Desmond Tutu's Humble Homegoing

Photo: Associated Press

By Amy Cunningham

Some of my colleagues in the funeral business awoke to real-world confirmation of their worst forebodings—photos of the modest public departure ceremonies for Archbishop Desmond Tutu, New Year’s Day, 2022. Yes, the church setting was glorious, and the other bishops wore their robes, but surely the great man who helped upend apartheid would exit in a mahogany, walnut or cherry casket with brass rails of some sort. And wait a minute—what’s going on there with the slender foot-end of the Archbishop’s pine coffin resting naked, skirt-less on the church truck? It’s not landing normally. No rails on the sides, just rope. Tiny fist of flowers for a significant public figure like that? Yes. It’s not that the funeral directors I know staring at photos like the one above—longing only for a dignified look—are hoping to up-sell the theologian’s handlers. It’s just that some folks in funeral work instinctively struggle to pair humility with high stature. In truth, I also would have preferred a truck skirt or bier, or modern catafalque in church, but the rolling truck, in the end, had a nimbleness to it, and spoke to transparency. What you see is what you get: an unpretentious monk’s homegoing. Humility is a practice encouraged by every great religion of the world. And since truth and reconciliation were the standards by which Archbishop Tutu lived, it all fits and makes sense. Completing the archbishop’s back-to-basic tastes and apparently by the great man’s request, he was not buried or cremated in any conventional way, but chose acquamation, aka alkaline hydrolysis. His body will be taken out of the wooden vessel and carefully placed in a metal tank of highly alkaline fluid, which will remove all the soft tissue from the bone. This process—now legal in twenty U.S. states—will be available to more Americans in the coming decades, alongside Natural Organic Reduction, as crematories reluctantly jettison their gas-fueled retorts and furnaces for more earth-friendly alternatives. Again, these gestures are mostly symbolic—a conventional crematory’s first cremation of the day may consume $50 in natural gas, perhaps not the worst crime against the environment in your individual lifetime (owning a vacation home to heat and cool is far worse)—but in the aggregate, yes, my God, every end-of-life decision matters greatly and we should honor every aspect of Desmond Tutu’s funeral and yes, my brethren, follow suit.