It's Only Superstition

I'm about to out some family members. Luckily they don't read my stories, because otherwise I'd be in a lot of trouble.

But I'm not here to mock them. Just the opposite - I want to show how things can shift from one generation to another, and its long-lasting effects.

My uncle died last night.

We thought he'd recover from a nasty bout of pneumonia, but he decided that this was his last rodeo. And so it was. When it comes down to it, we're an ambulatory meat sack piloted by a wrinkly bag of butter. Sometimes the brain writes checks the body just can't cash, but sometimes the exact reverse is true.

The problems arose when one of his kids insisted that we had to bury him before the weekend. Two days. Not enough time to tell everyone who'd want to attend the funeral.

To those of the Jewish faith, this makes perfect sense. Except, we're not. We do have some Jewish blood in the line, but the culture is overwhelmingly Pennsylvania Dutch, which is mostly white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant. We've never had such strictures in our family.

So what gives? The rest of the fam was told, in our chat, with absolute certainty, that if someone dies before the weekend, they need to be buried before that weekend, otherwise they come back.

Hunh?

I've said this before, and I'll say it again: I collect superstitions like others collect stamps. If this were part of our family and culture, I think I would know? And this isn't how we've done it before. I didn't think it was possible to lose a family tradition or two, maybe I left them in my other pants pockets?

My mother and I may have had a bit to say on this subject.

But we also talked about it today, just the two of us, outside the family group chat. I've written about my grandmother, Grenny, before - she was about as superstitious as they come, and Pop, my grandfather, wasn't far behind. What I didn't know was that my uncle's parents were just as bad. When he married my mom's sister, I didn't know that one of their kids was in for a double whammy of superstitious... um, "stories" - from both sides.

I knew about some, of course. Grenny made me wear underwear to bed, because that way I wouldn't get pregnant. (I. Was. Seven.) She, of course, didn't have to, because she was married. My aunt tried to take my lunch away from me, because, and I quote, "If you don't heat that up, you'll get worms and diiiiiieeeee!" (It was a can of spaghetti-o's, folks, that my mom herself opened up for me. The lid was left on by a tiny sliver of sharp metal for easy cleanup. I never cut myself.) My mother had to holler at her to get her to back off, as I sat and growled and shoved food into my mouth faster and faster to prevent my food from being taken from me. Grenny refused to let her kids have sleepovers in the yard, because "they have beds to sleep in! Each of you has your own bed, and that's where you sleep!"

When Grenny tried to make me sleep in her house without pillows, "because otherwise centipedes crawl into your ear," I called B.S. immediately. They had pillows, there were even pillows on the couch in case someone needed to take a nap, that's just nonsense. It was dropped after that visit and never mentioned or enforced again.

Mom wouldn't let me swim for a half-hour after eating, and believe me I complained bitterly about it till I was able to disobey as a teen. I reminded her of that one today, and she still tried to justify it, but I told her the studies were quite clear, sorry, love you, no dice. She accepted it with grace. I may still be a bit mad about it.

I, on the other hand, have apologized many many times to my husband, for forbidding him to crack his knuckles to prevent arthritis. And we both drink whole milk now after decades of skim.

Going back a few paragraphs - to those of the Jewish faith and culture, the three day stricture makes perfect sense. They lived in the ancient desert, where an unburied body would be a thing of great danger. It would attract large predators like lions, it would bloat and give off dangerous bacteria, it would leak contaminated fluids, even dogs would fight over it if it were left unattended. With no extra water to wash up, perhaps no proper body of water to become ceremonially clean - and, incidentally, clean your body as well of physical contamination, this becomes a critical issue within hours.

Our modern culture doesn't deal with bodies anymore. You call the coroner or the funeral home director, and the body is whisked away to be dealt with behind the scenes. They have refrigerators and ways to preserve the body, and prevent infection to the living.

But to tack on "otherwise they come back?" How? As a zombie? A ghost? Look, this is my uncle we're talking about. He would love nothing better than to come back and haunt us all!

