LET THE VULTURES CONSUME MY BOWELS WHILE THE SUN DEVOURS MY SOUL

Intense title, but work with me here. We’re talking about your death today. Yes, yours. Pocket your existential crisis for a moment and buckle the fuck up.

You’re gonna die, and you’ve probably put some thought into that. If you haven’t, I fear you dearly. I fear for your health. I fear for the health of the people who have to put up with you. You’re scary. If you have thought about the inevitable—which you inevitably will—have you ever thought about what happens next? Not for you, but for the people around you. The people who now need to decide, hmm, what sort of life celebration ceremony feels like you?

Yeah. Fucking rough.

We have some scripts for it. We have the usual—a wake, an open casket, a life celebration—we’ve had rituals around death for as long as we’ve been human, in fact. Some of them were pretty fucking hardcore, hence the title.

In Zoroastrianism, a faded religion stemming from what is now Iran, human bodies were breeding grounds for evil. This idea went so far that the tools used for preparing the body for the even more hardcore steps were onetime-use, to prevent the spread of evil. Touching the body or forcing others to touch it could result in the death penalty.

Call it what you want. Crazed religion, intelligent hygiene practices, whatever. Nothing matters compared to this next step.

Say you died in a Zoroastrian community. You stepped on a rather sharp rock, slipped, and broke both your legs. The community cared for you, and you made a full recovery! Ope, and then you die of dysentery. Time for the memorial: you’ve had your clothes stripped, tools disposed of, and now you’re on the way to the top of a hill where your body will be feasted upon by vultures until you’re nothing but bone.

This practice, however, has been banned in Iran since 1966–1967, and subsequently no bodies have been placed in this tower of silence — Tehran Times

We don’t have rituals like this anymore.

This rogue thought came to me while developing one of my sci-fi novels. I thought, How would a funeral play out on the Moon? and then, Why a “funeral”?

So I began digging into some non-Western rituals about life and death, birth, rebirth, the mix. What I found made me realize that, for how unique each of us is, our memorials don’t always do the best job representing this. There is variation from culture to culture, but within those ceremonies, how far do we stray?

Scripted Vows

Let’s point this to a different celebration—one with just as much existentialism, and potentially an equal amount of dread crossed with joy. Marriage.

There’s a damn script to marriage. To vows even, though some people have broken from that tradition and made it more about them. Most of us want these events to be uniquely ours, but we can’t create something too creative. Whatever new ideas you come up with, your guests will have to take part in. Without the script.

The traditions we have came from somewhere, though. Let’s look at vows again. Someone had to start that tradition, and their beautiful vows moved their guests so deeply that they made it their own, too—and then the next and the next, until an entire religion absorbed it into their script.

Similarly, a nervous Zoroastrian had to think, Hey, having my guts gobbled by stray dogs isn’t my vibe. I’m going to try something else. Maybe that something else came from a foreign culture, or was entirely their own thought. Either way, it was unique to them.

Today, if you said you wanted your guts devoured so that your soul could be freed from the constraints of living, you’d be called emo. Worse, mid-2000s emo. But honestly, what if that was what you wanted? Would society accept this? Would your friends let you be yourself to the very end, or would your soul be lost to regulations and expectations?

Maybe the mid-2000s emos were warning us. Culture is meant to change, meant to adapt and meld to new ideas. I’ve seen less and less of this in my life, though. More trends for the things that don’t matter, less for the things that do. Your story is yours, from your birthdays to marriage to the final breath. Make it your own. If you’re lucky, the vultures will come.