A LOOK AT DEATH AND OUR FUNERAL RITUALS

I KNOW IT IS A MORBID SUBJECT BUT WE SHOULD BE ABLE TO SPEAK ABOUT IT

Some of my most vivid childhood memories involve funerals and the death of some relative or neighbor. Even then at an early age I had to come to terms with our mortality. The rituals and traditions in my country and particularly in my hometown all seemed bizarre to me. Some things just didn’t make sense.

My family was not rich but we did have some of the accoutrements of upper middle class like a car and a television set way back in the 50’s. We owned a small bakery in a town of about 20,000 people and hardly a day went by that we didn’t have a funeral.

To me it was particularly poignant because both my house and my grandparent’s farm were located on the street that went to the cemetery and the farm right off the town’s cemetery road. It was hard to ignore as it was almost a ritual to sit in our front porch and sometime around four in the afternoon we would watch the funeral procession go by.

In my culture, at that time it was a sign of wealth to count how many automobiles were in the funeral procession. The more cars, the more prominent and wealthy the dead person was. There were a few exceptions and those had more to do with the popularity and how prominent they were in our town. The funerals of those were done on foot oftentimes the casket being carried on the shoulders of eight strong men. But those were few.

The other memory I have is that in my hometown, up until the mid fifties the local funeral parlor had a horse-drawn carriage that was black and very elaborate, surrounded by edged glass. They also owned a very old Rolls Royce from the 30’s. But this funeral parlor wasn’t that at all because they had no facilities to hold a viewing. They came into the decease’s house and set up a funeral stage complete with Damask red drapes, four candelabra and the inevitable cross.

Among the things I found strange was how much these funerals were show and how much were real grieving. The all night wakes were an excuse for social gatherings and many married men would go to the wake, leave early and head on to Margarita’s bordello on 13^th street.

Other weird things were the amount of crying, wailing and sheer theatrics some of the relatives displayed in their behavior. It was not uncommon to hire four or five “lloronas” to come and sit all night and they would take turns doing the crying and lamenting. It was truly a sight to see and hear. I have no idea how much they got paid but they had to be costly since most people didn’t have them at their wake. The personal belongings were then placed in the casket to accompany the dead on the journey to the other side. Elaborate embroidered handkerchiefs, dresses, expensive suits and jewelry included.

Then there was the cemetery itself. For a relatively small town, we had a very impressive if not a very elaborate cemetery. It looked like a small city, with massive buildings that looked like bank, all covered in fine marble or granite; intricately wood carved doors or very ornate brass gates. Some of these actually had glass doors and one could look inside and it had a small chapel and the caskets, all made of mahogany or bronze stacked up inside niches. I visited “Chacarita” Cemetery in Buenos Aires and saw very much the same thing.

Someone once told me that you could tell how big the ego of a particular country or a group of people was if you looked at their cemeteries; the more elaborate the larger the ego and this can’t be any truer than those of my hometown or the Argentineans.

I grew up, came to America with my parents as a political exile then went to college and got married. I had two children: lovely little girls two years apart. It was the Reagan era…not very good for the poor and the middle class; unemployment was high and that was the beginning of jobs being taken overseas. I was a technical illustrator at the time and was earning $17.00 an hour, an impressive number even by today’s standards. In my case it wasn’t that the job went to Pakistan; but I was replaced by a computer program called “CAD”. I found myself without a job in a lousy economy and with three mouths to feed.

What followed was a series of very frustrating interviews and futile attempts at getting a job. After two months I had all but given up and had to find something or my family would starve. I took a $5.00 an hour job at a funeral home as an attendant and worked there the better part of a year.

As you might expect, some of the things I saw were not only gruesome but incredible. I had to pick up dead bodies. I had to go into the embalming room and into the City Morgue. The one thing that will remain in your brain indelligibly embedded is the smell of death itself; once you smell it you never forget. I have a very strong stomach and nothing grossed me out. But I am an extremely sensitive human being with a lot of compassion and that was the part that bothered me most…my Achilles’ heel. I would “lose it” sometimes when I would see a dead baby or a very beautiful woman or man lying there lifeless. I wept a couple of times, away from the funeral service for someone I didn’t even know.

The whole process of embalming is very gross…not for the faint of heart; the embalmer drains all the blood out of the body and replaces it with embalming fluid. Then the hairdresser/beautician goes to work…the hair is tinted and washed, dried and coiffed and make up is applied to the corpse. I saw how they have a few tricks of their sleeve; like applying some glycerin to make the skin look alive…much like what you see in artificial flowers as water droplets.

The most repugnant of the bodies I picked up were either victims of drowning or car accident fatalities. However, the grossest one of all are those killed in fires; some of which are burnt beyond recognition and then a closed casket is in order for the funeral.

But I also saw a lot of theater, a lot of drama on the part of insincere relatives that were only putting on a show to either impress the mourners or to compensate for the love they denied the dead person while living. This was particularly obvious when they would buy the most expensive casket and have excessive amounts of flowers. It was in my opinion a piss poor attempt at making up for lost opportunities to have loved the deceased.

I realized then that I have done it all, from cleaning floors to waiting on tables. But I never had to ask anybody for money; not even the Government. I put myself through college back in the day when there were no loans or significant scholarships. I also never failed to put food on our table and my kids never went hungry.

I had the worse jobs any person could have: once I cleaned bed pans at Breckenridge Hospital in Austin while I was a student there. Can you think of anything more repulsive? Well I can and did it: I picked up dead bodies for a funeral parlor. But one day, on a very cold February morning, we were to have a funeral and I was instructed to put gas in the hearse. When I unlocked it and started the engine, I was readjusting the rear view mirror when I see a very scruffy and half dead looking character rise from the inside of the back of the hearse. I totally freaked out. I thought it was a dead body Wayne; the night attendant had picked up the night before and just left him there, only he wasn’t dead and just came out of his coma.

It turned out to be a homeless man who found the hearse back door unlocked and climbed in to get a much warmer place to sleep off his drunken binge. I still laugh about that one.