by Sarah Murray
Of all the ceremonial beasts, my favorite is the dragon, or Naga Banda. With a twenty-three-foot-long sinuous tube of a body covered in brocaded silk, his huge jaws reveal fierce splayed teeth. His eyes bulge wildly. This magnificent creature—rarely seen, even at royal cremations—will also go up in flames on July 15.
One afternoon, the dragon is to be ceremonially installed in the palace after being “retrieved” from the nearby village of Peliatan (he was actually constructed in the palace so they’ve had to take him there secretly in order to bring him back again). Waiting for his arrival amid hundreds of onlookers, the atmosphere is one of excited expectancy. A royal prince and princess arrive, dressed in purple, pink, white, and gold and conveyed on two golden palanquins shaded by parasols and lifted high above the crowd. Then the gamelan players strike up a tune. Hearing cheers from down the road, I quickly find a spot at the top of some steps, from where I can peer out over the palace walls. Below is a sea of people all looking in one direction.
Finally, here comes the dragon, and he looks truly splendid. His golden head, gilded adornments, and purple, pink, and blue silk body are resplendent in the fading sunlight. Slowly and majestically, he inches down the street toward the palace gates. And, coming up behind the dragon is—oh, how fabulous—another giant bull. It turns out that the bull I encountered next to the palace is merely the more modest version, destined for Gede Raka. This new arrival is for Agung Suyasa himself, and at about twenty feet high, it’s a much bigger beast. The bearers reverse it into position so that the two funereal bovines stand side by side.
As the dragon approaches the courtyard, the gamelan players’ tempo rises to a frantic pace and, to roars from the crowd, the Naga Banda enters triumphant. His jaw seems to have opened wider. His eyes seem to be bulging even more wildly (mine are, too). Floating above a carpet of people, he makes his way through the narrow gates and tiny passageways of the palace and, after much heaving and shouting on the part of the bearers, he’s finally positioned on the stage that will be his temporary resting place.
The stage—surprise, surprise—is even more ornately decorated than it was the day before, with all manner of offerings in banana-leaf baskets piled onto it. Cages of live birds hang stage right and stage left and, on two pedestals below, a couple of real cow heads on giant platters look like something out of a banquet scene painted by Rubens.
It’s about now that I realize I’ve wandered into a fairy tale. Everywhere I turn, there are demons, dragons, and princesses (and the princesses are real). The air is filled with an eclectic mixture of tuberoses, incense, and cigarette smoke. The music of gamelan players echoes around me and the lights twinkle like it’s Christmas. A few days ago I was wondering how to fill my time in Bali until the cremation ceremony. Now, I don’t want to leave. Who knew that a funeral party could serve up such generous portions of joy?
Yet it’s at times like this that I fear death the most, or at least regret the fact of it. For when I’m dead, there’ll be no more new discoveries, no more exotic, enchanted experiences. Nothing will make my heart race because my heart will have stopped. Death, as poet Philip Larkin puts it, is the “anaesthetic from which none come round.” Of course, when I’m actually dead, I won’t miss anything because I’ll be gone. But while alive, I miss these moments on behalf of my dead self. And perhaps that’s what makes them all the more delicious.
* * *
I was not there to see my father’s body enter the Weymouth crematorium. I was thousands of miles away, traveling along a potholed road in northern India. Sam didn’t want me to cancel my trip. She decided to go to Fa’s cremation with just her brother, Anthony, to keep her company. “I prefer to have my grief privately,” she told me. And after all, she reminded me, Fa had specified that the arrangements for his cremation should be “swift and practical” with no unnecessary “formalities” or “ceremonials.”
