Premature Death
In the Victorian era, a widowed bride wore a small vial around her neck—known as a tear catcher—to collect her tears, which she tenderly poured atop the gravesite of her husband on the first anniversary of his death.
Despite this poignant grieving ritual—possibly romanticized—the story is told of pallbearers carrying a man’s coffin to the graveyard. When they accidentally knocked the coffin against a wall, a faint moan was heard from inside, and the casket was thrown open to reveal the man was still alive. He lived for another decade. Upon his death, his body was taken to the same graveyard. When the pallbearers approached the cemetery entrance, the man’s wife yelled out, “And this time, stay clear of the wall!”
The fear of being buried alive was an obsession in the nineteenth century. Authors such as Edgar Allan Poe capitalized on this fear in chilling stories like “The Fall of the House of Usher” about a brother who buries his sister alive. Doctors occasionally pronounced comatose or unconscious patients dead prematurely. In some sensational cases, the deceased were revived during funeral services. The Society for the Prevention of People Being Buried Alive was created to allay the widespread fear of premature burials. Preventive measures included delaying interments by days and weeks. Shovels, crowbars, and a patented iron bell alarm device were added inside the caskets. Another popular mechanism was a pipe inserted into the casket that protruded from the ground to allow for emergency communications. The well-to-do retained servants to keep vigil by these pipes for any audible activity.
While the fear of a premature burial was a reality in the Victorian age and earlier, it is less likely to occur nowadays. Nevertheless, in 2018, when family members poured water on the chest of a presumed-dead ninety-five-year-old man during a traditional pre-funeral ritual in India, he shivered and began to breathe. That same year, a “dead” man in China awakened as the mortuary attendant applied makeup for his funeral, and a “dead” woman in South Africa was rescued from a morgue fridge when a worker discovered she was still breathing.
Likewise, just last November, a forty-five-year-old man in India was hit by a motorcycle, declared dead, and placed in a morgue freezer. When his family was summoned the next day to see the body, the man’s sister-in-law touched his cheek and noticed his skin felt warm before discovering he was still breathing. She expressed mixed emotions of “happiness and horror.”
To be buried twice sounds horrifying. By the same token, to be alive—but to never really have lived—is also a haunting thought. Figuratively speaking, this also is a premature burial. Something more tragic than dying frightens us, writes Rabbi Harold Kushner: “We are afraid of never having lived, of coming to the end of our days with the sense that we were never really alive, that we never figured out what life was for” (When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough, Summit Books, 1986).
While some people get a new lease on life after surviving an accident or illness, do we need a traumatic event to gain a better perspective on life? Rather, at this very moment, what are you living for? Furthermore, WHO are you living for?
