GESTÖRT: COKE BOTTLES ON THE GRAVE

“Gestört” is the German word for disturbed, deranged, crazy, off the normal track, an outsider in society, an outcast, or just someone you can`t stand. The mentally ill, drug addicts or your hated ex-boyfriend belong to that group. The equivalent for crazy would be verrückt, so gestört has a more intense connotation. You can’t be “gestört” and cool, there is no positive vibe about it at all, but you can be cool and crazy, no problem. I heard the word in a conversation recently and it has stuck with me ever since. Sue (name changed) told me and a few friends in a serious conversation that the previous week a stranger had put a pile of red coke bottles on her beloved sister’s grave. Her sister had jumped off a famous suicide cliff at the age of 26. The grieving young woman’s voice vibrated with anger. “What asshole would put a pile of trash on my sister’s grave?” It was only her grave, nobody else’s was messed up. The young girls` body became tense as she revisited the polluted site mentally. Who would do that? "What if", someone wondered, that person was just a "‘gestört’ drug addict friend who did not have money for flowers, and wanted to bring her something else instead? Since your sister liked coke, it would make sense to bring coke bottles". Sue gave her a shocked look. This was probably too much reframing for the untrained mind? And putting your beloved sister into the group of “gestört” people might be too harsh for the grieving soul. I, for my part, agreed with that interpretation. I just couldn’t handle the word “gestört”. It stuck with me. I turned it over again and again in my mind. I kept wondering, who is “gestört”? My father, a stoic regionalist and organic farmer who hated products that were shipped from overseas, had to endure a glut of conventional flowers on cold, rainy January days while he was waiting to finally be buried. I had a hard time accepting these well-meant tokens of love and, as I was automatically participating in the funeral process and surprised by the endless number of people showing up, I kept wondering where all these flowers came from. Why, when one dies, these life convictions don’t play a role anymore and everybody shows love in their own egoistic way? Why would you force an organic farmer to accept all these flowers that added to the pesticide and fertilizer pollution, that increased the overload of phosphor and nitrogen cycles, that added to the Co2 load, poisoned the ground water, guzzled water out of rare aquifers or lakes in d drought prone areas, forced child labor or low wage labor, contribute to cancer rates in flower workers, or other illnesses. Whose suffering hands had grown, picked, and shipped those flowers, who did not have enough to eat because there was no land to grow food crops on? Cash crops as a means  of reducing national debts induced by risky world bank loans. Inundated by the stream of people, most of whom I did not know, I wondered about the absurdity of global economic and cultural connections and how they enter simple mountain folks’ village traditions. Somebody even put plastic Edelweiß (his favorite Alpine flower) on his grave. I truly hoped my dad was plain dead and his ghost did not notice any of this kitsch. Knowing he got stuffed into a plastic bag like an old schnitzel and that his head was resting on a pillow made of plastic, did not help either.  When alive, he had loved to carve Edelweiß from wood and presented them to people he liked, or sold them. I realized he did the only logical thing. Why give flowers, produced under harmful circumstances, to dead people? He would have loved locally collected moss or lichen, lovingly turned into wreaths or bouquets. I remember once, before Christmas, he tried to sell fir branches with lichen we had collected together to a local flower shop, they refused to buy them because they considered them ugly. He thought it was beautiful and a special type of decoration.  My father taught me how interpret beauty differently, how to drive fuel efficiently and often made me walk because he regarded oil consumption to be a big problem. He was very aware of global challenges and tried to do his best locally by avoiding plastic, by recycling, by living a fuel efficient lifestyle. Now he had to endure unsustainable and unjustifiable flowers from Africa. “Only over my dead body” as some would say. I am sure he would have preferred recycled coke bottles to fancy roses. And so I wonder, who is more “gestört”, the person who decorates a grave with red coke bottles, or the one who buys unsustainable flowers on a cold January day for a dead person who doesn’t even like flowers from Africa.