Prayer
Oh when will men, when will men reconcile themselves to life and death? When will they? Why must they have an afterlife of souls; why doesn't life itself, soulless life, why doesn't it satisfy them?
It's meaningless, that's why.
But it is meaningless because it has been made meaningless, unphysical and out of touch. It is meaningless because all our experience has been destroyed, and all our instincts frightened out of us.
Our instincts, ah bring back our instincts! Bring them back! Bring back our instincts of life and death. Let us know how to live, and how to die.
Related
None of which is to imply that I intend to die soon. I certainly don't.
Certainly, I am afraid of dying right now; certainly it would be all too soon to die.
I take special care not to endanger my life—not to be hit by cars, for example. Even I worry about airplanes that come too close.
I am just getting ready to live.
But just as it is necessary to fight for the rights of life, so it is necessary as well to fight for the rights of death.
The two are somehow connected.
Addendum
It doesn't matter that a will be legal or illegal—it is still a will. That the law doesn't recognize it is the fault of the law, no one else. The law insists on lawyers and justices-of-the-peace seals, and witness with their signatures—well that creates things to do, and keeps lawyers in business and in money. But a will is still a will in fact, whether there are witnesses or not. My will won't change just because I can't afford a lawyer, and no doubt couldn't find a sympathetic one anyway. (Though money does buy sympathy, especially from lawyers.)
A will can't be carried out if it violates the law. Well damn the law then. It is unreasonable in this case. If a law is against life, or if it is against death, which is the same thing, damn it I say. It's no good, so break it. When real death is made illegal, what else can you do?
So this is my will, when I die, to be treated with respect and be allowed to end as naked as I began, as close and part of earth. From the earth I sprang—but that doesn't mean I never intended to return. To the earth I shall spring as well. I want to be cold and naked and close to the weather, and decompose when I am dead. I want the transformation to natural inorganic life. I don't want to be embalmed, to be treated like meaningless, purposeless, senseless, unearthly shit. From the earth I sprang; to the earth, someday, I'd like to be allowed to return. It is my will. No law can change that.
I want no funeral. Funerals are usually an insult to the dead.
But if there is to be a funeral, read this at it. That will help keep it a healthy funeral.
And let Debbie (Rigas) Clark see my writings (my notebooks) and whoever else would find them meaningful—for I don't know who would, if anyone.
Boyd is dead over a year now.
My Will
On this day, 19 April 1977, I repeat my desire not to be buried in a cemetery, and thus humiliated. Nor to be shut up in a casket, and thus given the final insult of loss of freedom. I want to be buried preferably naked, not too deep, in woods or a field, or a swamp, or the sea (just tossed in), or something similar that is rather natural and not overgrown with buildings or roads. I want my body to decompose naturally, easily. Let wild animals dig at my bones if they want—I don't care.
Now I understand that such a request is usually illegal by state law. (Indeed, apparently it is illegal to spread someone's ashes over California!) Apparently it is only legal to be buried in a public or private cemetery, or to have ashes made of yourself. It is quite legal to bury pets wherever you want, and so far no one has passed laws against wild animals dying anywhere they choose, but people—can't have them anywhere but cemeteries! Nothing is more insulting than a cemetery, and absolutely nothing more disgusting than gravestones and coffins, with names and years. There is no better way to assign someone to meaninglessness. There is no better final insult than making even the dead live in cities.
When a flower dies, who puts up a marker? Only a fool.
I want to be thrown into the woods somewhere, and left. I want to die freely, at least, if I can't live freely. Or throw me into the sea, or a river, or a creek I don't care. After all, I'm dead. But let me decompose—let me grow up again as a flower or a bush; let me be food for other living things; let the wild have my bones and do with them what they do.
Which is more insane I can't decide: the desire to “preserve” the dead in caskets and to put up “monuments” (as if gravestones could be monuments) to them; or the passing of actual laws that people shall be buried in authorized cemeteries! (And they require the buying of a casket!)
Nothing, nothing could show more clearly the insanity of our legislative bodies, if they pass such laws and cling to them. There is something more here than the phobia of death, and thus of meaninglessness, in this insistence that people shall be buried in cemeteries, dutifully bound in caskets. And the embalming of bodies! Better to be burned, I say, better to be ashes, than so treated. It is all perverse. It is all pointless. And so damn costly. But surely the Undertaker's Lobby can't hold that much control over state legislatures! Surely a lobbying force can't turn men into fools, and perverse fools. I can't believe that.
And I can't believe that it is illegal to be buried naturally. The wild animals are allowed that freedom, why not I?
But men are not reasonable, they are insane, perverse fools. They only do dirt on life.
And apparently on the dead as well.
I can understand the religious reasons for burial—that without a proper burial and proper rites, the dead soul doesn't get to heaven. At least there is rationality to that, if you accept enough of the basic religious premises.
But why the legal requirements? The unburied body will stink. Only it won't if it's in the woods, because it will be eaten and pecked at, and so on, by animals, birds and ants. Or even buried a foot under, free of casket, will prevent the smell. Argue that it isn't sanitary—but those arguments are foolish. Bodies have lain in woods throughout the ages and never caused a sanitary problem. We're not talking about bodies left in the gutter in the city to rot. We're talking about bodies buried naked under a thin layer of earth, so that they can decompose back into earth. If an animal digs up the bones—let it!—for surely it knows what it's doing. (Except for dogs, which have turned into instinctless fools for being around men for so long.)
Is it indecent to treat dead bodies so? But it's not indecent for birds or for turtles, so why humans? Besides, if you find it indecent, don't look. Is it the nakedness that bothers you?—don't look. I wouldn't want you to look anyway, your eyes would only be dirty. And I prefer dirt, good moist brown earthy dirt, to dirty eyes.
The truth is, you cannot bear to see it, real death. It would only make you conscious of how fragile was your own life and, even worse, how doubtful your own meaning in time. But I'm not asking you to see it—I know that would be too much to ask.
I only ask to be allowed to die a real death.
People who never live a real life are afraid more than anything of a real death. But for myself, I plead at least for a real death, if I can't have a real life.
I want to die physically, and be allowed to cycle back into life physically by being left a dead thing of the earth, not an embalmed, sealed, casketed, citied body in Cemetery Dis.
Of Dis, the city of death, I want no part.
When I am dead I want to be stiff, naked, cold, exposed to the elements and the weather. For death, after all, is only a transformation from animate to inanimate life. I think it is perverse to be denied the transformation, to be denied the inanimate, inorganic life in its proper turn of the cycle.
Such is my will—19 April, 1977—no witnesses.
Dwight Lyman
theNakedAtheist 