Fa’s instructions also stressed that the cremation should be, “above all considerations—Secular!” It certainly was. A small piece of paper I eventually found embedded in the ashes provides a prosaic record of the event. It read:
Weymouth & Portland Borough Council
Murray, Nigel Stuart
Crem no: 58809
Time & Date: 1:00 P.M. on Thursday 4 Jan 2007
Service: Committal
Fun Dir [he would have enjoyed this abbreviation]: A. J. Wakeley
Disposal: Remove by Representative of Applicant to A. J. Wakeley Funeral Service
Authority to Cremate [signed]: Helen Hornell
There it is again. That uneasy marriage of something so momentous, a last rite of passage, a human body (my own father’s, no less) cast into fire, with something so mundane—a bureaucratic record, complete with serial number, date, and the official marks of the local administration.
On January 4, 2007, as my mother and uncle were driving to a crematorium in West Dorset, I was hurtling along a Gujarati highway staring out at streams of huge trucks, each groaning under the weight of its cargo, horns blaring. I looked at my watch. Sam and Anthony would by then have left Summerfields. They’d be winding along the sinuous coastal road that runs past the villages of Burton Bradstock, West Bexington, and Abbotsbury (famous for its subtropical gardens). From this road you can, on a clear day, see Portland and the magnificent Jurassic Coast that stretches for eighteen miles along the south coast of Dorset. The journey, passing some of the county’s most spectacular views, would take about forty minutes.
Meanwhile, in Gujarat, we still had hours ahead of us. Dusk was falling and I was fixated on the road, not sure whether I was more afraid of being crushed between two lumbering juggernauts or of ramming into one of the barefoot pedestrians who every so often, without warning, strolled into the oncoming traffic. We passed billboards for the Why Wait Restaurant, and for a company claiming to offer the “World’s Second Largest Appliances.” On one stretch of road, a “Corpse Hotline” sign helpfully displayed a phone number above a simplified picture of a dead animal. We overtook camels and donkeys (happily none of them yet corpses). Between roadside chai shops and half-finished buildings, brilliantly lit gas stations loomed up, islands of the rich world transplanted into the poor.
At 1 P.M. Greenwich Mean Time on January 4, 2007, as Fa’s remains passed into the capable hands of the “Representative of Applicant to A. J. Wakeley Funeral Service,” dusk was falling over northern India. The sun was enjoying its final burst of energy, its incandescence magnified by clouds of dust, which captured and redistributed millions of tiny particles of light across the horizon, creating a glorious fiery haze. I looked down at my watch again. Right now, if I’d calculated the time difference correctly, my father’s coffin would be sliding into the furnace at the Weymouth & Portland Borough Council crematorium.
* * *
While the Balinese started cremating their dead after they adopted Hinduism, elsewhere this method of corpse disposal dates back as far as the Stone Age. The Romans embraced the practice (emperors such as Augustus, Nero, and Caligula were cremated), and the ancient scriptures of Hindus and Buddhists describe cremation. From Homer’s Iliad, we learn that the Hellenistic Greeks favored burning their dead, believing that this liberated them from their bodies, allowing them to enjoy eternal life.
Early cremation varied in its efficiency. Given enough wood and peat, it’s thought early pyres could achieve temperatures of up to eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit, putting them on par with modern crematoria. The Anglo-Saxons managed this, as analysis of their remains reveals. However, bones could be left charred and often in one piece (a bonus for archaeologists, of course).
And as in Bali, early cremations could provide moments of intense drama, as we learn from the great English epic poem Beowulf, celebrating an eighth-century Scandinavian hero and culminating in his cremation. “The wood-reek went up,” writes the poet, “Swart over the smoky glow, sound of the flame / Bewound with the weeping (the wind-blending stilled), / Until it at last the bone-house had bro
ken / Hot at the heart.”
Early European Christianity disapproved of such drama. The young religion deemed cremation a primitive, pagan practice and from the fifth century it fell out of favor, at least in the West. Above all, cremation was at odds with belief in the resurrection of the flesh, a central doctrine of Christianity. When Christ eventually returned, the church believed the dead would need their bodies in order to rise up again. Eighth-century French ruler Charlemagne subscribed to this logic. He banned cremation, making it a crime punishable by death (one wonders if the criminals were then cremated to compound their punishment).
