Lonely Planet’s Guide to Death, Grief and Rebirth: How Global Grieving Customs Can help Us Live (and Die) Well

I’ve been on a grief journey of my own the last few years; not because my losses are recent, but because they were so monumental my body and brain repressed them completely and I never did grieve. With counselling, I am now beginning to work my way through some of these issues and, as a result, have been thinking and learning a lot more about death itself. What do I believe it means? Do I believe in an afterlife? How would I like to be remembered when my time comes, and how do I want the occasion managed?

These aren’t simple questions, and one thing I quickly discovered is that there is no “one size fits all” answer to any of them. Perhaps a good place to start is to figure out what we don’t believe, what we don’t want, what we find creepy or overdramatic, what seems unnecessary and what, upon reflection, is non-negotiable.

“When someone dies, people tell each other: “there are no words.” Many of us are on a life-long quest to find them – to grapple with understanding the finality of death and how it impacts how we live.”

Lonely Planet’s Guide to Death, Grief and Rebirth provides a series of insights into the death customs of cultures around the world, and how these customs inevitably shape the lives of those left behind. From ritual finger amputation, to extravagant parties, from modern-eco burials, to corpses buried with mobile phones (just in case), it shies away from nothing. Divided into four sections: Celebrating, Commemorating, Mourning and Offering, it explores the different ways people around the world choose to live with death, rather than in opposition to it.

The book covers a lot of what you might expect: Tibetan Sky Burials, Mexico’s Dia de Muertos, the Irish Wake, but several of the entries are (at least to me) much less well-known. For example, until I read this book I had never heard of “ossuary’s”: resting-places-come-art installations that are as beautiful as they are haunting, as macabre as they are a stunning tribute to the terribly unimportant tremendous significance of short, human lives. Garlands of skulls are hung from arches and neat rows of thigh bones are arranged like bunting. Cleaned and polished, arranged with deliberateness and precision, they highlight both the inevitability of death and its role as the great leveller, uniting even the lowliest criminal with the most respected monarchs. They display the anonymity that death wields as the cloth that wipes all these labels away.

Similarly, I heard the term “Swedish death cleaning” for the first time only a couple of days before I read about it in this book. The pre-emptive act of decluttering your environment and streamlining the way you live your life should have a duel outcome: you will relieve your loved ones of the pain and burden of having to sort through mountains of your stuff when you’re gone, and managing your belongings in this way throughout your life will encourage you to focus on what’s most important to you - to create the life and environment you want, rather than blindly consuming and getting bogged down in the background noise of life.

“It isn’t giving up or choosing to fade away: it’s unburdening yourself of what you don’t need anymore, to live your richest life.”

Death, decay and the passage of time are all around us and that scares us all to some degree. Many cultural groups have chosen to welcome that as part of the cycle, rather than the end of it – death is just another faze of life to be celebrated. Yes, it hurts when we lose someone we love this way, but they’re only really gone if we allow them to be, if we forget them, or no longer honour the impact they had on us while they were alive. By not erasing death as a natural part of our narrative, we also get to keep our relationships with those who succumb to it before us, albeit in a different way.

I think that’s what strikes me the most about the collective story told in this book; that the west (and stiff-upper-lip Britain in particular) have cultivated such a sanitised and arms-length relationship with death, and prescribed ways of mourning. These customs have become so routine that they’re the assumed, “normal” way to do things and it doesn’t occur to anyone to do them any differently. There must be a religious service, we must dress in black and sip tea with relatives we’ve never seen before and will never see again, we must cry at the funeral, and we must move quickly on. However, despite our moving on, we must visit a gravestone once a year and leave flowers, without letting this remembrance of our dearly departed affect our work, relationships or mental health in any way. I’m not sure this structure works for me any more - if it ever did.

Whether you view it as dark tourism, cultural insight or a prompt to self-reflection, this book is well worth a read. It’s a beautifully presented hard back, colourful and full of interesting photographs, easy to either digest in stages or read as one, long comparative essay.

Has anyone else read it? Do you have thoughts on any particular customs or traditions? How is it you’d like to be honoured when you go, or would you rather be left alone to slip quietly into whatever does (or doesn’t) come next? It’s going to happen to everyone after all, maybe it’s time we started talking about it.

Until next time,

Cate x