The point has been made that Thursday’s funeral at the hospital morgue was a cynical PR exercise at worst, a hypocritical attempt to save face and to bring some peace to troubled consciences more like it.
Since I don’t possess the gift of getting inside people’s heads, let alone their consciences, I’ll assume the best. I’m happy to believe that the motives behind and the feelings at the funeral were entirely genuine. Mourners will have their own reasons for being at any funeral, and I don’t suppose this occasion was any different.
And yet there was something fundamentally and horribly wrong about it. On Thursday we buried 24 bodies that were intact, that belonged to recently-dead people, and that yet were nameless.
Last month, a service was held at Leicester Cathedral to mark the burial of Richard III. It was presided over by the Archbishop of Canterbury and attended by three royals and a string of distinguished guests. It was a funeral fit for a king, except there can’t have been much king left to bury. Richard III died in battle in 1485. It took much detective work to establish that bones found beneath a car park in 2012 were his.
Putting names to the bodies of the people who died in the Germanwings plane crash was another matter altogether. In that case, investigators had to work with thousands of tiny bits of burnt flesh and bone that were found scattered among the wreckage. The DNA of about 80 people was identified. Which means that relatives were able to give proper send-offs to some of those tiny bits.
Whatever the intentions, Thursday’s was the very antithesis of a proper funeral and burial
And yet there was no questioning the whole point. On the contrary, we can all sympathise with the families in their wish to have something to bury or cremate.
The shape of that something is secondary to its proper name. People have come up with all manner of treatments for dead bodies. The dead have been buried, cremated, dismembered, mummified, shrunk and even eaten – but never anonymously.
Funerary rites and customs do two things. First, they draw some kind of line between the realm of the living and that of the dead, however imagined. Second, they fix the dead person, individually or collectively, as a living memory.
Funerals and cemeteries and gravestones and such see to it that there is life after death, so to say.
Thursday was a slap in the face of all of that, in at least two ways.
First, the bodies were in relatively good condition. They had been recovered at sea almost immediately after death and were therefore eminently identifiable. I find it outrageous that no systematic and sustained effort was made to name them, and to return them to their relatives.
Take the hypothetical scenario of 24 bodies of Europeans fished out of a lake in Kenya. I don’t suppose they would be placed in coffins numbered Body one to 24 (the coffins at Thursday’s funeral actually had that scribbled on them) and buried anonymously. Rather, every effort would be made to name them and arrangements would be made for their repatriation.
I’m not saying it would have been an easy task to pull off in this case. What really gets me is that we didn’t even try. If we really cared, those bodies would still be in the morgue freezer, and our Foreign Office would be doing its utmost to name them. Instead we were happy with bleeding-heart renditions of faceless people in Africa who didn’t even know their loved ones had died.
I’m not aware that any serious attempt was made to trace the countries of origin of those 24, let alone to repatriate them. It’s as if the northward journey of the living is mirrored in the southward one of the dead. Both are, and must be, unthinkable.
I imagine that any thought to try to do the decent thing will have been shrugged off as a tall order. After all, isn’t Africa the heart of darkness where people die like flies and nobody cares? Aren’t Africans ‘wiċċ wieħed’ (faceless) and therefore impossible to think of as individuals with biographies, families and friends?
The second reason why I think Thursday’s funeral was a disgrace has to do with another, related, kind of anonymity. The one example I can think of in which the dead are prescriptively unnamed is that of the various ‘tombs of unknown soldiers’.
In that case the dead (if indeed there are any bodies in those tombs) are deliberately treated as generic. That’s because they stand for something that is collective by nature, usually a nation-state or a national army or such.
The inference is that we think of migrants as some kind of national population, only without a nation. The only thing that unites it is its generic and collective failure to belong to the world of the deserving. To give 24 unnamed dead a burial in a common grave is simply to affirm that perverse line of thought.
Whatever the intentions, Thursday’s was the very antithesis of a proper funeral and burial. It drew a line between the living and the living, and it consigned the dead to the dustbin of anonymity.
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