Making an Exit
From the Magnificent to the Macabre---How We Dignify the Dead
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Thoughtful, amusing, and provocative, Making an Exit will transform the way you look at life's last passage. Because, as Murray discovers, death is, for many, not an ending but the start of something new.
Author and journalist Sarah Murray never gave much thought to what might ultimately happen to her remains—that was, until her father died. While he'd always insisted that the "organic matter" left after a person takes their last breath had no significance, he surprised his family by setting down elaborate arrangements for the scattering of his own ashes. This unexpected last request prompted Murray to embark on a series of voyages to discover how our end is commemorated around the globe—and how we approach our own mortality.
Spanning continents and centuries, Making an Exit is Murray's exploration of the extraordinary creativity unleashed when we seek to dignify the dead. Along the way, she encounters a cremation in Bali in which two royal personages are placed in giant decorative bulls and consigned to the afterlife in a burst of flames; a chandelier in the Czech Republic made entirely from human bones; a weeping ceremony in Iran; and a Philippine village where the casketed dead are left hanging in caves. She even goes to Ghana to commission her own fantasy coffin.
The accounts of these journeys are fascinating, poignant, and funny. But this is also a very personal quest: on her travels, Murray is seeking inspiration for her own eventual send-off.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Murray (Moveable Feasts) takes readers on a charming and informative tour of how different cultures dispose of and mourn their dead. We follow her to an elaborate royal cremation in Bali, where sadness and signs of grief are discouraged (for fear they'll impede the soul's journey to the next life), and to Ghana, where Murray has her own coffin commissioned in the shape of the Empire State building. No matter how far-flung the location in Sagada, the Philippines, where caskets hang from cliff faces, or the Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo, Sicily, where mummified corpses still wear their 18th-century trappings Murray's mind wanders back to the English countryside, where her father had recently died. Despite being a lifelong atheist, her father had requested his ashes to be scattered in a churchyard a move that has left his daughter perplexed. Part cultural study, part eulogy for the author's beloved "Fa," and part meditation on coming to grips with mortality, the book concludes with the author creating a novel solution for her own final arrangements, one that matches her wit, ebullience, and joie de vivre that permeates her story and make it difficult to put down. In less capable hands the subject matter might be morbid or disturbing, but with Murray at the helm, this journey in search of death is full of life.