Prayers for Passing

I’ve avoided death most of my life. It just rarely presented itself to me, and when it did on the outskirts somewhere, in some friend’s or colleague’s family or other, I avoided it. I couldn’t look it in the eye. I took the long way round. I didn’t know how to express condolences and thought I had to act a certain way, as if the grieving were enclosed in a glass case where selecting the wrong arrangement of sympathetic words might make it all shatter and I might break along with them. I never had attended a funeral in my adult life, the last one having been that of my paternal grandmother when I was 10 years old. It’s not like they didn’t happen, out there on the periphery, but there was “no way I could fly thousands of miles to one when I was working a minimum wage job,” or “I was busy that day,” or “I can’t take a baby to a funeral,” or myriad other voices of avoidance of what is.

I’ve always been comfortable with the concept of my own death, with the clause I think everyone has of “I just don’t want it to hurt.” I’m certainly comfortable with what I believe comes on the other side of “The Great Crossing.” I’m comfortable with the teaching that the Angel of Death always walks right next to us, lending us every moment of our life, able to take it away without a moment’s notice. But real, honest-to-god real death, seeing someone actively in a dying process? Seeing a dead body of someone I know? I’ve always said, no thanks! But even as I’ve said it, I’ve had to sort of laugh at myself for my fear, because for goodness’ sake, death is inevitable. I will inevitably run across it in my lifetime. Experiencing the death of someone close to me will inevitably have to happen at some point in my life. I can’t run away forever. And so I started waiting, thinking time is passing, people I know are getting older, who’s it going to be? We have this quirk in our village, one of the traditions I’ve had to get used to, that when a person dies in town, someone climbs up into the church tower and rings the bells slowly, so that the bell “doubles” – several slow high dings followed by a low dong, so to speak, well, maybe “low dong” isn’t a respectful way to talk about the death knell, but that’s what it sounds like. You hear it echo out across the streets of the village, and everybody looks up from their work and asks “Who died?” Sometimes the spirits take companions, and the bells ring several times in several days, as if death was contagious and spreading through the village with plague-like mystery.

So the inevitable happened. Someone I know died. My husband’s grandfather, Marco’s great-grandfather, my father-in-law’s father. He became ill, and I went to visit him in the first local hospital he was in. He smiled his usual beaming smile at me as he hunched in his thin gown and I told him some blather about staying positive and visualizing health. When I left, I remember I kissed his hand that didn’t have IV lines poking into it. And then I didn’t see him again as he was transferred first to one hospital, then to another, then into ICU in a giant meat house of a social security hospital in Mexico City where visitors were extremely restricted. I’d get reports back from my husband and my in-law’s, about his deterioration, about his surgery, his coma, the machines and respirator, the tubes and needles.

And then he was transferred again suddenly, to another floor with 24 hour access to visitors. That could only mean one thing … immediately, on a Saturday night at 8 p.m., I said let’s go right now to visit him. We packed in Marco and my mother-in-law and drove into Mexico City. Marco fell asleep in the car so I told them we could take turns. My husband came back shaken and tearful and told me not to go see him. I paced around the dark parking lot a bit, and then went and told him that I had to go see him. I found my way through the labyrinthine pathways of the hospital courtyards to the correct wing, and there was a huddle of family members sitting on the benches with my father-in-law. My mother-in-law decided she could take me up, and we wrangled our way past security guards up to the 3rd floor where my grandmother-in-law was stretching out for the night on the hard plastic seats of the waiting room, and waved us past. I felt a profound sense of purpose when I walked into that room, heard for the first time that odd fake breath of a respirator, the red zigzag of heart rate blipping across the screen – like being in a movie. And the patient, swollen and fevered, immobile and somehow deeply eternally asleep … I felt total peace wash over me and I knew that we would likely be the last visitors he would have, and that it somehow depended on us, my mother-in-law and me, to free him, to bathe him in light and prayer, to caress him like one does a newborn baby and whisper into his ear that the Mother and all the host of angels are with him and he is free to fly with them into the Light. Being present in death felt exactly like being present in birth, so death is not so foreign after all, really. The energy is the same, the bigness of the portal just as awesome, the sense of being present just as palpable. We left him to rest his final living hours while we dragged home through Saturday nightclub traffic, and it was with no great surprise that I received the phone call in the morning that he had flown through the portal.

