consciousness. As for Arnold 'living on' in his loved ones' memories, no he doesn't. They may have memories of him, but those memories are not 'him living', they're a set of synaptic responses in the brains of those who shared some aspect of his life when it was a life which will themselves decay and come to an end. Call me simple-minded, but all this is metaphor, not truth. I never, ever use language like this.

In a way I sympathise, because what on earth can you say? A truly honest humanist funeral would state, if it said anything, 'Arnold is dead and we are here to dispose efficiently and cleanly of the collection of carbon, phosphor and other elements that make up his body. Some of the things he did were good and some were bad. You will remember him for a while, less and less accurately as time goes on, and eventually you too will die and nobody will remember him at all.' What we have here is an attempt to accommodate through linguistic sleight-of-hand what the officiant believes, or doesn't believe, with the perceived need to comfort Arnold's family and friends with the thought that in some way he 'lives on'. Shouldn't atheists be brave enough to combat this weak-mindedness? Or perhaps it doesn't really matter?