At a Czech funeral

Why we should not end up on a shelf without a ceremony

A question in a contest: Under the current laws, can a widow who has just seen her husband die in bed at home, keep vigil at his bedside for three days and then have a funeral procession march with the coffin from the entrance door of their Prague pre-fab flat as was the tradition in the time of our great-grandmothers? Try asking your doctor, a clerk, or a spokesman at the nearest hospital. They will probably not know. At a time, when knowledge of one's own rights is part of the basic equipment of a citizen of the western world and all conceivable social taboos are being broken, death remains an unknown life situation about which we do not know and do not want to know anything. According to statistics, Czechs are world champions in psychological repression. Czechs prefer to hear a merciful lie rather than the truth from the mouth of their doctor in the autumn of their life, one third (in the country) to one half (in Prague) of funerals have the form of a cremation without a ceremony, every fifth urn with the ashes remains lying on the shelves of a crematorium, since no relatives come to pick it up. How should we interpret these facts?

Waiting for the ravens

Under the totalitarian regime there existed…