At least back in the day, even going back to the ancient people of the past. They always have beliefs about the afterlife. The ancient Egyptians believed in the afterlife and there was a sort of preparation for death while they were alive.
Even all the ancient monuments and structures we know about, most were built for religious reasons and were sacred. Nowadays most people are atheist and there's no belief in an afterlife for a lot of people.
I think if I had a strong belief I'd go to the afterlife, maybe death would be easier to contemplate. I think I am at a point where I'm comfortable with death, although I'm still not 100% there.
Ancient Greeks on death:
'The Ancient Greeks treated death as a rite of passage to help people negotiate their passage from one state of being to another, in this case from being moribund to being integrated into Hades, the world of the dead. Between these two states of being is a liminal place or condition when someone is neither one thing nor another. The word ‘liminal’ derives from the Latin word limen, meaning ‘a threshold’. As long as one remains on the threshold, one remains in great danger.
To help the dead across the threshold, society constructs rites of passage, which enable the dead to pass from one status to another, ‘from here to there’ as the Greeks put it. These rites facilitate someone’s passage from this world into the next. They’re absolutely critical because if one’s relatives didn’t perform them on one’s behalf, one wouldn’t be able to enter the underworld that the Greeks called Hades.'
“Bury me as quickly as possible,” says Patroclus to this friend Achilles in The Iliad so that he can pass through the gates of Hades. Otherwise, he’ll be left to wander endlessly up and down the banks of the underworld river known as the Styx.
Before continuing with the rites of passage, it is important to consider some of the general observations about death in Greek society. “In the midst of life we are in death,” says the Book of Common Prayer used by the Episcopal Church. Although people know that fact intellectually, they can be forgiven for ignoring it most of the time.'
Comparison Between the Modern and the Greek Way of Death
Jessica Mitford in The American Way of Death (1963), an exposé of the abuses perpetrated by the undertaking industry, said that the Americans sublimate death, whereas the British ignore death. The Americans create the fiction that their dead are in a ‘home’ when the truth is that they’re being handled by professionals, whereas the British generally shun all contact with the body except at the funeral. That hits the nail in the coffin squarely on the head.
Both societies fail to confront the existential phenomenon of death head-on. In both societies death generally takes place in a hospital. The very opposite was the case in ancient Greece. As a Greek, one would have faced death head-on, and it deserves great admiration.
The dying—other than those who met their end away from home, including those who met their death on the battlefield—almost invariably had their family members around them. And it was their family, not professional undertakers, who took care of them once they were dead. In fact, the Greek word for a funeral is kêdeia, which literally means ‘caring for’. The word is still used today by the Greek Orthodox Church.
Taking Care of the Dead Body
As a Greek, one would care for the dead bodies of everyone in their family, especially if one were a woman. Given the lower life expectancy in antiquity, if one survived to adult years, it’s almost certainly the case that one would already have experienced the deaths of several family members and also some friends. And since the corpse was prepared for burial in the home, one would have lived, quite literally, cheek by jowl with death.
There were many other ways in which death made itself visible to people in the Greek world. First, since Greek communities were far more closely knit than the modern ones, one would have been much more aware of the death of a neighbor, or an acquaintance, or a distant relative than in modern societies.
Expressing Grief
The Ancient Greeks were far more demonstrative in their expressions of grief, so one would have heard them grieving for hours on end. The Greeks didn’t go in for the famous British stiff upper lip. They believed in letting their hair down, in more ways than one. As a Greek, one would have been appalled with the stiff upper lip British posture. One would have thought it was disrespectful to the dead to show no signs of emotion.
When Achilles in The Iliad learns of the death of his dear friend Patroclus, he completely falls apart—at least by modern standards of subdued grieving. He tears his clothes, beats his breast, rolls about in the dust, and goes without food or drink for several days. He’s a complete basket case. True, he holds himself largely responsible for his friend’s death, but the point is that no Greek would have thought his behavior unmanly. On the contrary, they would have regarded it as entirely appropriate.
Manifestations of grief were regarded as a mark of honor to the dead—they were a way of saying to the dead person that life without them now has no meaning. The dead, one believed, actually took pleasure in witnessing one’s display of grief, irrespective of whether it was completely sincere.
