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Grayson Perry tackles mortality in Rites of Passage
Death becomes him: Grayson Perry tackles mortality in Rites of Passage. Photograph: Richard Ansett/C4
Death becomes him: Grayson Perry tackles mortality in Rites of Passage. Photograph: Richard Ansett/C4

Grayson Perry: Rites of Passage review – how to create your very own death ritual

This article is more than 5 years old

In Indonesia, they live with the corpse of their deceased loved one for a year before saying goodbye. So why, wonders the artist, must we be tied to the trauma of traditional funerals?

I would happily nominate Grayson Perry to explain human beings to an invading alien force. Despite his artistic obligation to “cast an anthropological eye” over things, he manages to retain real affection for our species. Even if he can’t help but see us for what we are, he can still make us sound sort of charming. Worth preserving, even.

In Grayson Perry: Rites of Passage (C4), Perry sets out to explore the rituals that govern the big moments in our lives and, where possible, to improve on them. “All rituals were invented by somebody,” he says. “They didn’t just come out of the ether from God.” Perry begins at the end, with death. It’s a tough subject, mortality, but Perry is as unflinching and clear-eyed as ever. His investigation first takes him to the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, home of the Toraja, who have a much more tangible relationship to death than we do in the west. Mourners will live alongside the body of a departed loved one for a year or more before any kind of public ceremony is held. “It’s hard to be late for a Toraja funeral,” Perry says. They wait until they are good and ready.

The arrangement is, as Perry points out, more cosily domestic than ghoulish – there’s granny, swaddled in a box, spectacles perched over eyeless sockets, slightly in the way of the television. Consider yourself part of the furniture. But it works for the Toraja: their funerals are celebrations of status and regard – the grief has long since been processed.

Back at home, Perry laments the paucity of meaning in the grieving rituals we are saddled with. “I’m looking to see how we can reframe these big moments in our lives, re-energise them,” he says. “I want us to feel more alive in that moment of death.” Perry has two deaths to reckon with. First up, Alison and Kevin, whose 17-year-son was killed by a drink driver six months before. In the absence of any religious leanings, Alison has begun to formulate her own rites according to her needs. She has redecorated Jordan’s room so that it has become a kind of chapel. “It’s the space where I go to speak to him,” she says. In the living room she has turned one wall into a sort of shrine, painted to reflect Jordan’s sartorial preferences: red on top, blue on the bottom. “I feel like I’m at the beginning of a religion,” says Perry. “I feel like I’m witnessing the birth of a major belief system. I can understand how world cultures were born from strong feeling.”

The other death is more problematic, in that it hasn’t happened yet. Roch Maher was diagnosed with motor neurone disease and given 18 months to live. That was eight years ago, but the end, Roch feels, is now nearly at hand. The plan is to celebrate Roch’s life while he is still around. “If the Toraja can separate a death from a funeral, why can’t we?” says Perry.

The ceremony devised for Roch’s life is full of laughter and tears, with mementoes from friends and family placed in an urn made by Perry. Roch is not only present, he also speaks at his own funeral. The pilgrimage for Jordan, a march around the estate he called home to mark what would have been his 18th birthday, is no less moving, and the icon Perry creates for the occasion makes a profoundly touching addition to Jordan’s wall. Even if a rite is just a vessel for us to pour our feelings into, it needs to be sturdy enough for the task, to hold a solemn weight. That is probably why we retreat to conventional rituals when something momentous happens, even when those rituals no longer seem appropriate. “Making meaning, that’s what we’re doing,” says Perry. An end note informs viewers that Roch has since died.

Perry has two distinct advantages when tackling uncomfortable subjects: a very direct way of asking a question and an extremely generous laugh. This works as well for death as it does for, say, class and snobbery. In other words, he makes people feel at ease talking about matters of great significance, emotion and irrationality. I tend to approach programmes about death warily, because all the grief I harbour is improperly stowed, but this was more stirring than unsettling. Above all, it left one with a sense that there was something unifying and important about being human. Let’s hope the aliens were watching.

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