When the Homily is about Immunology

How we treat our dead - an indication of what we think about life?

Absolutely.

In 1914, the city of San Francisco declared that graves were “a public nuisance and a menace and detriment to the health and welfare of city dwellers" and thus was the opening salvo of a fight that would eventually rid the city of all tombs...save the few thousand left unmarked and covered over with a golf course.

First Things has an excellent article about how we treat our dead. It's long and I have not yet finished it, but thus far I am well convinced it is worth spending some time with.

San Francisco was merely echoing the twentieth century’s general conviction that the nineteenth century had taken funerals far too seriously—the Edwardians’ general belief that their Victorian parents had been a profoundly sick people: as infatuated with displaying death as they were obsessed with hiding sex.

Still, even the most ardent modernist might feel some misgivings about a rejection of the dead as complete as San Francisco’s. And such misgivings reflect, however dimly, a deep political insight—for a city without cemeteries has failed at one of the first reasons for having cities at all. Somewhere in those banished graveyards was a metaphysical ground for politics, and buried in them was a truth that too much of modern political theory seems to have forgotten: The living give us crowds. The dead give us communities.

Read it. Once I'm finished I may have more to say...for whatever that may be worth.