Interest in cremation revived in the late nineteenth century, as the industrial revolution gave rise to new technologies and as populations swelled, putting cemeteries under huge pressure and sparking worries about the spread of disease. By burying the dead, society was “laying by poison,” wrote Sir Henry Thompson, cremation’s early champion, since future generations would “find our remains polluting their water sources.” Thompson, who was also Queen Victoria’s surgeon, founded the Cremation Society of England in 1874 and drew up a declaration calling for cremation as a more sanitary alternative to burial.
Debates over cremation were, dare I say it, heated. First, there were religious objections. The Bishop of Lincoln, an influential Anglican leader, declared that the practice would undermine belief in the resurrection of the body and so spark a wave of immoral behavior. Others said the process would simply be too expensive.
Technology would ultimately triumph over such arguments, and technology was advancing fast. In 1873, at the Vienna World’s Fair, an Italian anatomy professor called Ludovico Brunetti displayed the cremation chamber he’d devised. Six years later in 1879, the Cremation Society of England successfully cremated a horse in the crematorium it had built.
Rumors that this was a prelude to a human cremation provoked public outcry and threats of parliamentary and legal proceedings against the society. Others put the law to the test, too. In 1884, when his five-month-old son died, William Price, an eccentric Welsh doctor and a druid, cremated the body. He was prosecuted but successfully defended himself on the grounds that no law explicitly banned cremation.
The following year, Britain’s first official cremation took place when the body of Jeanette Pickersgill, a well-known scientific and literary figure, was cremated six days after her death. The Times reported that the cremation, which lasted an hour, “is said to have been eminently successful from every point of view.”
With the technology proven, the argument for the sanitary benefits of cremation gained momentum. When, in 1886, William Eassie gave a lecture at the Sanitary Institute of Great Britain (he stood beside a vase containing some of the ashes of the cremated horse) he declared that “the thinking community are perfectly satisfied that the crowded dead injure the living, and that if this source of danger be not removed, or, at least, abated, it will become more and more intensified until an ungovernable climax be reached.”
Meanwhile, Americans were starting to take an interest in cremation. Among the pioneers was Francis Julius LeMoyne, a medical doctor and philanthropist. In 1876, he built America’s first crematorium in Washington, Pennsylvania, on his own land. On December 6 of that year, modern America’s first cremation took place when the body of Joseph Henry Louis, Baron de Palm, was incinerated in LeMoyne’s crematorium. The New York Times later gave a blow-by-blow account of the incineration, which could be viewed through a hole in the door of the retort:
Five minutes after the body was put in the furnace was dark inside. In seven minutes a thick white smoke could be seen. In fifteen minutes the retort was lighted up, and the body could be seen distinctly. By 9:45 the head had separated from the body and rolled to one side; the flesh had all disappeared, and all the bones but the skull were red-hot. At 11 o’clock, after two and a half hours of burning, the skeleton was almost entire, and white hot in every part. It was a skeleton of fire. Soon afterward it began to show signs of crumbling, and by 12:30 the cremation was pronounced complete. Some of the larger bones still retained their shape but they needed only a breath of air to reduce them to ashes.
As in Britain, the American public was slow to take up cremation (possibly put off by those descriptions in the Times). However, by 1913, when the Cremation Association of America was formed, fifty-two crematoria were conducting more than ten thousand cremations a year across the country. Today, about 35 percent of Americans are cremated and that’s expected to rise to almost 60 percent by 2025. In Britain, the numbers are even higher, with more than 70 percent of the population choosing to be cremated.
I’ve thought a lot about cremation. I agree with my father that it seems a swift and efficient method of disposing of “organic matter.” However, the prospect of cremation raises questions. It’s not the most eco-friendly method of corpse disposal, as the furnaces generate smoke and carbon dioxide, as well as mercury emissions from dental filings. As a result, a few crematoria are investigating the possibility of reusing the heat produced by their operations. In Sweden, one plans to save energy by using its crematorium furnaces to heat its buildings—and eventually some of the homes in the town surrounding it. The idea is causing a few raised eyebrows but, if my body heat could help warm up some homes, that’d be fine by me.
