Let's Chat... How Covid-19 changed death rituals (with Natasha Mikles)

#122. Let's Chat... about how the Covid pandemic reshaped important death rituals.

These 'Let’s Chat' episodes are conversations with guests who have experience/expertise in a particular area of loss. 

In this episode, I (Claire Sandys) chat to Natasha Mikles who is an assistant professor at Texas State University.

Natasha is a scholar of stories about death and what happens next, and researches traditions related to death and grief around the world (especially in Tibet and the Americas). Her most recent book, ‘Shattered Grief: How the Pandemic Transformed the Spirituality of Death in America’, examines how Covid-19 affected the spirituality of death and the grieving rituals surrounding it. 

Grief is not just a personal experience, it is a community journey shaped by rituals that connect us to the dead and each other. This conversation reveals how Covid-19 drastically altered the rituals we rely on during loss, redefining our understanding of mourning.

We explore the fascinating world of death rituals across different cultures, including the Tibetan sky burial ceremony. Natasha and I reflect on how the pandemic forced religious communities to innovate, balancing tradition with contemporary needs, often using technology as a bridge to maintain connection in times of isolation.

This episode discusses the vital role of community in mourning, the psychological impact of Covid-related deaths, the importance of ritual, how other cultures and religions honour and recognise death, and how Covid-grief can differ from other forms of grief. 

Plus, how you can have your body eaten by vultures in the US ...legally! 

For more about Natasha: www.hellscholar.com 

For her book:
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/shattered-grief/9780231558921
Amazon: https://gogl.to/3Mzd  

Chapters

• 0:00 COVID-19's Impact on Death Rituals
• 12:46 Traditional Tibetan Sky Burial Ceremony
• 16:16 Death Rituals and COVID-19 Research
• 19:29 Religious Communities and Virtual Rituals
• 23:15 Impact of COVID-19 on Death Rituals
• 31:43 Rituals and Grief in Modern Society
• 39:02 Cultural and Religious Perspectives on Death

Transcript

Claire: 0:00

Hello there and thanks for joining me for another episode of let's Chat on The Silent Why. I'm Claire Sandys and through this podcast we're exploring how and where we can find hope through grief and loss, and in these let's Chat episodes I talk to a guest who has experience or expertise in a particular area of loss. In this episode, I'm chatting to Natasha Mikles, who is an assistant professor at Texas State University. Natasha is a scholar of stories about death and what happens next and researches traditions related to death and grief around the world, and especially in Tibet and the Americas, and her most recent book, Shattered Grief how the Pandemic Transformed the Spirituality of Death in America, examines how COVID-19 affected the spirituality of death and the grieving rituals surrounding it, like social distancing, and how often this meant that conventional funerals couldn't be held, or how religious communities were disrupted at the exact moment mourners turned to them for support. This pandemic caused a dramatic change not only in rituals, but also how people found meaning after the loss of a loved one. So in this conversation we talk about the importance of ritual and how it can not only help us but also let us grieve, and how other cultures and religions honour and recognise death, and why and how COVID grief can differ from other forms of grief and how you can have your body legally eaten in the US by vultures.

Claire: 1:23

And because I want to capture some useful magic from each of these chats. A bit like the Hermans on our usual episodes you need to check out www. thehermancompany. com for more on those I'm building a tool shed, metaphorically, of equipment to help us face and get through loss and grief. So at the end of each of these episodes I ask our guests what sort of tool their subject would be and then I add it to my shed. And so far I've acquired a very useful range of tools. So grab a cup of tea, a coffee or maybe a ranch water apparently, that's a Texas thing or a whiskey that's a Natasha thing and relax with me and Natasha as we chat death rituals and COVID-19.

Natasha: 1:57

I'm Natasha Mikles. I'm an assistant professor at Texas State University in San Marcos, texas. There I teach classes in our religious studies program, primarily in Tibetan and Chinese religions, but also in world religions, and we might say kind of thematic courses about death, dying and narratives about kind of what happens next, like in the afterlife. I'm also the author of Shattered Grief how the Pandemic Transformed the Spirituality of Death in America, which just came out this past year with Columbia University Press.

Claire: 2:31

So tell me what brought you into this kind of world, because it's not your average little girl's dream to go into this kind of area. Rituals, death, shattered grief, all this kind of stuff. So is this something that's come from personal experience you've been through, or is it just something you're really interested in? Just tell me how you kind of got here.

Natasha: 2:46

So I was trained in what we call Tibetan studies, or I was trained as a Buddhologist. What that means is that I was primarily a scholar of Asian religion, of Buddhist traditions as they were practiced in China and Tibet, and I should say I am still a scholar of that. But during the pandemic, of course, worldwide global travel was halted and I was unable to go back to my fieldwork sites in Tibet and China. And as I was kind of contemplating how this was going to affect my career, because I had just been made into what in America we call tenure track positions I'm not sure how it works in the British and European academies, but in a tenure track position you have to kind of publish a certain amount of stuff that's within a certain timeframe and then they decide if you get to stick around or not. So, as this was happening, a friend of mine sort of I wouldn't call him a close friend, but an acquaintance of mine a young man died really unexpectedly from COVID-19. He was a PhD student at Texas State University but was also teaching full-time in their English department and he was a friend of mine in the sense that, you know, we met about once a week or maybe once every other week with a group of other professors to have beers at those little pub across the street from the university and just talk about kind of complain about our students and vent. And his death really, I think, struck all of us really hard, because it wasn't the kind of COVID-19 death that most of us were seeing on the television. This was January 2021. So the vaccine had just started to kind of enter into our conversations about COVID-19.

