Should death be celebrated?

I was intrigued when I saw this in a friend's twitter feed - it's a genuinely interesting question and few dare to broach it. As it turned out, this was a reference to Osama bin Laden's death, which somewhat dampened my enthusiasm. Of course, the question of whether his death should be celebrated is a controversial topic at the moment; it interrelates to all sorts of questions as to whether this will escalate tensions between patriotic Americans and radical extremists, or serve to improve things (less likely!); as to whether the use of military force against a possibly unarmed man is legal in international law; and as to what heroism and martyrdom mean in a world where science returns most well-educated people's frame of reference to within the immanent, though not necessarily to atheism. Yet beyond this reference to a specific, historically significant person, the question is a profound one because in most cultures death is so strongly associated with mourning.

Of course, it is right that, in most circumstances, rituals to commemorate a person's passing (funerals and interment, etc) should be sad. In the Jewish prayer recited in memory of the dead (Keil Malai Rahamim), it is said "may their soul be bound up in the bond of life." Here, bond of life means the bond of eternal life in God; but I, who am more convinced of the present reality, always think of the bonds of life we form here: the intense emotional attachments that are formed from our inception through to our birth, interlinked with our siblings' birth and then our teachers, mentors, friends and loved ones. The majority (I hope) have formed such intense bonds in the hearts and minds of a few around them - a husband or wife, children, and certain others - that their sadness at having a person wrenched from them must be respected.

At the same time, I am fond of a memory when a friend of mine studying history recollected a detail of a town in France where death was celebrated, ritually and with an upbeat passion. Long ago, and very rare, it gave me a sense of what perhaps is underrepresented in mourning for people - to celebrate that people have really lived and fulfilled themselves within the human span.

Wittgenstein said

"Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits." 

Perhaps it is because I am young and irreverent, but I enjoy jubilation and humour, expressions of a person's vision and desire for achievement, at a ritual of passing and think it is often apt. My uncle, who died in 2006, has written on his tombstone his bumper sticker: 'Defeat terrorism / Have a nice day!' And at his funeral I gave a speech about an article he'd been telling me about, which described the technology for a bridge spanning the Atlantic possible. I think funerals should also be about our striving and our sense of possibility.

I also like macabre humour, if tasteful. At my grandfather's funeral, I read the famous song from Shakespeare's Cymbeline:

Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
 Nor the furious winter's rages;
 Thou thy worldly task hast done,
 Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages;
 Golden lads and girls all must,
 As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

 Fear no more the frown o' the great;
 Thou art past the tyrant's stroke:
 Care no more to clothe and eat;
 To thee the reed is as the oak:
 The sceptre, learning, physic, must
 All follow this, and come to dust.

 Fear no more the lightning-flash,
 Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone;
 Fear not slander, censure rash;
 Thou hast finished joy and moan;
 All lovers young, all lovers must
 Consign to thee, and come to dust.

I love the pun on 'come to dust' at the end of the first stanza; it's so dark and materialised, and puts such a spin of working life on the 'ashes to ashes, dust to dust' formula. One that was incidentally repeated at my grandfather's interment, when the church warden was attempting to pour his ashes into the pedestal, and some of it blew away in the wind, on a lovely summer's day.

My grandfather would not have been pleased. He did not want to die, and he wanted to be buried, not cremated. But he was so demented by his death that he was barely whom he had been, and frankly we had all said goodbye to him long before. And we had bought no plot to bury him, and his desire for burial was, I think, not a religious one. (In some societies, they toss the corpse wrapped in a sheet into the ground). In his last decade, he attended church (incidentally, his surname was Church) and became moderately religious; but he had confessed to my mum that looked at as a story, the story of Jesus Christ was one of the most horrible and bloodiest ever written. (One can see that I lied to the man at the door two blogs back). The Christian myth has its positive aspects too, but I think death for my grandfather was not to be celebrated.

If anyone reads this, I'd be interested to hear their thoughts on the question.