While the energy of death ended up being familiar, the preparations for funeral events were not. Of course, I didn’t have to deal with the chaotic grief-laden logistics of casket-selection, and hearse transport from Mexico City out to the village, or even preparation at his house for the wake. I had to hold down the fort at work because we had a group arriving that afternoon, as well as business lunch guests during the day, so I headed over to work to help the kitchen staff, all family members as well, shell peas and peel potatoes over dripping tears. Mundane tasks like cutting vegetables are wonderful for processing grief I think, as I saw many times in the days that followed and all the ladies of the family daily cooked up giant amounts of food to feed the funeral visitors. The cooking began during the first wake (which spanned two nights). As visitors began to arrive at the house for the hours-long chanting of prayer and song, they each brought a bag filled with sweetbread, coffee, tea, fruit, sugar, cinnamon, rice, or cooking oil, to contribute toward the endless handing out of food during breaks between prayer. After the official prayer session ended, many sat all night in folding chairs, bathed in the soft shimmer of light from the scores of candles surrounding the casket. The second night of the wake, a marimba played sparklingly sad tunes, hundreds of farewells chiming in every strike of mallet on keys. Even more visitors were there, joining their voices to the lilting rise and fall of repetition, of petition to the saints, the harmony of call and response through the cycles of the rosary, the Lord’s Prayer, and infinite songs of passing souls on to God and into the beyond. All the female family members tied on their aprons to begin cooking the vats of food for the meal after the burial the next day. They cooked all night and into the small cold hours of the morning.

The church bell rang long and slow again to signal the rising of the sun and the end of the wake. As the day grew warmer and heat began to rise off the pavement outside the house, all the visitors gathered again for the funeral procession. I finally walked up to the casket to look in and say good-bye. He was dressed like a saint, and he glowed with the peace and detachment of release from the density and heaviness of the world we were left behind in. I felt a profound sadness, not so much that he had gone on, but simply because we wouldn’t ever see him again, smiling and moseying down the street or clucking his flock of sheep through the soccer field on the edge of town. We wouldn’t hear his wistful stories again, or his solid clear advice. Outside the men struggled under the bulk of flower wreaths twice as tall as them, while others sweated under the weight of hoisting up the casket and carrying it into the street. The women carried white flowers and opened black umbrellas over their heads for shade. The mariachis ground their bows on violins, the banda blasted horns and struck their drums to the rhythm of hundreds of slow feet walking behind the casket in a procession that led to every one of his sons’ and daughters’ homes, entering into the front gates at each stop as if to give a final blessing.

The line of crying humans streamed to the church for mass, then the long hot journey continued out to the edge of town, under the highway underpass, across the train tracks, through the crackling dry weeds and dust of the cemetery to the hole of final rest. Village men stood around the hole they’d spent the day digging, sleeves rolled up, smudged and resting on shovels. Everyone huddled under umbrellas, hiding from the glare of the sun. Children whined and the dead man’s wife passed out. The crowd was so thick that I couldn’t see anything until it was over and they piled bucket after bucket brimming with gladiolas onto the mound of dirt that was now a grave. They drove the stakes of the giant wreaths into the soil surrounding it. The grave itself was completely buried beneath flowers as if we could hide the evidence with a colorful mask of beauty and aromatic petals. Eventually everyone tore themselves away from it, trudged back through the dust, stopping to buy popsicles outside the cemetery gates (because vendors always show up where there is a crowd gathered in a hot place, even at funerals), and heading by the hundreds back to the deceased’s house for the giant meal that the ladies had cooked all night during the wake.

I discovered then the ongoing beauty of processing grief. For 9 days, every night at 8 p.m. the same vast crowd of people gathered at the house to chant the rosaries for an hour. Every night at the end of the prayers, the family handed out coffee and tea, bread, and tamales, or bean-laden sopes, or hojaldras with mole, another elaborate preparation of food to thank those who had come to accompany them, to sit after prayer and chat, to reminisce, to plod through years of memories and nostalgia, the talking and the remembering bit by bit chipping away at the grief, making it manageable. You can talk about death. You can talk about the dead. You can talk ten times, or a hundred, or a thousand, about all the details of his final days, or about events from ten or twenty years ago. And someone is always there to listen. Maybe you argue. Maybe you cry. Maybe you laugh as you remember a funny story he told. The rosaries are brilliant and keep everybody going. At the end of nine days, it was back to the church, back to the cemetery to plant the final cross, massive wood, engraved plaque, into the soil where all the glory of flowers had since wilted and now showed the grave for what it was, a mound of dirt with the shell of a man in it. And there was more food served, then another mass to mark the one month point, then more food served, and another mass, more food, mass, food, mass, food, and so on and so forth for surely many years to come, years to process, remember, honor, until someday the mariachis are trailing down the street behind us in the box.

So I met death finally, got to know its intimate workings a bit, its rituals and ceremonies, its sweat and dust, its capacity to feed, its hard swell in the chests of the living, and its softening. I pray that when it hits even closer to home that I have both the ability to cook 20 kilos of rice and to accept my grief with grace. I pray that when it comes for me that the rosaries speed my travels to the other realm and that the marimba plays for me.

Image: Breathing into the Bones, Acrylic & Feather on Canvas, Emily K. Grieves, 2011

Emily has an upcoming journey to Teotihuacan with Annie Fuller Sept. 21-28 – The Journey of the Four-Petaled Flower - a unique transformational experience anchored in the profound mystery teachings of the pyramids. See www.fullcirclespiritualhealing.com for more details.