Natasha: 4:20

And I think, like many academics, I began thinking immediately analytically and began thinking about how all these funeral rituals had changed because of COVID-19 and death. I actually talk in the introduction of the book about watching his funeral from Zoom. At this point the funeral home still had not the one that his parents chose to go with for his funeral, did not have a great digital virtual setup, and so like they had this little camera kind of position that looked like it was like maybe like kind of just positioned very rockily over the door, like maybe they had like hooked it onto the wall and all these elements of Hindu funerals that I was really familiar with my research in Asian religions were still being done but were being modified, and I immediately began thinking what other changes are being made and how can we document this period? As a scholar of religion, I'm very interested in documenting important transformational periods as much as possible so that future researchers can have this type of data.

Claire: 5:19

Fascinating. Did you ever think about what COVID was doing death-wise before your friend died? Or was that literally the point when you started thinking? Actually, this is changing things.

Natasha: 5:28

I've been thinking about COVID-19 and death before that because my research is on Buddhist death traditions and kind of Buddhist ideas of the afterlife and rebirth and particularly Buddhist hells. Because of my Tibetan Chinese colleagues on different social media groups, I could see how in China Tibetans were being scapegoated as the people who were, you know, like happened in many countries. They were the ones who were bringing COVID into what was otherwise the Chinese government, trying to say otherwise this would have been a problem. So Tibetans, other minority groups, foreigners, but also watching how Tibetans were relying on traditional Buddhist practices to combat COVID-19. So there's a certain pill that a Buddhist monk can make in utilizing all sorts of different herbs but also different types of prayers and rituals that a lot of my Tibetan friends began taking as a means to combat COVID-19. And so that was very fascinating to me.

Natasha: 6:24

But I think the death of my friend really took it from being something that was academically interesting to really experiencing it myself. And while I had elderly parents and I was of course worried about COVID-19 for them, I think kind of having to hit someone that was actually younger than me and in my immediate friend group really kind of changed the tenor, changed the entire parameters of the conversation I was having with myself about this you know I don't know much about what the, the funeral rituals or anything would like that would be with Tibetan people, buddhist, anything like that.

Claire: 6:56

So what are the sort of the main differences that you would see with dealing with death in that culture compared to like American or British?

Natasha: 7:03

So for Hindu death rituals there's a kind of need to take care of the body right away. This is something that we see also in Islam and in Judaism, this kind of need to take care of the body, usually within 24 hours, if at all possible. So there's that kind of rush as well with Hindu death rituals, this belief that until the funeral happens, the soul of the individual inside the body can't go on to their next rebirth. So usually Hindu priests if this is happening in India, hindu priests will come and do the funeral themselves. They do believe in cremation, and so what happens is they will set up a funeral pyre, a funerary pyre, and as they set that up, the priest is chanting certain important passages from the Vedas, which are these sacred Hindu scriptures that are prized especially for their kind of, we say, their orality, for their sound, for their ability to kind of communicate and to speak. The important, foundational sound of the universe itself is the way some Hindu teachers have described it. Once they have the pyre set up and the body has been blessed and usually smeared with turmeric, the priest usually it's the oldest son, but in the case like my friend Arun, his father had to be the one to actually light the funerary pyre, so usually it's the oldest son, but here it was his father had to.

Natasha: 8:33

Now in America, because we don't allow open air cremations except in very specific places. What that means is that the father ends up having to be the one to actually hit the button that starts the cremation machine. So that's how that ritual has actually gotten transformed in America. Then, as the body's burning, a special frenu work will actually puncture the skull to make sure that the soul can get out. So seeing a lot of those things.

Natasha: 9:07

There were things like Q-tips. It was very strange to be seeing this ritual that I was very familiar with from my research but being done with like Q-tips in place, because at certain points you're supposed to smear turmeric all over the body or over the head. And you know the priest didn't want to get close because it was a COVID positive body and so he had this like Q-tip and it was just kind of like spraying it very far at a distance. You never really forgot that you were watching a COVID funeral in any way, shape or form. So Tibetan funerals often similarly incorporate elements like that. I mean I can talk about Tibetan funerals if you'd like.

Claire: 9:39

Yeah, give us a little bit about what they're like, because it's so different from anything we know I they're like, because it's so different from anything we know. I think it's really interesting to see how other cultures are doing it and how we can learn from those, especially if they help with the grief in a way that we might not be doing.

