LIFE AND DEATH: “Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.” The elderly Balinese priest spoke these words as we watched the elaborate Ngaben ceremony unfold before us—a cremation so magnificent it resembled a festival more than a funeral. This was a funeral in Indonesia, and I understood that death, like love, speaks a universal language, though its dialects vary dramatically across cultures.
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The Celebrants. In New Orleans, I joined a jazz funeral procession that transformed grief into rhythm. The brass band played “When the Saints Go Marching In” as mourners danced through the French Quarter streets, umbrellas twirling above their heads like colorful prayers. Here, death wasn’t the end of the song—it was simply a key change.
I witnessed a similar celebratory spirit at an Ethiopian Orthodox funeral, where mourners ululated in waves of sound that seemed to lift the soul skyward.
The priest told me, “We do not mourn the departure—we celebrate the arrival.” Women in white cotton shawls swayed like wheat in wind, their voices creating a tapestry of joy and sorrow so intertwined I couldn’t tell where one emotion ended and the other began.
In contrast stood the profound silence I witnessed at a Japanese Buddhist funeral in Kyoto. The ceremony moved with the precision of a tea ritual, each bow and incense offering deliberate and reverent. The deceased, dressed in white burial kimono, seemed to float on waves of whispered sutras and the gentle percussion of wooden fish drums.
The Guardians. In Madagascar, I learned about Famadihana—the turning of the bones. Every seven years, families exhume their ancestors, rewrap them in fresh silk shrouds, and dance with them before returning them to their tombs.
“They are not gone,” explained my guide, “They are simply resting between visits.”
The Torajan people of Indonesia took this connection further. In their mountain villages, the dead remain part of the household for months or even years after death, lovingly cared for as if merely sleeping. I watched a grandmother feed rice to her deceased husband’s lips, whispering the day’s news into his ear.
This same protective instinct manifested differently in a Romanian Orthodox wake in a Carpathian village. The deceased was never left alone—mourners took shifts through the night, lighting candles and reciting prayers to guard against evil spirits. Old Anca, the village matriarch, explained as she adjusted the deceased’s burial clothes: “Death is a doorway, and doorways need guardians.”
I found an echo of this in the Jewish tradition of shemira—the watchful sitting with the dead. In a Brooklyn synagogue, I joined volunteers who maintained vigil over a beloved rabbi, reading psalms in Hebrew until burial. The soft murmur of ancient prayers felt like a protective blanket, wrapping the departed in continuous devotion.
Even the ancient Egyptians, whose mummification practices I studied in Cairo’s museums, were guardians of a sort. They preserved bodies for eternity, surrounding pharaohs with treasures and spells to guide them safely through the afterlife. The elaborate rituals weren’t just preservation—they were the ultimate act of protection, ensuring safe passage to the next world.
The Journeymen. In Tibet, I witnessed a sky burial on a remote plateau, where the deceased is offered to vultures as a final act of generosity. The ritual master explained: “We came from the earth, we return to the sky, and through the birds, we join the eternal cycle.” There was something profoundly beautiful about this aerial farewell, the body becoming sustenance for life itself.
In the Philippines, I encountered the Benguet tradition of mummification in caves—not the Egyptian kind, but a process where the deceased sits in carved wooden chairs in mountain caves, watching over their descendants from stone chambers. The journey here is vertical, ascending to sacred peaks where ancestors become eternal sentinels.
The Aboriginal Australians I met in the Outback had perhaps the most complex journey of all. During Sorry Business, the deceased’s spirit must travel the songlines back to their ancestral Dreamtime home. I learned that every rock, tree, and waterhole contains a verse in this spiritual GPS system, guiding souls across thousands of miles of desert to their proper resting place.
At a Hindu cremation in Varanasi, I watched families carrying their loved ones to the sacred Ganges. The burning ghats along the river have hosted this same journey for millennia—bodies reduced to ash, then scattered into waters that flow to the sea, evaporating to clouds, falling as rain, completing an endless cycle. “Death is not a destination,” the priest told me as smoke rose toward the stars. “It is simply changing vehicles on an infinite journey.”
The Storytellers. In Ireland, I sat through an entire night of mourning, where stories about the deceased flowed as freely as the whiskey. “We don’t bury our dead,” old Patrick told me, his eyes twinkling despite his tears. “We plant them in our memories and water them with tales.”
The Aboriginal Australians I met had a different approach to memory. During Sorry Business, the deceased’s name cannot be spoken for a period of mourning, allowing their spirit to journey to the Dreamtime without being called back by grief.
