Culture, Death and Meaning: An Easter Reflection
It’s Easter Sunday and I am sitting at the dinner table with my mother, my wife and my daughter. We are drinking masala chai and eating chocolate. There is talk of fathers and sons, of suffering and forgiveness, of death, Gods and bunnies, and the magic of easter eggs appearing in the middle of the night; and I can’t help but reflect on what this all means for me today.
I need to be clear, I am not religious and I do not believe in God, but I think I get it, at least a little. And I think I get it a little more this year because I recently lost someone who was very dear to me. Someone who was very dear to our family. I recently lost my father-in-law, my Pappa.
I loved my Pappa because he was the father I always wanted. Pappa’s life and his death has made me more appreciative of my family, and in particular, of my own mother who is ageing and now coming closer to the end of her life (and who also happens to be deeply religious). Pappa’s death makes these moments, where we can share the simple pleasures of tea and chocolate, even more precious.
Now, I have spent a lot of time reflecting on death. Part of my PhD was to understand how a small indigenous community in South India, the Paniya, used funeral practices and ancestor worship to understand who they were and how they should live their lives. They were slaves until quite recently, and so their rituals of death helped them create a sense of place and belonging in the midst of a life that was full of suffering.
In my time with the Paniya, I learned that we make sense of life through the meanings we place in death. Bereavement prompts us to relearn the self and relearn the world in the wake of loss. The Paniya used stones to represent the bodies and stories of their ancestors. These stones helped them remember, helped them heal, helped them find meaning in their loss and in their difficult lives.
In this way, parts of what they do are similar to the “continuing bonds” theory of bereavement. It is all about finding ways to adjust and redefine our relationships with the deceased, allowing for a continued bond with the person throughout our life. This theory states that it is healthy and normal to continue ties to our loved ones, holding on to the relationship instead of “letting go”.
Whether it be through telling their stories, wearing their clothes, feeling their “presence” or having rituals and artefacts of material culture to remind us of the deceased (stones, photos, possessions, or making the deceased a part of us by ritually consuming their body and blood - like in the Eucharist), our loved ones will always be a part of our life after they die. They are just part of our lives in a different way. Mourning and remembrance are our processes of reflecting on what they meant to us, working out how we will continue our relationship with them, and how we will hold on to the value of their existence.
Whilst we knew that Pappa’s death was coming, in the end it still felt like it happened too fast because, no matter how much notice we received, we could never be truly ready to see him go. But in doing so, Pappa gave us an invaluable gift. He forced us to think about our lives. He reminded us of how fragile, fleeting and precious life is, and that we can’t wait to tell the people we love what they mean to us. Papa reminded us that what we have is something to be truly grateful for. What we have is each other.
Pappa’s death was also a stark reminder that because our existence is so random, improbable, fragile, impermanent and precious, it really is a miracle that we are here at all. In fact, it is the impermanence of it all that helps me to see the beauty in little things. And it is in our suffering, our sacrifice, our grief and our loss that we are brought closer to the beauty of that gift. How can we truly appreciate something that is perfect and that lasts forever?
How can we truly appreciate our life if we never accept the inevitability of our death?
And so, I like to think that it doesn’t help to ask “why we suffer”, and then spend the rest of our lives trying to avoid it. I think it is more helpful to simply accept THAT we suffer; that we die. Then the only question we can really ask is how we choose to meet that truth? How do we choose to meet each and every precious moment that we have left?
And I find that it is in embracing this choice that I have had the opportunity to create my own answers in my search for what it means to be human.
This ability to explore what it means to be human, for ourselves, has helped me move past the idea of an objective “right or wrong” way of understanding our lives. As an anthropologist, this has been my motivation to connect with the many different people, stories and perspectives out there in the world, and uncover the different ways that we all use to make sense of our existence.
But in doing so, I have also learned that it is human to seek out concrete answers in the face of suffering. We are taught that there is comfort in knowledge and fear in the unknown. It is human to want to be surrounded by a community that makes us feel safe and helps us make sense of these things. It is human to become attached to the answers we find in these spaces of belonging.
The danger is in believing there is only one way of finding these answers, or that our answer is somehow better than that of another, or that our answer cannot change over time. And so, in attempting to understand life, our desire to hold on to the answers can actually contribute to further suffering.
And so, as I contemplate the meaning of life in the face of death, I find myself caught in a dance between faith and knowledge, where I oscillate between 2 positions: 1) Having faith that even though I can never know the true purpose of my existence, my existence still has purpose. And 2) The need for my purpose to be explicitly revealed, and for that purpose to be recognised, appreciated and validated by others.