Natasha: 9:52

So Tibetan funerals there's an idea that once a person dies, you don't want to touch the body, because wherever you touch the body there's still this idea that there's a consciousness kind of moving around the body and if you touch the body on the shoulder, that's going to make the consciousness leave there and because it's not the head, it will have not as good a rebirth. So I think with both Hinduism and Buddhism there is this real concern with rebirth and making sure that the person who's died, that a particular good karma is going to come out, so they will have a better rebirth, a rebirth as a human, a rebirth in a divine realm, a more pleasant rebirth. I'm trying to think. I usually think about bad rebirths since I research Buddhist hells, but so with Tibetan Buddhist funerals they'll often so the body will be left for about seven days in the house and a Buddhist monk will come in, usually one who's been trained by a teacher, and read what's called the Tibetan Book of the Dead or the Bardo Tudral. So this is it's actually a really interesting text that is kind of talking about what the consciousness of the person inside the body is going to be seen as they go through the afterlife, or as they go through this what's called Bardo, this kind of intermediate period between one life and the next life. So the text is literally like you are going to walk forward here, you're going to see this wrathful deity, don't be afraid. This wrathful deity is just your own mind projecting its fears back at you. You're going to see this, you want to go this direction. And so the monk is kind of reading this into the ear, chanting it over the body, sometimes reading it directly into the ear of the corpse or the deceased person, as they are helping to guide the person through this intermediate period. And there is actually a lot of interesting fears in the tradition that the monk will be lying when he says that he can read this text. So I know from my own work on Buddhist hells that certain hell literature will say that there's hells reserved for Tibetan monks who said that they could read the Bardo Tudral and that they were able to, but actually were lying and were just kind of spouting random words. They get reborn in a very special, very, very bad hell because they not only lied but they also affected the rebirth of dozens, potentially hundreds, of other people.

Natasha: 12:09

Yes, so after that's finished, the family will take the body and then the kind of traditional form of body disposal into. That has been sky burials, where vultures eventually eat the body Usually. I only had an opportunity to see a sky burial once, but the family brought the body up to the top of the mountain along with monks who went up. They blessed the body and then the Buddhist monks actually had to leave immediately because it was very bad karma for them to see this and there's a special ritualized practitioner who actually begins to slice up the body in different ways.

Natasha: 12:46

At the Sky Barrel that I witnessed, I had not planned to see one.

Natasha: 12:50

We were just visiting the monastery and the family saw myself and a couple of my friends that were there and I think was surprised to see a bunch of random white people in the middle of Tibet and said that they were about to do this and that if we wanted to stand kind of on the outskirts so we were pretty far back, we couldn't see any details that they were okay with that and I remember, as we were watching it, all these vultures. There's a big hill and the vultures of course know what is about to happen. They're getting filled with anticipation and they're all on the hill and the sun comes out and the vultures all kind of open their wings and I understand biologically it's because they're trying to heat their bodies up. It's like they're trying to get warm. But it did look like this very beautiful moment of the vultures thanking the family for donating the body to them. Um, so there was a in maybe about 60 or 70 vultures on the hill. All it's just their wings spread directly, facing directly towards the family.

Claire: 13:46

Whoa, what a sight.

Natasha: 13:48

Yeah, so, and then, but yeah so, then the bone cutter will kind of slice off bits of the flesh to try to get the vultures excited and then kind of steps back and lets the vultures devour the body. And then kind of steps back and lets the vultures devour the body, and then one thing I was actually very unprepared for when I saw this was just how I had no idea how fast vultures can eat a body. I think it was about three minutes and all that was left was bones. And then he sucks back in and has a large mallet where he actually breaks the bones up and mixes them with butter and a little barley flour and then feeds them to tinier birds. So within the course of probably about 20 minutes the body's entirely gone.

Claire: 14:33

That's incredible. I honestly thought that would have been hours, if not days.

Natasha: 14:37

Yeah, wow. And this is not the only kind of like. This is the most famous form of biodisposal in Tibet. Really important people are cremated, but there's not always enough trees to do that everywhere, and most Tibetan Buddhists believe that by giving your body back to the vultures in this way, it's actually a kind of final act of generosity that earns good karma for yourself and good karma for your family.

Claire: 15:00

Yeah, I remember talking to somebody who worked nearby in a national prey center. There's a vulture project going on trying to help them. I think it might've been in India where they have, like is it Temple of Silence or something? They have a certain kind of death ritual.

Natasha: 15:13

Yeah, towers of Science. It's the Parsi community, so they were originally the only living Zoroastrians alive today.

Claire: 15:19

Ah, okay, they were having trouble because people were starting to take medication a lot more. Oh, fascinating I think it was Diclofenac specifically was killing the vultures when they were eating the bodies, so they were having to reintroduce more vultures. It was amazing I can't remember exactly what it was, but the knock-on effect of this one medication affecting the vultures, which then I think it was less food for the carnivores that were roaming around, but it was amazing the effect on all the different creatures that were involved in it. That's fascinating. Yeah, it is such a fascinating area because, like I said, it's so different from anything we have here.

