Katie Allison Granju struggles with the imagery of her son's cremation.
I don’t remember much of that period immediately after Henry died, but I do remember the agony I felt every time I thought about what was going to happen to Henry during the autopsy and then later, at the crematorium.
Knowing that Henry’s body was inside a bag or refrigerated box in a cold, impersonal mortuary space at the hospital was bad enough. The thought of his body being transported in a hearse from the hospital to the crematorium made me ill. The understanding that strangers would undertake the medical desecration of my child’s gorgeous physical self during the autopsy was even worse. But the thought of my baby being placed into a sealed wooden box and pushed into a white hot oven was honestly the most horrible thing I’ve ever considered – worse than any nightmare I’d ever had before. And yet, I made myself think about it. All of it. Every detail. I forced myself to imagine exactly what would happen to his hair, his skin and his eyes. I allowed the images of his burning body to flood my consciousness without pushing them away. This horrific imagining was the only way I could sort of, kind of be with Henry as the burning of his body took place in reality.
In the days just after Henry died, when I would express my great pain due to the autopsy and cremation, people who love me kept telling me that it was “just his body.”
“The real Henry is gone,” they would remind me gently. “What he’s left behind is just an empty shell.”
I understood completely what they were trying to convey, and I know they wanted nothing more than to take away some of my pain. However, these particular words were no solace to me at all. In fact, there is nothing anyone could have said to make the impending burning of my son’s body any less painful for me. That’s because there is no way that any mother can EVER see her child’s physical being as “just an empty shell.” While I understood and accepted that Henry’s spiritual self had been separated from his body at death, that didn’t make his actual body – his gorgeous, lithe, strong young body – any less important to me. I didn’t love my child’s body any less now that his spirit had gone elsewhere. I loved it the way I always had, and that was a lot.
I would not presume to write a comment on a grieving mother's blog giving my own religious opinion, especially when I don't know her beliefs.
But I wish I could give my opinion directly to the people who told her that her son's body was "just" an empty shell.
It seems to be a pretty widespread belief that the body is an unimportant husk, that it somehow doesn't matter in an eternal sense. You see it even among Christians. And yet that's not the traditional Christian belief, which includes the literal "resurrection of the body." Yes, the body. The body, like the soul, is meant somehow for eternity, even if here in time it disintegrates. We don't know how it is going to be re-made, but somehow it will be, and that is the traditional belief. And that's why we know the body is important.
The body is not a "shell" containing the "real person" either. The spirit is not the "real person." The person is the body AND the soul. That is why we are horrified at the earthly destruction of the body. That is why there is incomplete solace even in the knowledge that the soul survives. Solace is incomplete because the person is incomplete without his body.
This is why we grieve at death — the separation of the person into live soul and dead body. However much we believe that all will be made new again, it's not happening yet, and while we wait, it hurts.
I would like to honor Katie's grief. It would be unseemly for me to volunteer my own beliefs on a grieving mother's blog. But I can write them here.
bearing blog 