What We Owe The Dead
To bury them, to embalm them.
Stay with them as they leave, stay with them in sickness, stay with them when they bleed.
cut them apart to answer their questions, mark their graves.
tend to those head stones like a sacred idol.
consume them as they would have you.
preserve them, and gild their bones.
Spread their ashes in the sea after watching them burn.
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serve them as they loved you, i suppose.
Author's note.
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Yeah, this is a bit morbid. It's a reformated text message, or rather, chain of text messages, that I sent to a friend. Ruminations on, indeed, what we as the living owe to the dead, and the affection that carries through in various burial and post-mortuum rituals. It starts out with a simple answer; we bury and preserve our dead. Why? Because we love them. Because we might have loved them enough to be there when they were sick and dying. We search through their mortal remains to figure out why they died, and then we bury them.
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The lines, "consume them as they would have you. preserve them, and gild their bones. Spread their ashes in the sea after watching them burn." is simply about other ways that people honor their dead. Ritual endocannibalism, mummification, the making relics out of the bones of saints-- In different ways, these are ways people care for the departed, and while they seem gruesome-- They're still ways people honor and care about their dead.
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Simply, you serve them because you loved them, because they loved you.