Claire: 15:51

It's, I mean, for some people it would seem quite horrific because we just don't even see bodies at all, let alone any kind of separating the parts for vultures. Yeah, was there any part of it to you? That was really shocking, because obviously you know how, how these cultures work. But was it? Is it hard to watch? Or was there anything that was so different that it was just like, actually this is quite difficult to see yeah, I think for myself personally, the seeing the sky burial became difficult.

Natasha: 16:16

I do remember there's one part where this like there's intestines just go flying in red, like it's kind of it's almost funny. It's not obviously it's not funny, but I think that kind of was his moment, like oh, this is real, like yeah, what am?

Natasha: 16:27

I watching yes and um, at one point I did I started to get a little sick to my stomach and I I did have to turn my back, but I remember I could still hear the vultures breaking open the bone marrow, like the bones to get the marrow inside. That's a very distinctive sound and, and you know know, I kept thinking to myself, like you know, I think I wasn't before then. I wasn't entirely certain about mind body dualism. Is there a soul that's separate from the body? And in that moment I was like there is a soul separate from the body and that person is no longer in that body, and that being very arresting, you might say.

Claire: 17:01

Would a whole family go to something like that? Is that something children are introduced to, or is that just an adult thing?

Natasha: 17:06

I'm not entirely certain. The one that we were at, there were no children and it was a, I would say, middle-aged woman. Just by again, we're kind of far away, but just by looking at color of the hair and kind of the shape of the body from where we were, I think they would probably keep most children away from that. But I do remember the family was really not crying at all. I think on one hand you could say that for them that this was this incredible gift that they were giving to the vultures and they knew that this was kind of giving good karma. There's also some Tibetan popular stories that say if you start crying over the death of a loved one, that the loved one in the bardo will start experiencing rains of blood and pus for all of your tears oh gosh, you should not cry for the deceased loved one.

Natasha: 17:49

This actually is where we see also in Sikh cultures have very similar stories, not exactly the same, but that if you do cry overly much once the kind of mourning period is over, if you keep crying you are going to actually negatively hurt your loved one in the afterlife or in the kind of next rebirth.

Claire: 18:04

Gosh, that really does dictate your grieving, doesn't it? Because you wouldn't obviously want to do that to somebody. It's so different. It's really interesting. But I also want to see your COVID research and what came out of that. So, yeah, tell us. What was it around it that made you think, rather than just being interested in this and this is fast, because some people have been fascinated by what COVID was doing but also you wanted to keep going further, to do research on it and then a book on it. So what was it about that that made you think? Actually, there's just like so much here and why does it need doing? Why do people need to know about?

Natasha: 18:37

this. I started by doing interviews, just cold emailing. At first I thought I'd just be emailing religious professionals, so priests and imams and rabbis and pastors, and I started emailing them to ask how were the funeral rituals that they were doing changing because of COVID-19. What immediately began happening was they said well, you really should talk to this hospice doctor who I've been working with to kind of help make sure that any Episcopalians who die in hospice have the last, you know, final prayer, the last rites, done for them. And then through that it kind of became clear that this wasn't just something concerning religious professionals. This was actually concerning a whole community of people, the whole. There were dozens of individuals involved in every single death happening with COVID-19 that were all being affected by the pandemic. So it kind of exploded out.

Natasha: 19:29

And what I found, as a scholar, really interesting was, as I began doing more and more interviews, all these things that I had learned about as a graduate student, like all these theories, like Durkheim's theories of communities and Hayden White's theories of narrative and emplotment, all these like very high level theoretical ideas I got to really see on the ground, got to see them how they're being used or just how people were embodying these kinds of theoretical ideas just in their everyday life.

Natasha: 19:57

And I had this realization that this was actually a very important moment to help to provide this like tiny little microcosm to think about how religion works in society and how the experience of grief can actually change and transform the way that we think about religious identities and religious communities, and that if I didn't document this very dramatic period, that that data could be lost, because even right now, you know 2024, we are, you know we're all, everyone's in this rush to go back to normal, or we are, have been in this rush to go back to normal, and we're almost trying to forget that COVID-19 happened. And so it's important to remember it, to kind of document that exact little period and to see how, to kind of test theories to see does religion work this way and how does the idea of trauma inform, then the idea of a traumatic death inform, our religious communities?

Claire: 20:49

And what sort of things have you been learning from that? How does it affect them?

Natasha: 20:57

I think COVID-19 provided an important opportunity for a lot of people to re-evaluate what a community and what a ritual meant to them, and sometimes they had the support of their religious communities in doing this, and a lot of times they didn't. Here in America, I think there were a lot of religious communities who didn't want to accept that COVID-19 was happening, but also didn't want to change the way things had always been done, didn't want to question why do we need this particular ritual? Or to talk about why this particular ritual continues to be important and useful, and so I do think COVID-19 provided this kind of this important opportunity to evaluate and to make these changes and to think about what would we want a religious community to look like?

Claire: 21:33

Yeah, I guess at that time obviously a lot of religious communities were shut down so they couldn't meet. I mean, I never thought we'd see a day when the churches were shut down across England, let alone across the world at any kind of meeting like that, the religious stuff all being shut down or not being allowed to meet. What was the impact of that across a nation when it came to things like COVID and death and mourning and funeral rituals?

