Departures: Passings & Comfort in Ceremony

Another flight and another set of movies. I’ve been wanting to watch this Japanese movie called “Departures” for a long time but never got around to it. It’s a movie that covers the depressing topic of death but it also turned out to be about life too. Life affirming actually. Seeing death makes you appreciate life and the art of living well. Beautiful natural scenery, the Onsen hot spring, lovely music and delicious food. 

Daigo is a professional cellist in Tokyo who returns to his home town Yamagata after his orchestra is shut down. He takes a job as an assistant to a local undertaker who performs the passing ceremony for families of the dead. 
After a rough start, Daigo starts to learn the way and begins to understand the comfort their ceremony provides for the family of the dead and the living. It’s a grim but important job. He starts to find meaning in this work. His wife and friends slowly come around to the immense value of his work.  

There is a scene during a ceremony where they are met with an angry father whose wife had passed. But the caretaker lovingly and meticulously as only the Japanese do, restores the dead wife’s look, touching the mourning family deeply. 

Daigo says: 

“One grown cold, restored to beauty for eternity. This was done calmly and precisely….with a gentler affection than anything else. At the final parting to send them on their way. Everything is done peacefully and beautifully.”

This is also a restart for him, finding a new path to fulfillment. There is a scene of him watching the salmon swim upstream. He says: “Sad, coming all this way to die. it doesn’t seem worth it.” He is told by a wiser old man: “They want to go home, back to where they were born.”

I truly believe people go somewhere after death. Humans are energy and as the laws of physics show energy doesn’t just disappear. It just takes a new form. 

There is a quote from the movie that stayed with me: “I’ve often thought that maybe death is like a gateway. Dying doesn’t mean the end. You go through it and onto the next thing. It’s a gate.” 

Japanese death ceremonies are a beautiful way to send this new form on its way. And more importantly are a form of solace and closure for the living.