week seven_to keep or to dump

It is natural that people want to keep the body or even ash of their gone family members or friends, for the reason everyone can understand easily: we want to stay in the time spent with the loved person, leaving the body behind seems as cruel as dumping the family member or even worse,because the one dead won't make any resistance to show his or her anger or sadness, which may probably makes people done so feel terrible about what is done. To most people, knowing the fact that each gone family member / friend is resting in peace in some graveyard or cinerarium is much more relieving than have totally have no idea that where he or she finally belongs to.

But let's think from another perspective, since the very beginning of human history death has kept a close companion with it. People born and died, nobody knows where the remain of our earliest ancestors' bodies are now, and nobody cares. Just let it be, for nobody cares about it, that is the opinion we hold to death happened long time ago. But we are treating death much closer to ourselves in a quite different way: we hold ceremonies and try to make the dead one feel better without even understanding the original meaning of these ceremonies; we buy some place to store the ash of them as long as possible. Just like the ship mentioned in today's lecture, this ship is designed to carry the ash of dead people to release the active demand of cinerarium in Hong Kong. But why not just simply spread the ash to sea area nearby as many local families have done? Why still bother figuring out a way to keep ash as long as possible? Is this insistance of intergrality of body really unbreakable?

news photo taken in a sea burial