Natasha: 21:55

I think there was this real, this incredible shift to the virtual kind of virtual space that we've all experienced, and I think that for a lot of religious leaders, while they all said that you know, obviously virtual participation is often not as fulfilling as in-person participation that this was really important, but they actually said that we never would have made this jump as quickly as we would have without the pandemic kind of forcing us to.

Natasha: 22:26

This is something that is going to remain a part of our church community in some capacity in the years to come, and so I think there are good things that came out of this, some people pushing communities to enter into virtual spaces. This also benefited those who are disabled or homebound or otherwise unable to safely attend church services and church meetings, and so I don't want to say that the move to virtual religious practices is necessarily always bad, but in when my interviews, when I spoke with people who lost their funds to COVID-19, by and large everyone found the virtual funeral unfulfilling, and most of them seem to be haunted by the funerals that they envisioned for their loved ones, for their parents and grandparents, and that they could not have.

Claire: 23:11

Yeah, very difficult. I think and, like you said, in some ways again people now can attend funerals from across the world that they could never have got to physically because of that, because we had to do a lot of virtual stuff with funerals. It's definitely not the same, and the restriction on the numbers at funerals and things would have been horrible for people. But I guess a lot of things. I was just thinking about all the people who don't get to say goodbye, Because obviously there are always people who haven't said goodbye to relatives. You know there'll be people listening now that didn't get to say goodbye to a relative. They died in hospital, nothing to do with COVID, they didn't get there in time, they weren't there at the right time. That's always a situation that happens which is incredibly hard to deal with, Do you think?

Natasha: 23:52

it's different or does especially. I talk about this idea I call the liturgy of death, which is the idea that we have an idea of how a death is supposed to proceed and we kind of have a mental map of what our loved one's deaths are going to look like and oftentimes, as you point out, it doesn't happen. People are not able to get to the hospital in time, or people or someone has a traumatic death far away from their family. But even when that doesn't happen, we're still able to do to follow up with the other aspects of it, the other community building aspects, the you know, friends and family are still able to come visit you afterwards. You are able to. Even if you couldn't be there at the moment of death, if you couldn't be there at the funeral, you are still. Everyone in your society still will acknowledge that you are a mourner, that you are now in this new stage, also due to individuals that might have less risk tolerance for COVID-19, people were really unable to get that kind of social support and unable to be socially recognized as mourners. They also weren't able to be socially recognized as mourners because at least here in America, 50% of the country didn't think the pandemic was happening and if you said my loved one died of COVID-19, a lot of people I interviewed when they would tell their friends and family my loved one died of COVID-19, they would kind of get questioned and being like well, did they have diabetes, were they overweight, like what other issues were there?

Natasha: 25:25

And I think that's probably a very human response. People don't want to understand their own mortality. You want to find some kind of reason why so and so die, but that you would be protected in that capacity. But the reality is COVID-19 was what one of the doctors I interviewed called a Russian roulette disease. You had no idea who would live and who would die from it and that there were certain things that made it more likely. But at the end of the day the doctor said I've seen perfectly healthy people get put on ventilators and die who had no reason to.

Natasha: 25:54

And for those people I interviewed who had to kind of endure this questioning, it really devalued their loved one's death. It made it feel like it was somehow like an acceptable death to have. It was okay that their loved one died from COVID-19, or at least it was understandable. I think it's really hard to grieve in that environment. No one wants to be told that your loved one's death is an acceptable death that we're going to put up with because we all want to go to a bar after dinner.

Claire: 26:21

Do you think that it's had a lasting impact? Do you think that there's been something from this that will just keep impacting?

Natasha: 26:28

I think there will be no-transcript friends group and I found that to be that continues to be remain as active as ever.

Claire: 27:23

And so I think that for a lot of people, covid-19 grief is still very real, even if our society doesn't want to talk about it. You know, if someone else died of something, you wouldn't necessarily say, well, were they obese? Did they have lung issues? But with COVID, people obviously feel like they have that freedom to do that and that's really difficult. It's like a disenfranchised grief isn't it.

Claire: 27:39

It's something you feel you can't really grieve to the full extent. Is that sort of what's happening in the COVID groups you're talking about? Is it the lasting effect of talking about that? Or is it that people are still dying of COVID and you've got new people coming with that sort of grief.

Natasha: 27:53

I think people are still dying of COVID-19, but because now I think people still have COVID-19, but we're able to have the types of funerals people wanted to have. My period of field work went from January 2021 until August 2021. So a very specific six month period, because people are now able to have the gatherings afterwards to have the kind of social recognition. I think there is a lot greater recognition of COVID-19 grief or that there's less of this type of questioning and there's kind of more societal and social support. I think what the COVID-19 epidemic really proved was that we can't really grieve in isolation and that grief in isolation just is incredibly painful and leads to unfulfilled grief.

