A funny scene from a funny movie, and it was even funnier in the Broadway show. We laugh at death, but it’s just our way of not thinking about it, not taking it too seriously. But we should, and here is a short scenario to show you why:
You are manning a firing position, engaging a gang of bandits who are intent on looting your group’s retreat. One of your group shifts position to get a better firing angle, but unfortunately, he exposes himself in doing so and is fatally shot. You and the rest of the group manage to fight off the horde after a fierce engagement, killing five of them but losing one of your own.
Now comes the hard part, which is dealing with the bodies. In most of the survival literature you’ll read, you’ll rarely find the subject of death and the disposing of bodies being mentioned. After all it’s about surviving, not dying, right? So what are you going to do with the half dozen dead people littering your retreat area? How do you plan to deal with your casualty? What sort of body preparation and rituals are appropriate? Will you treat the bandits differently? Will you bury them in the same area as your own people? Will you bury the bandits at all or will you use a gallon of gas to drive their bodies a distance away and just dump them?
Death is not something we deal with anymore. You die in a hospital, the nurses whisk a curtain around the corpse to keep it from view, and very shortly the mortuary folk come and remove it. The body is embalmed, made up, dressed up and laid out in a lovely coffin worth more than your dining room set so that family can exclaim: “Doesn’t he/she look good!!” From start to finish, our modern society is protected from the realities of death.
And death is not pretty. At the very least, you will have a corpse on your hands that may or may not have leaked body fluids (which in the case of some diseases can be infectious in nature), with mouth agape and eyes that don’t quite close, despite what you see in the movies. The pretty young woman that you can carry easily in your arms alive at 125 pounds is nearly unmanageable in death. It can be a hard thing to deal with for most people.
In the event of collapse, you have no undertaker to help you avoid the unpleasantness, so you need to give some thought as to how death will be dealt with by your group. What rituals will you perform for the living? What care is appropriate for the dead? Will you try to make a casket, or merely wrap a shroud? Perhaps not even that?
This might seem morbid and unimportant, but how you deal with your dead will have a very large psychological effect on your group. Their ability to function will in part require ritual and routine to help them go on, some trace of ‘normalcy’ is needed to make sure they feel there is a point to surviving.
So what happens in the above scenario? Well, the attackers are driven a half mile to an old gravel pit, dropped over the edge, and enough slope knocked over them to keep animals from getting at them, more for reasons of sanitation than respect.
The group’s casualty is washed, dressed, wrapped in a shroud (maybe poly, maybe cloth), and a grave is dug. Prior to the ceremony, the body is placed in the grave, something that is horribly awkward to do, and nothing the family needs to witness. The burial ceremony takes place, and the grave filled. A marker is erected, and you pray you don’t need to do this again for a long time.
Ah, but what about cremation? If you are secure enough, if you have fuel enough, and time enough, go ahead. Just remember that a wood fire cremation may leave you with bones to be pulverized, or with things like hip replacements largely intact, possibly a distressing prospect for the family.
Here’s another scenario:
One of your people contracted cholera while on a foraging mission. Sadly, you can’t save her, and she passes away in your camp…..
Seems like a simple scenario, but this has a catch. Because cholera is one of the few infectious diseases that can be spread by human remains (this is caused by fecal matter from the corpses leaking into the water supply. In a case like this, the remains should be disinfected as far as is practical, and buried at least 100 feet from sources of drinking water.
There aren’t a lot of infectious diseases that can be spread this way, but when you are dealing with things like cholera, it pays to be careful.
How we will treat our dead after a collapse will vary from place to place and group to group. As I mentioned before, there are strong reasons to have a procedure in place, not the least of which is the psychological effect the death of a group member will have on the survivors. This is something that needs to be planned for just as much as other aspects of preparedness, talked about, and procedures decided upon.
In many collapse or disaster scenarios, death is expected to occur and in the absence of modern medicine, perhaps become much more commonplace. How we deal with that prospect is up to us.
Originally posted February 21, 2011 @ MPN
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