Narration Of Death Essay

The Narration of Death: How Traditions Narrate Death and its Effect on Community Throughout the semester, we as a class have examined numerous different religions and the traditions they follow pertaining to death and the afterlife. In many cases, death is seen as an extremely simple process: the dead gets buried and then you send sympathy to those close to the deceased. However, this is very much not the case. Each of these traditions works on two levels: they are built around honoring the dead and they help to shape the community of grievers. The goal of the narration of death in these various traditions is to help make meaning of death. To truly comprehend how and why this occurs, we must examine multiple traditions and customs, whose origins are rooted as far back as 500 CE (possibly even older) and some whose origins are much more contemporary, with prime examples occurring within the last …show more content…
Though from a glance this may not seem like much of a death tradition, it definitely still plays a vital role in narrating the death of the person, honoring that person, and building community from that tragedy. The news has filled with stories of unarmed black people killed by police brutality. Black Lives Matter is a movement organized to address this issue of police violence against the black community. In this case, they honor the dead by putting their story out their, both in the news and on social media platforms. They also hold demonstrations, demanding justice and reform. In this sense, they make martyrs out of those who tragically passed away. The creations of martyrs also helps to create a community. The Black Lives Matter community is ever growing, and continues to grow with each new tragedy. The demonstrations that Black Lives Matter hosts is their way of grieving, because they are upset about the person’s death and are fighting for justice so that they will not have to grieve as