Curious Swedish Customs

Speaking of Skogskyrkogården (see previous post), one of my visits there included a behind-the-scenes tour not available to members of the public. On it, I was surprised to discover that there is a huge mortuary in the basement, a gigantic white space with trolleys covered with sheets standing in it, in which perspective seems to fade into a snowfield-style horizonless whiteout reminiscent of the overexposed look that Lucas used in his first film, THX 1138.

Dozens of bodies are stored there awaiting disposal, almost always by cremation - an undertaker in Stockholm that I know only does perhaps two burials a year. Burial is prohibitively expensive in Sweden unless you have a family plot with room left in it.

It's America, Australia, Britain and France where undertakers look after the body - and the countries of the former British and French colonial empires? If anyone knows other places where undertakers take charge of the body and store it on their premises, please leave a comment here. 

Everywhere else, they just do the paperwork and put the body in a box before the funeral. The body is stored in a hospital morgue, and the hospital does the embalming, too.

The odd thing about Sweden, though, is the amount of time they leave between the death and the funeral, at least three weeks, and not unusually, two to three months.

They're usually surprised when I tell them everyone else does it a lot quicker (Jews and Muslims being the winners here), and I've been given two explanations for this:

1. "It's because people might have a long way to travel." - And then again, they might not, and people might have to travel a long way everywhere else, too, but they don't arrange the funeral months after the death.

2. "It's historical: over most of Sweden, for most of the year, the ground's frozen too hard to dig a grave. That's why Swedish graveyards have a special house that was used to store the bodies until summer came." - Sounds more like it, and yes, Swedish churchyards do often have a charnel house. We have them in old churchyards in Britain, too, but ours were used to store bones which had been removed to make room for more burials.

There's a problem, though - it gets just as cold in Norway, but they don't do that there. They just light a bonfire on top of the plot to thaw the ground before the grave is dug. 

So if any anthropologists or experts on Swedish funeral customs know a better explanation, please post a comment.

THX 138 (George Lucas)