The GCW Tour, Vietnam: Death in Vietnam

For what should be obvious reasons, one of the thing I'm interested in doing with my GCW Tour is learning about how people die in other countries. Dying is, of course, universal, but how we go about it probably isn't. And who knows? Maybe it's not too late to move if I find some place that's got it really figured out.

Oddly enough, it was pretty easy to find people in Vietnam willing to talk about dying. You can't get too far here without tripping over somebody's shrine or cemetery. In fact, one of the things I learned is that it's becoming something of a problem. The country's running out of land so the government is trying to change people's approach to death and burial.

Given this (as well as the country's headlong push toward modernity), I suspect that much of what I learned about the Vietnamese approach to dying is likely to change. So take all this with a grain of salt (assuming, of course, you're still reading; I doubt this post is going to set page view records).

Perhaps not surprisingly for an agricultural society, I was told the land and home are very important to the Vietnamese when it comes to dying. Li told me there are three basic rules the Vietnamese try to adhere to when it comes time to depart: first, if it all possible, you want to die at home; second, you don't want anyone who's not part of your family to die in your home; and third, you don't want dead bodies coming into your home. 

The problems that modernity creates for these rules are probably pretty obvious. What happens when people leave their farms for life in the city where they rent? The owners don't want people dying in their flats, so what happens in those cases? It seems they're still figuring that out. The other major problem, which they have solved with a little creative bookkeeping, is what you do when someone has a home they own but dies in a hospital. The rules say you should die at home and no bringing dead bodies through the door, but now you've got Grandpa's body in the hospital. Or do you? Perhaps, to borrow a phrase from The Princess Bride, Grandpa's only "mostly dead"? Apparently, this is a fairly common solution to the problem. The doctors just complete the Vietnamese paperwork to show that Grandpa didn't die at the hospital but left, only to subsequently die at home. Everyone's happy. Grandpa got to die at home and the hospital's death rate goes down. 

More interesting was what the Vietnamese do once they have a body, and this is where the shrines come in. In Vietnam, you're buried twice. The first burial lasts for three years, during which time your soul has the opportunity to reflect on the mistakes you made during your lifetime while your body decomposes back into your land. This is why you see the shrines everywhere in Vietnam. Even in death, the people want to be tied to the land they worked and lived on so they need to be buried on their land. 

In any case, at the end of that three year period, your family digs you up, your bones are cleaned, and then you're reburied permanently in a smaller grave that only contains your bones. The interesting thing is that this grave, too, isn't completely sealed; a hole is left so that your soul, like your bones cleaned after three years of reflection, can now make its way either to heaven or another life.

There's a certain romanticism to this, and many of the shrines and cemeteries are quite beautiful, but I can't help but think that it all sounds like a lot of work for the surviving family members. 

Loved Vietnam, but I can't really see relocating here for my final days.