This all sounds like Doughty was making a pitch for morticians, but in fact she ended up very against automatically embalming corpses and uncomfortable with efforts to hide the reality of death from loved ones, like shifting the washing of a body from the family to professionals.
I have an interesting-to-me reaction to this position, which is that I am all against embalming, but I like that tahara is performed by the chevra kadisha and I would not want to abolish the existence of such societies; they are endangered enough at this point in history and I like what they represent, which is a gift that cannot be and can never be expected to be repaid. (Full disclosure: I know people who are involved in this project and its successors.) It is in fact strange to me that I did not see my grandmother after she had died. My grandfather, I was there when it happened, which I preferred to disappearance.
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Date: 2023-02-22 07:40 pm (UTC)I have an interesting-to-me reaction to this position, which is that I am all against embalming, but I like that tahara is performed by the chevra kadisha and I would not want to abolish the existence of such societies; they are endangered enough at this point in history and I like what they represent, which is a gift that cannot be and can never be expected to be repaid. (Full disclosure: I know people who are involved in this project and its successors.) It is in fact strange to me that I did not see my grandmother after she had died. My grandfather, I was there when it happened, which I preferred to disappearance.