Moto funerals and other innovations for the last goodbye

Hey, but how beautiful one of the girls says, mounted next to her friend on a two -level staircase in the San Pedro de Medellín cemetery."Beautiful was," the other answers, which has the fingers wrapped in tape and does not know what to put first, if the serpentines adorning the date on the tombstone or if to paste a balloon that says "I love you", signed with many names.

Outside, in that funeral redoubt that is race 51 and 68th Street, they survive, as museum showcases full of plaques, ornaments and flowers, the marbles that surround the oldest cemetery of Medellín.But there are already few marble tombstones exhibited, carved with minutia to the sound of chisel and hammer.

The protagonists are the photoobids, with the face of the loved one stamped on the stone and adorned with the cachivaches that the deceased loved in life.That is why photography, that absent face, is accompanied by motorcycle adhesives, soccer shields, pets, waterfall landscapes and sand castles, the images of the Virgin of Guadalupe or the saint of devotion.

And so, little by little, in Medellín they are increasingly ingenious to say goodbye to those who have left.The historian and academic coordinator of San Pedro, Juan Diego Torres Urrego, emphasizes that the transformation of the funeral rite part of the eternal question for the soul.The ornament in the grave varies according to what each person believes beyond when he dies.

In the nineteenth century, the lavish monuments brought from Italy by the Antioquia elite arrived in the field.The mausoleums were as great as their eagerness to last in memory and the greatest aspiration, the dream fulfilled after the death, was a size of Arabesques and religious figures sculpted by hand by Melitón Rodríguez Roldán and his apprentices Horacio Marino and Francisco Antonio Cano.

Being A Mom is Fun Until Your Baby Rons A Fever and You Don’t Know What To Do With Yourself and You Just Feel Like ... https://t.co/wm07OW4Z1X1x1x

— Chrisandra♕ Mon Sep 14 12:09:46 +0000 2020

From the 80s, marble becomes more scarce and expensive.Fiberglass alloys are born and the printed, painted or laminated plaques boom.

Torres, in that sense, speaks of the insertion of the Kitsch style in the way in which we commemorate death, the game with the elements of popular culture.It will not, then, will be the huge sculptures of the nineteenth century that occupy the necropolis of Medellín.Now the tombstones are, in essence, the search for singularity: that this altar for my relative or friend is unique, spontaneous, colorful.That the roof that the ossary seals carries his photography, as it was before, that reflects his way of smiling, or walking, the way he dressed and even his intimate manias.

"For a nineteenth -century person, the beautiful was a tombstone carved by Melitón Rodríguez," adds the historian, "today the beautiful for someone is a photothone with flowers, camps or the shield of the football team that he wanted so much.All based on how I want to remember my dead. ”

The life of a human being is full of ceremonies, but the rite of death is strange.It is not designed for the deceased, but so that the living can face the farewell, begin their transit to the duel.

Somehow funerals seek to turn the death of others into images.And then those scenes of grieving mark the beginning of another stage, of a fracture, such as saying that, "now that you are not, the world is a different place."The funeral rite puts a point on the calendar and, as a trace that you want to keep, it insists on the preparations, to take care of the detail, that the cult is beautiful.