In a Maasai village in Kenya, I witnessed the ultimate storytelling funeral—elders spent three days recounting every significant moment of the deceased warrior’s life, from his first cattle raid to his final blessing. Each story was told three times, ensuring it would be remembered by three generations. The deceased’s spear was broken and buried with him, but his stories became the inheritance of the tribe.
I discovered a parallel tradition in the Mississippi Delta, where African-American communities have preserved the West African practice of “telling the life.” At a small church funeral, I listened as congregation members rose one by one to share memories, each story building upon the last until the deceased’s entire life story formed like a river delta—complex, meandering, but flowing toward the same sea of remembrance.
In Korea, I learned about jesa, ancestral ceremonies where families gather to share meals and stories with deceased relatives. The dead are given places at the table, their favorite foods served on special plates, while living family members recount family news and seek ancestral guidance. Here, storytelling becomes a bridge between worlds, keeping the deceased active participants in family life.
Perhaps the most poignant storytelling tradition I encountered was in a small Mexican village during Día de los Muertos. A grandmother sat beside her grandson’s grave, reading him the sports pages because he’d loved soccer. “He needs to know how his team is doing,” she explained.
The Teachers. At a Ghanaian fantasy coffin workshop, I watched artisans craft elaborate caskets shaped like airplanes, fish, and mobile phones—each reflecting the deceased’s profession or passion. “Death should tell the story of life,” the master craftsman explained, putting finishing touches on a coffin shaped like a giant cocoa pod for a farmer.
In Mexico, during Día de los Muertos, I learned that death could be intimate and joyful simultaneously. Families picnicked in cemeteries, sharing meals with deceased relatives whose favorite foods adorned colorful altars. Children played among the tombstones while grandmothers told stories of those who had “crossed over.”
The Batak people of Sumatra taught about death as transformation through their elaborate sigale-gale puppet ceremonies. Master carvers create wooden puppets in the likeness of the deceased, which then “dance” at the funeral, manipulated by hidden puppeteers. The puppet becomes a vessel through which the dead can say their final goodbyes, teaching mourners that death doesn’t end communication—it simply changes the medium.
At a Quaker silent meeting for worship that doubled as a memorial, I learned about death as a teacher of simplicity. No flowers, no music, no elaborate rituals—just silence broken occasionally by someone moved to share a memory. “In the silence,” one elder told me, “we learn to hear what truly matters. Death strips away everything except love.”
In a Tibetan monastery, I observed monks creating an intricate sand mandala over several days, only to sweep it away at the funeral’s end. The lesson was unmistakable: impermanence isn’t something to fear, but to embrace. Every grain of colored sand taught mourners that beauty lies not in permanence, but in the preciousness of the moment.
The most profound teaching came from a Lakota elder at a ceremony on the Pine Ridge Reservation. As we sat in the sacred circle, he explained: “Your white world fears death because it sees ending. We see transformation. The caterpillar doesn’t die to become a butterfly—it changes form. Death is just another word for becoming.” He gestured to the prairie wind that bent the grass in waves. “See? The wind doesn’t die when it stops blowing. It just goes home to rest before it dances again.”
The Question. “So what’s it like to be dead?” The question that launched this journey continues to follow me, book signing after book signing. Having witnessed eighty different ways of saying goodbye, I’ve learned that death isn’t a single experience—it’s as varied as the cultures that honor it.
I’ve seen death treated as celebration and catastrophe, as doorway and destination, as ending and beginning. I’ve watched bodies burned, buried, suspended, and scattered. I’ve heard death songs in a hundred languages and witnessed grief expressed through dance, silence, feast, and fast.
The remarkable truth I’ve discovered is this: how a culture treats death reveals everything about how it values life. The elaborate mausoleums of New Orleans speak to a society that believes in permanent remembrance. The communal wailing of Lebanese mourners reflects a culture where grief is shared, not hidden. The festive colors of Honduran cemetery decorations suggest a people who refuse to let death dim their vibrancy.
Yet despite all these differences, one thing remains constant across every culture I’ve encountered: love transcends the grave. Whether expressed through Viking fire ships or Tibetan sky burials, through New Orleans jazz or Japanese incense, the message is always the same—we are loved, we are remembered, we continue.
So when people ask me what it’s like to be dead, I tell them I don’t know. But I can tell you what it’s like to be loved by those we leave behind—and that, perhaps, is the only death experience that truly matters.
As Mark Twain might have said, reports of my death remain greatly exaggerated. I’m still here, still traveling, still collecting farewells. There are, after all, countless more ways to say goodbye.
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