Sky Burial
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4FwR-EAtZg
Vimeo below is a better video
open vimeo above
I was standing in the cadaver lab, working over the dead man and slicing and dicing his arm. I was perfecting taking the radial nerve out and dissecting other tissue before suturing it back together. At some point I realized how special the person was that donated his body to science, in effect letting me cut him to pieces and then trying to put him back together. I tried to figure out how he died: gun shot, cancer or old age. I think it was cancer because the arm was so thin.
Ok So I said a prayer of thanksgiving and then proceeded to chop him up and that took me back to my memories of the “SKY BURIAL” below
Arden and I had attempted to ride our bikes around the world and by the time we got to Nepal we were trekking up the Kalikondaki River Valley, well past the Annapurna circuit. One of things we had wanted to see was a very spiritual function the “SKY BURIAL”. We as humans have some special functions we celebrate: birth, (puberty- or coming of age), marriage, and then death. So the sky burial celebrates and deals with death. For the western person, especially 25 years ago, the SKY BURIAL was unheard of, but it is of significant importance. In the west, we usually have a what could be a long ordeal celebrating a persons death. It can include: wakes, embalming, casket, viewing, burial service and then remembrances in a party function. This can take well over a week to happen depending on the religion. Now, more frequently, the person is cremated (burned) with the ashes saved in an urn.