José Miguel Espinar returns to the Valdelacalzada cemetery, like every year, to beautify your grandmother's grave on her birthday. The last link he maintained with this small town in Badajoz with barely 2,700 inhabitants has long since disappeared, where he only goes to honor the memory of his grandmother. But on his last visit he encountered something different: the cemetery had been digitized. There was a small stone totem with a QR that takes you directly to a website called 'Eternals'a kind of social network of memories where he was sadly able to verify that his teacher, Don Aureliano, had recently died.
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Valdelacalzada was the first colonization town within the Badajoz Plan and a pioneer in the installation of irrigation; has also been one of the first small towns in Estremadura in embracing the digital era in the field of funeral services. The app of 'Eternos' allows you to search for the deceased and where their remains rest. There is also a section dedicated to illustrious figures of the cemetery and allows us to trace the first settlers.
The digitization has come to stay in this area, driven above all by necessity, since the covid pandemic forced confinements to be avoided to plan funerals for Zoom and online condolences. For some time now, it is common to find a digital totem in Extremadura's funeral homes that allows you to pay tribute to the deceased, sending (through a person, usually a family member, who controls the flow) photographs to remember and messages of condolences. condolence. We see a carousel of images of the deceased, along with his name and other possible relevant information: his place and date of birth, the day of death and the time and place of the funeral.
Of rituals and death
The funeral area is being updated within the online world and since the pandemic ended it is possible to contract a funeral service electronically on large company portals. But, even so, death continues to cause frontal rejection in our society. “We have killed death,” he says. Israel J. Espino, university specialist in Mythology and anthropologist of beliefs between gods and monsters, as she likes to define herself.
Why is All Saints' Day celebrated on November 1?
«There has been an increasing detachment from death, from not wanting to see it, from trying to cancel it. That means great harm to the little ones who grow up without that knowledge; without realizing that death is part of life and that we must know how to go through the grief that the passing of a loved one leaves us with. We are encountering generations that do not have emotional tools to face death. If even Disney is considering a version of 'Bambi' in which the death of the mother is avoided (laughs) … It's tremendous. In ancient times, newborns were taken and passed over the tombstone of a recently deceased person. It is a macabre tradition if we see it with today's eyes”, very appropriate for these dates of Halloween and All Saints, «but, in reality, what was done was normalizing death. Before, a dead person was kept vigil for days in the houses and the little ones were used to it; “They grew up with that knowledge and assimilated it.”
Commissioning of the cemetery in Mérida for the festival of Saints
Cybermemorials, virtual cemeteries… funeral tradition In Spain it has been modernized, but that direct relationship with sadness, drama and solemnity continues to be maintained. Technological change is becoming normalized, but ritual is not. Until yesterday, the funeral sector had remained in the last century, and the key is to focus on the tribute and not on the sadness. And this is where new technologies play a fundamental role. «In traditional societies, death was not hidden, and the dead remained present in the social sphere of the living. Death was something visible, public, exposed. Now, the cemeteries are on the outskirts. It is true that it was done for reasons of health, but in modernity we begin to live with our backs to death, except on key days and dates such as November 1,” says Israel J. Espino.
Transcend
What does not change over the centuries is our desire to transcend, to become (somehow) eternal. «I have realized that deep down we believe the same thing about death as the ancient Romans or Celts; even if we go back to the Neolithic era. Transcendence is craved by the need to believe that there is something after death.
“What is changing is the way we relate to death.” This idea of transcendence is also closely linked to an area in which Espino moves like a fish in water: spirits and ghosts. Not in vain, she is the author of the book 'People of death and other supernatural courtships'. “People like to believe in spirits because that means that there is something after death,” which connects with that atavistic idea of transcending. All this paraphernalia has given rise to a growing interest in gloomy and spectral places that have never before been included on guided tours.
«Our way of relating to death changes, but the need to transcend is fixed»
He chronicler Fernando Jiménez Berrocal He has been taking a historical and educational tour of the Cáceres cemetery for several years around this time. He does it within Gothic Days organized by the Norbanova collective in a traditionally funeral month and is the most successful activity. Because the so-called 'necrotourism' is no longer just an eccentricity for those who come to see Jim Morrison's grave in the Parisian Père-Lachaise cemetery (which also houses the tombs of Molière and Oscar Wilde), but an option that is It is normalizing to know our past. The current Cáceres cemetery dates from 1843, “on those dates the burials in this space already begin.” An enclave that, in its oldest part, offers “funerary art, pantheons, chapels and the option of learning about the types of burials: 2 meters underground, pantheons, limbo for unbaptized children… It is a space that documents the history of Cáceres”, which transcends the Gothic and the macabre, that these dates acquire prominence, and “where the genealogy can be observed; Necrotourism is another way to learn about the past of people,” comments Fernando Jiménez Berrocal.
The Cáceres cemetery includes an amalgam of epitaphs with prayers, poems, Latin texts, African proverbs, biographies, declarations of love and even ominous quotes that make you remember the maxim of 'memento mori'. «To understand the past of the cities you have to visit the cemeteries. They offer an impressive wealth of names, dates, customs… The tombstones are epigraphic documents with sometimes exclusive biographical information. The facility is an encyclopedia, a great archive,” says the Cáceres chronicler.
«We have killed death; “But we have to normalize it because it is part of life and we have to face it.”
Israel J. Espino also does the same in the Emeritus cemetery, which dates back to 1868, where there are «beautiful tombstones, with a lot of symbolism; We have lost the funerary symbolism and it is a shame,” says the anthropologist, who highlights a tombstone with a crown with violets and roses, “which means that it is a child's grave, of a girl who died in pain.” Berrocal and J. Espino highlight how burials have been lost (almost also the figure of the gravediggers; the old QR that indicated to people where the tombstones of the deceased they were looking for were), “due to a lack of space and change of habits; The niches have become popular and there are more and more cremations. If burial continued at the rate of yesteryear, the Cáceres cemetery would need to be expanded ten times larger than the current one,” says Jiménez Berrocal.
In fact, if we travel to other latitudes we find how in China they are promoting, not just niches, but digital cemeteries, as they are becoming increasingly expensive as urban land becomes scarce and expensive. He aging population (and Extremadura is a very aging region, although certainly with a lot of land), and new technologies suggest that shots could go there. Digital wakes were already an option to ease the last goodbye due to the coronavirus. And virtual cemeteries are nothing new. The current cult of connectivity means (a mantra that was repeated during the pandemic) that we are less alone. And digitalization means that, every time, we are less dead. Thanks to the fingerprint and the Artificial intelligence (IA), in the not too distant future we can aspire to be eternal like the old celluloid stars, who revive on the screens.