Natasha: 28:41

One thing I always say to my students is that there's this one scientific principle that talks about to understand what an organism needs to survive, and you need to find all those places with the organism where we only see what things have to be in place that needs to survive. And you need to find all those places with the organism where, like where we only see, like, what things have to be in place that organism to thrive. So you could talk about this with, like earthworms. You can talk about this with, like different types of fish, that they need certain you know water and they need certain amounts of types of food.

Natasha: 29:04

With humans, the only thing that, like human communities, are diverse across the planet. The only thing human communities really need to survive is other humans. You never see a human living by themselves, completely without any other human around them or any kind of framework. We see that with language development, we see that with social development and I think we see that with grief that humans need each other to grieve, to recognize their grief, to help guide their grief, but also to share their grief, and I think, because during the pandemic people couldn't do that, their grief really became halted. So, even though we still have people die to COVID-19 today and it is still incredibly painful, I think the fact that you can have that shared grief afterwards makes the experience different than in the 2020 and 2021 period of the pandemic.

Claire: 29:52

And I guess those that went through it in the pandemic. It could bring up stuff now when you're seeing people who are having loved ones die of COVID-19 and they're getting all that freedom. I think if that was me, there'd be another level maybe of grief or anger or frustration or like an unfairness that you missed out on that, and so you could almost be grieving again for what you missed out on around the ritual and around the community and seeing other people and so, yeah, that must be really difficult. I don't think people think about it in this level much. So I think it's a really interesting thing to look at and to tap into, because you're sort of only aware of what you're aware of in your vicinity and what happened with COVID.

Claire: 30:29

We don't really hear much about what happened individually in different countries, especially when it comes to things like death and funerals and how people were doing it. Have these other communities that you've been looking at, whether it's you know Hindu Buddhism? Have they? Have they gone back to the funeral rituals they were doing before? Has it changed anything about how they do things or have they gone fully back to how things were pre-pandemic?

Natasha: 30:49

They've largely gone back to how they were pre-pandemic, although I know that with some of the Buddhist communities that I look at before, if you had a loved one die in a Buddhist community, you would need to get some Buddhist monk or some Buddhist individual to chant sutras, to chant various texts for them. It used to be you'd have to go and fly to the country where your loved one died and get a monk there. But I do know that a lot of the Buddhist temples at least here in Austin, texas, where we have a small but sizable Asian American population that they are starting to offer that they will chant virtually for your loved one in China if they die and you can't get back, or they will chant virtually for your loved one in Hong Kong or Malaysia are the three that I'm thinking of right now. I think that's something that is this type of innovation that I think will continue to remain in religious communities.

Natasha: 31:43

Another innovation that I've been seeing is and this has been happening for a while is things like the virtual puja in Hinduism, so having certain devotional rituals that you can do online and can do virtually, and I think that this has generally a very good thing for most people who want to participate in a kind of religious practice but might not be near their community. But one thing I do talk about in the book that I think is also concerning is these virtual communities are allowing people to self-segregate even more. There is something very dangerous about the idea of continuing to reinforce your bubbles and to become more and more into only a kind of liberal religious community or only a very conservative religious community.

Claire: 32:24

It's just really interesting how something like a worldwide pandemic can make funerals and other rituals that go more virtual. Because if you'd have suggested that pre-pandemic you know most communities would be like, well, no, no way, why would we want to do virtual? That's crazy. But it's just one illness spreading across the world has just changed how we do things. Are there things about these other funeral rituals you've seen in any religion or community that you think that seems to be really helpful or valuable to grief, or it's something that maybe we should adopt more kind of in the western world, I think one.

Natasha: 32:58

One thing that I think really kind of came through for a lot of the individual interviewed was that kind of really respecting the role that ritual can have, not as a reflection of grief, but as a thing that shapes grief itself. So when I talk with my students, we talk about how a reflection of grief, but as a thing that shapes grief itself. So, when I talk with my students, we talk about how, a lot of times, the study of religion in the West oftentimes says you have a belief first and you express that belief with a ritual, and this is largely because we have kind of Protestant Christian foundations to our culture that say that belief is primary. The reality, though, is that for most religious traditions around the world, belief is pretty much secondary to ritual practice, and that often, ritual can help shape our beliefs, and so I talked about this a little bit in my chapter, looking at just kind of ritual as a phenomenon.

Natasha: 33:47

During the pandemic, one Buddhist nun I spoke to said that she had a parishioner or a kind of congregant whose husband died, and she kept saying I'm not sad, I don't feel sad, but she obviously the Buddhist nun said well, but she's been married for 40 years.

Natasha: 34:05

It was very, very strange. So I started telling her to come in and do more rituals and come in and you know here's a key to the temple Come in and do different types of sutra, chanting for your husband in our memorial hall and that actually made her experience, the grief that allowed her to give her this kind of out. And some of the Muslim leaders that I interviewed here in America talked about how even having these important being able to do these important foundational Muslim death rituals, like washing the body and kind of wrapping the body, actually were important opportunities for people to actually feel their like, to have the expression of their grief, to feel like their grief had a purpose. And so I think that a lot of times we don't really honor ritual as the thing that lets us grieve. Ritual doesn't have to express our grief, but it can be that thing that tells us you're now a mourner and you've now lost your father, your grandfather, your mother, your child and you've entered into a different state. I think that can be a really important tool.