Things finally made sense when Mom mentioned about superstitions may be how older generations tried to make sense of the world, then told me a doozy I didn't know: at one arbitrary point, Grenny forbid her tween kids from having ice cream after they had fish for dinner. A new rule, presented as a "that's the way it's always been." Um, B.S. Finally they got a weak explanation - Grenny heard a story passed from gossip to gossip that a kid ate fish for dinner, than went to the church's ice cream social, and died. Q.E.D.

Do you remember when Mikey died from eating Pop Rocks and Coke?

If that one's before your time, have some fun looking it up. That's what immediately sprang to my mind this morning.

So, being the anthropologist-type people we are, Mom and I started deconstructing where on earth these superstitions come from.

Some, of course, could very well come from ancestors having undiagnosed OCD. Ritual keeps bad things from happening, right? Well, it worked for washing your hands before a meal, so why not others that soothe more anxious fears? I think many rituals incorporated into religion are from the same source. Some may even have some forgotten truth behind them. Washing hands does work, after all. Did you know that frankincense and myrrh are both known antibacterials? Well, we know that today. But carrots don't improve eyesight, as much as I wish it were so. I still eat at least six baby carrots a day. Dang Brits and their don't-tell-the-enemy-that-we-have-radar...

But the fish and ice cream hit another nerve, and I wonder if I'm on to something.

I've read the funny stories online: "I told my kid that the spiders in the cellar eat little kids, so they won't find my snack stash." "My kid's worried about the Loch Ness Monster, I told Junior that he drives now, and the last sighting was twenty kilometers away." "They wanted to go to the amusement park, so I told them the rides have to go to sleep."

I remember having a few doozies of my own as a kid. I was terrified that Bigfoot would kidnap me. Now, why it would travel hundreds of miles through more and more concentrated civilization just to take little ol' me from my bedroom, I have no clue. Or, how about when I firmly believed that you had to be dead for a hundred years before the soul left the body? Somehow that changed to only when the first hole was made in the body from rot, never mind that certain holes are already part of the system. When I finally inquired, in that casual, offhand way that kids use when they think they're being sooooo smooth, I was told bloat takes three days max to perforate. Oh.

How much conviction would it have taken to make those things real to someone younger or more gullible?

We are not very far away from "I can't stand looking at a body, I want this dealt with, I remember when Uncle Mort snapped upright in the coffin at his own wake. They said it was an extreme case of rigor mortis, but what if?" As kids we worry about monsters under the bed, but as adults we know so many more things that can really get us. There's a reason we let professionals take care of dead bodies now. We know the relatives that can feel the eyes of their deceased loved ones following them around the room, or get a serious case of the grues when they realize that urn on the mantle is Aunt Philomela. When I worked in a jewelry shop, I had a cremains necklace thrown at me because my boss didn't realize what it was, and it freaked him out. It's in my collection now, and I don't even know their name. It holds a place of honor in my house, but I don't tell visitors where it is.

How many superstitions are trying to get kids to obey? How many are because they have anxiety, and pull something out of the air that sounds plausible just to soothe it? How many are just because some narcissistic person wants control, and isn't good in the creativity department when it comes to pulling a reason out of their tushie? How many are just because someone responded with a smart-butt comment to a question, and someone else believed them? The TIL lists on many websites are testimony to the creative things we say to each other, and who believes it for how long.

How many were perpetuated by a generation or two of the telephone game? I think the one we're wrestling with tonight is along those lines: my cousin's anxiety is well known, they're known for having absorbed a lot of superstitions and treating them with the force of law when no one else was ever told about the supposed "tradition." The vagueness of the "or else" clues me in that this was a thing said as a toss off that someone heard that something bad happened when they didn't bury the body "on time," and suddenly unspecified crisis, so let's just avoid all that unpleasantness. Never mind the inconvenience of everyone else having to wrap their lives around it, change plans at last minute, cater to the most insistent. Anxiety soothed, and that's the most important thing.

Generational curses are a thing, but maybe some time and attention should be paid to generational superstitions. Boundaries are good, and family sometimes just has to insist that people deal with their own issues and not make it a family matter.

Ironically, my husband and I had salmon and ice cream for dinner.

Now, remember, forward this to all your friends and make them read it, or your soap will leak into the sewer and clog your pipes.