Kelli Swazey: Life that doesn't end with death

I think it's safe to say

that all humans will be intimate with death

at least once in their lives.

But what if that intimacy began

long before you faced your own transition

from life into death?

What would life be like

if the dead literally lived alongside you?

In my husband's homeland

in the highlands of Sulawesi island

in eastern Indonesia,

there is a community of people that experience death

not as a singular event

but as a gradual social process.

In Tana Toraja,

the most important social moments in people's lives,

the focal points of social and cultural interaction

are not weddings or births or even family dinners,

but funerals.

So these funerals are characterized

by elaborate rituals

that tie people in a system of reciprocal debt

based on the amount of animals --

pigs, chickens and, most importantly, water buffalo --

that are sacrificed and distributed

in the name of the deceased.

So this cultural complex surrounding death,

the ritual enactment of the end of life,

has made death the most visible

and remarkable aspect of Toraja's landscape.

Lasting anywhere from a few days

to a few weeks,

funeral ceremonies are a raucous affair,

where commemorating someone who's died

is not so much a private sadness

but more of a publicly shared transition.

And it's a transition that's just as much

about the identity of the living

as it is about remembrance of the dead.

So every year, thousands of visitors

come to Tana Toraja to see, as it were,

this culture of death,

and for many people these grandiose ceremonies

and the length of the ceremonies

are somehow incommensurable

with the way that we face our own mortality in the West.

So even as we share death as a universal experience,

it's not experienced the same way the world over.

And as an anthropologist,

I see these differences in experience

being rooted in the cultural and social world

through which we define the phenomena around us.

So where we see an unquestionable reality,

death as an irrefutable biological condition,

Torajans see the expired corporeal form

as part of a larger social genesis.

So again, the physical cessation of life

is not the same as death.

In fact, a member of society is only truly dead

when the extended family can agree upon

and marshal the resources necessary

to hold a funeral ceremony

that is considered appropriate in terms of resources

for the status of the deceased.

And this ceremony has to take place

in front of the eyes of the whole community

with everyone's participation.

So after a person's physical death,

their body is placed in a special room

in the traditional residence, which is called the tongkonan.

And the tongkonan is symbolic

not only of the family's identity

but also of the human life cycle from birth to death.

So essentially, the shape of the building

that you're born into is the shape

of the structure which carries you

to your ancestral resting place.

Until the funeral ceremony,

which can be held years after a person's physical death,

the deceased is referred to as "to makala," a sick person,

or "to mama," a person who is asleep,

and they continue to be a member of the household.

They are symbolically fed and cared for,

and the family at this time

will begin a number of ritual injunctions,

which communicates to the wider community around them

that one of their members is undergoing the transition

from this life into the afterlife

known as Puya.

So I know what some of you must be thinking right now.

Is she really saying that these people live

with the bodies of their dead relatives?

And that's exactly what I'm saying.

But instead of giving in to the sort of visceral reaction

we have to this idea of proximity to bodies,

proximity to death,

or how this notion just does not fit

into our very biological or medical

sort of definition of death,

I like to think about what the Torajan way

of viewing death encompasses of the human experience

that the medical definition leaves out.

I think that Torajans socially recognize

and culturally express

what many of us feel to be true

despite the widespread acceptance

of the biomedical definition of death,

and that is that our relationships with other humans,

their impact on our social reality,

doesn't cease with the termination

of the physical processes of the body,

that there's a period of transition

as the relationship between the living and the dead

is transformed but not ended.

So Torajans express this idea of this enduring relationship

by lavishing love and attention

on the most visible symbol of that relationship,

the human body.

So my husband has fond memories

of talking to and playing with

and generally being around his deceased grandfather,

and for him there is nothing unnatural about this.

This is a natural part of the process

as the family comes to terms with the transition

in their relationship to the deceased,

and this is the transition from relating to the deceased

as a person who's living

to relating to the deceased

as a person who's an ancestor.