Claire: 35:10

In England it's very much. You can kind of choose what you want to do. In some ways there's a lovely freedom in that because you could honour the person however you wanted to, and I've done interviews with funeral celebrants who have done them in circus tents and all different places have honoured the person that was alive, which is great if you've got the creativity in that moment to think of these things. But on the other side of things, I think when someone dies, a lot of us don't know what that's going to look like. That's quite scary, it's confusing. Do they want to be cremated? Do they want to be buried? They seem to be the only two options that people have on their minds. So there's like we've got to pick one. What do you want? What do they want? And then beyond that, it's like well, do I want to be in a church, no-transcript service? But that might not feel very genuine to them because they don't have any kind of religious beliefs. So the whole thing is a little bit disjointed. We sort of have some rituals left over from a religious country when we were a bit more Christian, and then, unless you're in a religious community in which case you would know roughly what it looks like, because you'll see it happening. I don't think people know much about it and I think that's such a shame because, like you said, there is no space really for having that ritual.

Claire: 36:26

If you knew this is what was going to happen, the body was going to be in the house for a day, let's say, or there was going to be an open casket. You'd have time to mourn, you'd be wearing black or you'd rip your clothes or you'd put ash on your face, whatever it is. If you had something specific and I can really see how that would shape your grief and help you through and allow you that space to mourn. But here we just hide it away. It's like, oh, someone's died. Quick, get the funeral directors in, move them away. Do you want to see them or not? Probably not, okay, that's fine, let's have a quick service. And it's just like, where is the space to really allow that grief to kind of feature?

Claire: 36:59

So I definitely don't think we've done ourselves any favors by getting rid of any of the rituals we might have had in the past where people would wear black or something just to show they were mourning. I think that would be a really healthy thing to see other people mourning, because then when you go through it, you know what it looks like. Or also, if you're mourning, you know I'm not alone in this. Someone else is mourning over there. Yeah, there's so much to it we've lost. I don't know if that's something that will come back at any point, or I don't know, maybe we're we're too far. Is it similar in America, or have you got more of a diverse range of how people do it?

Natasha: 37:29

I think it is similar in America. I think especially, um, you know America a couple years ago. We has hit the very big statistic that now most Americans do not identify as belonging to a religious institution. Honestly, I tell my students that doesn't mean they're not religious, it just means what it means to be religious has now changed and that is less of a kind of institutional, hierarchical kind of focus to that. And so I do think that that is something very prevalent here in America, and one of the funeral directors I interviewed talked about even before the pandemic. He said that before the pandemic, the most difficult clients that he worked with, most difficult families he worked with, were people who didn't have religious identity and didn't really know what they wanted. Because he's like I can't make these decisions for you and I can't tell you what's going to feel significant in that moment. Only you can do those things. But, as you said, these people had never really thought about what would a funeral look like and what would a funeral look like that looks significant.

Natasha: 38:30

A very famous scholar of religion talks about ritual as the assertion of difference. A very famous scholar of religion talks about ritual as the assertion of difference, meaning that rituals feel useful and feel important when they are very obviously different than ordinary time. So in Judaism you sit shiva for six days and you sit and you aren't allowed to leave the house, and I think that that's actually really important. You are doing something very different than your regular time. You're doing something very unique and special, and I think having that set apart time is so important for grief and so important for rituals to be effective.

Claire: 39:02

What do you think all these other religions, or do you know what they think of how we're doing it over here, making it shorter and shorter and sort of cleaning it and putting it away? Do they have an opinion on that?

Natasha: 39:12

Not that I know of. So we always say religious studies is unfortunately generally a lot of Westerners studying not Westerners, and there hasn't really developed the idea of not Westerners. So like Chinese scholars or Indian scholars coming back to America to study us. I think whenever we get to that point, I think we'll be in a really great place because obviously, as you point out, they would notice things in our own culture that we might not see just because that we're part of it. So but I do know that you know most of the people that I interviewed who are.

Natasha: 39:45

You know, I interviewed only Americans, but of course, america is one of the most culturally and religiously diverse countries in the world, and so the people that I were interviewing who were part of second and third generation immigrant communities so Sikh Americans or Buddhist Americans they would talk about how one of the major things that would decide what funeral home they were going to is just how familiar they were with their rituals and that these rituals were very precious. These were some of the most unchanging rituals that they would. One person I interviewed said like it's so important to me as a Muslim, even though I don't attend mosque every Friday, that I have a Muslim funeral for my father. But this is central to everything. I need it to be.

Claire: 40:24

Yeah, it must be fascinating for funeral directors in our countries when they come across these other religions and how they do things and watching how they do it differently. Since you started studying all this, has this shaped what you want for for your funeral? Do you know what you want that to look like?

Natasha: 40:35

in terms of my funeral, I know I just want a really big party. I'm polish, irish catholic, so I think on both sides, you know, you get a big, big wake, kind of a big crazy whiskey field party. I've thought about my body disposal. So at texas state university we have what's called an anthropological forensic research facility, which is a very fancy way. It's kind of colloquially called the body farm. So I know I want my body to be disposed of there, so I will be eaten by vultures there.