* * *
One morning, down at Ubud’s royal palace, I run into one of the caretakers. For a small “donation,” he lets me into the private areas behind the main courtyard and leads me to the door of the chamber where the two royal corpses are lying in state. I’m not allowed into that section, so I wander around the other parts of the palace.
At first glance, the buildings look more like temples than royal residences, except that on raised platforms outside each pavilion—the place where at temples you’d normally leave your shoes—is a motley collection of modern sectionals, antique chairs, glass-topped coffee tables, electric lamps, and TV sets. There are faded family photographs and kitsch plastic clocks, as well as a plaster bust of Beethoven and a large tank whose occupant—a somnolent turtle—looks like it was born around the same time as the German composer. All in all, it’s an eccentric setup.
At night, however, the palace becomes magical. That evening, locals crowd into the public courtyard to watch legends being retold, as demons and angels face off in dramatic dance performances. With fingers aquiver, toes curled, and masks whose eyes bulge like those of the dragon, the dancers are the epitome of vibrant, nervous energy. Each performer plays several roles. A youthful devil reappears as a comic figure, first as an old man, stumbling and tripping, then strutting around like a chicken, twitching, pecking, and scratching. At times, he opens his cape like a bird of paradise displaying his splendid colored feathers like a sexual weapon.
Meanwhile, Hindu high priests have arrived at one of the palace’s private enclosures. Two of them have black hair tied in a knot on top of their heads while the most senior, wearing an ivory-colored linen jacket, has gray-blond hair cut in a short bob. They mount a high stage opposite the dragon, where they sit chanting prayers amid piles of offerings and religious accoutrements. They’re here to help transfer the souls of the deceased (for now wandering freely) into the body of the dragon. At the precise moment of the transfer, the expression on the face of the dragon will alter. It’s pretty heady stuff.
I step outside the enclosure momentarily, and when I return the ground is covered with seated women. Heads bowed, the women open their palms expectantly to receive droplets of holy water being scattered by a priest (I’m reminded of the morning in Yazd, when holy water was sprayed over the crowd that had gathered to mark Imam Husayn’s martyrdom).
As they disperse, family members assemble below the dragon’s stage. Holding a long rope representing the deceased, they walk around a table piled with offerings and tiny model boats (symbolizing the sea into which the royal ashes will eventually be scattered). The relatives smile and laugh to show their happiness as the spirits of the departed royals approach their rebir
th.
It’s a joyous, fond farewell for the dead, and an assurance for those left behind of the continuation of the cosmic and social order. Yet watching everything unfold, I find it astonishing that all this pageantry is not for the president or prime minister of a powerful country. It’s for members of a royal family who hail from a tiny town on an island not much bigger than the state of Delaware. Everything—intricate rituals, giant towers, fantastical effigies, musical performances, and, let’s face it, extremely large sums of money—is being laid on for a couple of people who’ve reached their expiration date. Their time might be up, but what a way to go.
* * *
The Weymouth & Portland Borough Council crematorium sits on a quiet road called Quibo Lane on the outskirts of Weymouth, a coastal town on the mouth of the River Wey. The crematorium has a garden of remembrance, burial plots for cremated remains, and a remembrance room at the side of the main building. It lies eight miles south of Dorchester and the Joseph Weld Hospice, where Fa spent his last weeks surrounded by tubes, wires, and wonderfully kind nurses.
Since I hadn’t been at his cremation, on a visit to Dorset some months later, I asked Sam if we could visit the crematorium. She said she wouldn’t mind driving me there but she’d probably stay in the car. This, she hastened to add, wasn’t so much because she didn’t want to go in but because, as she reminded me, she likes sitting in cars. It might sound like an excuse, but strangely enough, she does like sitting in cars. As a family, we’d often go to West Bay, our local harbor town, for a walk on the beach, usually in winter when the waves were smashing up onto the pebble shore and we children were carefully packed into sou’westers, Wellington boots, and woolly hats. My mother always preferred to stay in the car and read the papers.