And here you can see these wooden effigies

of the ancestors,

so these are people who have already been buried,

already had a funeral ceremony.

These are called tau tau.

So the funeral ceremony itself

embodies this relational perspective on death.

It ritualizes the impact of death on families

and communities.

And it's also a moment of self-awareness.

It's a moment when people think about who they are,

their place in society,

and their role in the life cycle

in accordance with Torajan cosmology.

There's a saying in Toraja

that all people will become grandparents,

and what this means is that after death,

we all become part of the ancestral line

that anchors us between the past and the present

and will define who our loved ones are into the future.

So essentially, we all become grandparents

to the generations of human children

that come after us.

And this metaphor of membership

in the greater human family

is the way that children also describe

the money that they invest

in these sacrificial buffaloes

that are thought to carry people's soul

from here to the afterlife,

and children will explain

that they will invest the money in this

because they want to repay their parents

the debt for all of the years their parents spent

investing and caring for them.

But the sacrifice of buffalo

and the ritual display of wealth

also exhibits the status of the deceased,

and, by extension, the deceased's family.

So at funerals, relationships are reconfirmed

but also transformed

in a ritual drama that highlights

the most salient feature about death in this place:

its impact on life and the relationships of the living.

So all of this focus on death

doesn't mean that Torajans don't aspire

to the ideal of a long life.

They engage in many practices

thought to confer good health

and survival to an advanced age.

But they don't put much stock

in efforts to prolong life in the face of debilitating illness

or in old age.

It's said in Toraja that everybody has

sort of a predetermined amount of life.

It's called the sunga'.

And like a thread, it should be allowed to unspool

to its natural end.

So by having death as a part

of the cultural and social fabric of life,

people's everyday decisions about their health

and healthcare are affected.

The patriarch of my husband's maternal clan,

Nenet Katcha,

is now approaching the age of 100, as far as we can tell.

And there are increasing signs

that he is about to depart on his own journey for Puya.

And his death will be greatly mourned.

But I know that my husband's family

looks forward to the moment

when they can ritually display

what his remarkable presence has meant to their lives,

when they can ritually recount

his life's narrative,

weaving his story

into the history of their community.

His story is their story.

His funeral songs will sing them a song about themselves.

And it's a story that has no discernible beginning,

no foreseeable end.

It's a story that goes on

long after his body no longer does.

People ask me if I'm frightened or repulsed

by participating in a culture

where the physical manifestations of death

greet us at every turn.

But I see something profoundly transformative

in experiencing death as a social process

and not just a biological one.

In reality, the relationship between the living and the dead

has its own drama in the U.S. healthcare system,

where decisions about how long to stretch

the thread of life are made based on our emotional

and social ties with the people around us,

not just on medicine's ability to prolong life.

We, like the Torajans,

base our decisions about life

on the meanings and the definitions

that we ascribe to death.

So I'm not suggesting that anyone in this audience

should run out and adopt the traditions

of the Torajans.

It might be a little bit difficult

to put into play in the United States.

But I want to ask what we can gain

from seeing physical death not only as a biological process

but as part of the greater human story.

What would it be like to look on

the expired human form with love

because it's so intimately a part of who we all are?

If we could expand our definition of death

to encompass life,

we could experience death as part of life

and perhaps face death

with something other than fear.

Perhaps one of the answers to the challenges

that are facing the U.S. healthcare system,

particularly in the end-of-life care,

is as simple as a shift in perspective,

and the shift in perspective in this case

would be to look at the social life of every death.

It might help us recognize that the way we limit

our conversation about death

to something that's medical or biological

is reflective of a larger culture that we all share

of avoiding death, being afraid of talking about it.

If we could entertain and value

other kinds of knowledge about life,

including other definitions of death,

it has the potential to change the discussions

that we have about the end of life.

It could change the way that we die,

but more importantly,

it could transform the way that we live.

(Applause)