Groping The Elephant: Grandma Was Afraid Of Being Buried Alive

The above book, Buried Alive:?The Terrifying History of?Our Most Primal Fear by Jan Bondeson, is one I greatly enjoyed reading. It took me a while to work through it, but that isn't a?complaint. It just means the subject was given a thorough treatment (that, and I read it in short bursts nightly before going to sleep). This is a book I've lent out to others because it is a subject of general intrigue. I came away with the feeling that this fear - like many of our primal fears - was a tad overblown, to the say the least.?The stuff of urban legend.?I wish a book like this had been available for my maternal grandmother to read.

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Mom's mom died back in 1965, at the age of 65. She had been an invalid for a few years prior to her death because of strokes. Those strokes began in the late 50s, so I never heard her talk other than to say boy repeatedly, as that was?all she could think of to say. Her mind was quite bad the final two years of her life, so I never really knew her. Hers was the first real encounter?with human death that I experienced. She died at home and I clearly remember them coming to remove her body, sheet covering her face as she was?taken away on a stretcher.

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My mother let?us know that it had always been a fear of her mother's that she would be buried alive.?Grandma had been a nurse in her younger life, but had not practiced in many years prior to her death, having chosen instead to focus on being a wife and mother. Was it her encounters with death and dying as a nurse that led to her fears? Had she read Poe? Who knows? Mom doesn't.

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I remember?Grandma's wake and funeral. My mom held me over?her casket?so I could?get a better view. I reached out and touched her hand, cold and hard as stone.?My dad tried to explain embalming to me after I pounded him with tons of questions.?Grandma was gone, was not coming back, and there was no doubt about that or concerns that she was going to?be buried alive.???

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Morbid as all that was for a young child like myself, it did later relieve my own fears of premature burial that?were nurtured by the horror movies I had watched during childhood. It probably was also the first spark that started my rethinking?of the entire funeral tradition my family was steeped in.?No embalming, no burial, I?plan to be cremated. (Hope I'm really dead when that takes place.)

Source: http://gropingtheelephant.blogspot.com/2012/10/grandma-was-afraid-of-being-buried-alive.html

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