Sometimes I feel I need to do something “great” for my life to be of value; for me to be worthy of this gift of life, and for me to be remembered. Sometimes I feel like I need the validation of others because I find it so hard to love myself.
But then I say this to my mum, as we are drinking tea and eating chocolate, and she tells me very clearly that even if I did nothing, my existence would still matter to her. My existence still made her world a better place (except, of course, for a few dodgy years during my adolescence?!?). She reminds me that I don’t have to do anything and I would still be worthy of love. I don’t have to save the world or do “great things” for my life to be of value. I think of my own kids and feel the same; that true love really is unconditional.
In the context of global instability, with the world on the brink of large scale conflict, I look at the people around me and know that we may not agree, we may not feel the same, we may all be in different places and see the world differently, but each of our lives has value. Each of our lives is precious. Each of us deserves understanding, empathy, love, compassion and forgiveness.
And so, as I reflect on what Easter means to me, in the context of my Pappa’s death, I can’t help but think of my own father, who was an abusive parent and whose “love” had so many conditions placed upon it (its the main reasons I do so much work on positive masculinity). And I am reminded of how my mother brought magic into our lives during Easter and Christmas, even though we had so much darkness around us. But even though I know that magic is an illusion, I find myself wanting to hold on to another truth, that my mum’s magic brought us great joy and gave us hope.
And so, on Easter Sunday, with the world as it is, as we are all eating chocolate and I am pondering life, I seize the opportunity and ask my mum if she still believes in God. Her answer is a resounding and unshakeable “Yes!”
I ask her what she thinks happens when we die and she says “Who cares!”
“I don’t believe in God for what happens next, I use it now, here in this world.”
“I get the same thing thinking about God as I do when I think of you.”
“When I feel sad, or lonely, or even when I feel happy, when I think of you I feel better.”
And the beauty is that this truth that I am coming to terms with, the truth that my mum holds on to, is not new.
The more people I connect with - the more I learn about religion, philosophy and culture - the more I see this truth playing out in different ways, just with different words, different symbols, different structures and practices.
And when I think about the big story of human evolution, over hundreds of thousands of years, I get the sense that the answer has always been here, within us all, just as the need to question and wonder has been too.
The ability to ask and wonder and find meaning, this is one of the most challenging and rewarding aspects of our existence as humans. But life (with its suffering and its death) is the vehicle through which we make sense of our existence. In essence, we make sense of our existence through living our lives in the face of death. And we don’t need to be anything more than who we are for our life to be of value, or for us to be worthy of love and forgiveness.
I take comfort in knowing that throughout history and across cultures we have always simultaneously known the simple truth of our existence and yet still desperately kept seeking that truth; asking the big existential questions whilst the answers were staring us in the face. And that is why the answers can be so elusive. That is why we keep searching. That is why we try to hold on to them so tightly when they come to us in those moments of clarity from time to time. The question and the answer have always been here, they just can’t seem to exist in the same space and time. When one emerges, the other disappears…this is the dance that I was reminded of when my dear Pappa died.
This is what I have been reflecting on this Easer as I think about fathers and sons, of suffering and forgiveness, of death, Gods and bunnies, and the magic of chocolate eggs appearing in the middle of the night.
They say that grief is the purest form of love. And in the end we got to love Pappa in the purest, most tender way possible, as we held him and held each other whilst he took his last breaths. It was the hardest and the most beautiful thing that we could do.
But in his death, he brought us closer together. And in that moment, there was clarity. We felt connected and loved and proud that we were with him. We felt grateful for him, grateful for each other and grateful for our lives.
Dr Monty Badami is an Anthropologist and the Founder of Habitus. He combines evolutionary evidence with cross-cultural research to demonstrate how our creativity, diversity and imperfection, is actually the secret to our adaptability and success as a species.
He has spent most of his research living with the Paniya, a marginalised indigenous group in India, who were slaves until recently. However, he now works closer to home, where he delivers transformative workshops that help people put more meaning and joy back into their lives.
Monty supports organisations to improve their performance and gain a competitive edge by embracing our humanity and nurturing collaborative and inclusive cultures.
He runs a series called “Brave Conversations”, where he uses his anthropological knowledge to talk about what it means to be human, as well as challenge the norms of toxic masculinity as well as other stereotypes of class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and race.