Claire: 41:00

I thought you were going to say sky burial.

Natasha: 41:02

I can't do a sky burial but I can do this. The only way to have your body eaten, at least in America legally, is by doing one of these body farms. There are two places in America you do open air cremations that often then the vultures come to eat the kind of charred remains afterwards. But there's nowhere to do a sky burial here in America. And this actually was an issue when I interviewed. You mentioned the Parsis and the Towers of Silence. I interviewed the Parsi community in Houston and the man who ran that said that COVID-19 actually you know it made it harder to get to ship goods across the world. But one of the things that made it harder to ship was bodies, because a lot of the Parsis in Houston, if they died, would pay to have their bodies shipped to India where you can do the towers of silence. And this became a problem because some of the bodies got delayed in transit along the way there.

Claire: 41:52

Shipping bodies. I need to find someone to talk about that. How does that work? Yeah, oh, that's really interesting. I'm always fascinated by people who work in the funeral industry. I know some people think it's a bit morbid when you talk about it, but I think there's a lot of value in thinking ahead for these things. Do you think it can be helpful in some way to sort of think about these things, either for ourselves or, you know, asking those we love what would they like? Do you think that's a good thing?

Natasha: 42:12

Very important to talk about this and to begin envisioning what type of funeral you want, but also begin envisioning your loved one's funerals, not only so that you know their wishes, but also so that you can begin thinking about the fact that you or your loved ones will die. One of the people I interviewed was a death doula an end of life specialist doula an end of life specialist and she talked about how, when the family doesn't know what someone's final wishes are for their biodisposal or for their rituals surrounding it, that actually can cause more pain for them that having that moment. There can be great comfort in knowing that you are fulfilling what your loved one wanted at the very end.

Claire: 42:53

Yeah, one of our guests said a while back that she thought the funerals were for the living, not the dead.

Natasha: 42:57

Yes.

Claire: 42:58

And I've often thought about that. And I was actually chatting to somebody this week. They were talking about someone who a friend of a friend who'd had a pure cremation. So they'd been sent off for cremation and the ashes get sent to you and that's pretty much everything. And she said I was like literally I wouldn't do that for my husband, like even if that was what he wanted, I'm the one grieving, I'm going to have some form of gathering Afterwards. I just couldn't do it. I can totally see the temptation and I can see why people would want to, because I guess you just don't want to go out into a funeral and see loads of people and you know when you're at that raw grief stage, I totally get it. But I do see the importance of why people should do it and the gift it probably gives you and others to allow that space for grief. So it's something I would definitely make myself do.

Claire: 43:44

I do worry that we can even get even quicker with death and make it something that clean and sort of clinical, and I'd probably say, if people have regrets about doing that at some stage to have a gathering later on, I don't think it necessarily matters when it is.

Claire: 43:57

If you've had one of those and thought, oh gosh, I missed out, or you know, have a gathering or remembrance thing for somebody. It can be done at any stage, just like grief comes up at any stage. So thank you for everything we've been talking about and we could go on talking for ages about loads of this stuff but what I want to ask as the last question is what kind of tool this is. So we've talked about the importance of death rituals and how they can shape our grief and all the benefits they can bring and the different ways people can do them. So if these are a useful tool that help people through loss or help them in their grief or even prepare for it, if I went to the shed to pick out that tool, what kind of tool would represent this area?

Natasha: 44:30

so in thinking about rituals, I kind of think like a rake, like one of really big, when you have to rake leaves, and those ones that are like really big fan outspread, and I think that that can be a really important symbol for thinking about rituals and thinking about the way that they rituals can serve to bring people together and can kind of unite various strands of identity, unite different focal points of one's life. I think that ritual can just serve to bring people together at moments of crisis in the way that when you're kind of raking with all those big, wide rakes, you can bring all those leaves together.

Claire: 45:05

A rake, and one of those ones that fans out a bit, which means I can differentiate it from the previous rake that I had, which is a more traditional wooden one, in my mind, another very useful tool for my shed. If you want to find out more about Natasha, you can check out the links in the show notes for more on her and where to find her book. Thank you so much for this conversation, natasha. It's fascinating to chat to people who are in such different areas of study and interest. Ritual is so important when it comes to saying goodbye and it reminds me of the conversation we had in Lost 41.

Claire: 45:35

Lost without a body with Lisa Kolb Ruland. The body of Lisa's husband was never found and she said one of the hardest things was not being able to have the rituals and the traditions of a funeral. These are things we often don't realise we're taking for granted when someone dies, and it reminds us that even in these moments when life feels at its worst, there are still things to be grateful for. If you want to find out more about me and Chris and our experience with infertility and childlessness, or the podcast or Herman's and loads more, pop over to www. the silentwh y. com. Thanks for listening to The Silent Why. If you've got a subject you'd like me to chat to an expert on, please get in touch via our social media or the website or the email the silentwh y@ gmail. com and let's chat.