by Sarah Murray
In Victorian England, too, a once flourishing tradition of emotional, public demonstrations of grief eventually faded. The tradition had developed alongside Romanticism, an eighteenth-century artistic, literary, and intellectual movement, and the rise of Evangelical Christianity. In paintings and novels, the deathbed scene, depicting grieving relatives gathered in a domestic bedroom, became a popular theme. Composing lines that might have been written by the Sufi artists of Persia, British poets infused their stanzas with tears, as did Lord Byron in lines such as these, from “And Thou Art Dead, as Young and Fair”:
As once I wept, if I could weep
My tears might well be shed,
To think I was not near to keep
One vigil o’er thy bed
Public displays of sentiment were accepted, and even encouraged. “They were not shy about expressing the depth of their suffering in tears and in words,” explains historian Pat Jalland, who cites contemporary accounts describing the behavior of bereaved individuals. There was the man who, having lost his only child, became “almost frantic” and started “rolling on his bed and tearing his hair,” and George Lyttelton who, on his wife’s death in 1857, sobbed uncontrollably for days after, and wanted only to “weep and muse and pine.”
As the century drew to a close, however, the influence of Evangelicalism and Romanticism waned. Meanwhile, advances in medical science led to a sharp fall in the rate of death by disease. In the process, public and even private emotional outbursts of grief became less acceptable. For Englishmen, says Jalland, the process was accelerated “by the ethos of the public [private] schools with their cult of manliness and masculine reserve.” This masculine reserve, this stoicism, is what shaped my father’s generation in their responses to death—and perhaps mine, too.
* * *
In the early hours of August 31, 1997, the British way of death was turned on its head. All of a sudden, that notorious stiff upper lip betrayed a distinct wobble. What caused the wobble was the death of a princess. Within hours of a black Mercedes crashing into a Parisian tunnel, killing Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi Al Fayed, her companion, flowers started arriving at the gates of Kensington Palace, where Diana had lived. With bouquets, teddy bears, and other gifts piling up outside the palace, the nation became swept up in an extraordinary—and highly uncharacteristic—public outpouring of grief. Even Tony Blair, the British prime minister, allowed his voice to crack just for a moment in his television broadcast on the morning the “people’s princess” died.
The night before Diana’s funeral, I paid a visit to Kensington Palace. It was a warm summer evening, and the stench of rotting flowers combined with the heady aroma of scented candles and joss sticks to create an ambiance more like a temple in India than a park in Great Britain. Facing a sea of cellophane-covered floral tributes, teddy bears, photos, and handwritten signs, people sat on the ground, alone or in groups, around small personal shrines. Heads were bowed. Some wept quietly.
Early the next morning, some friends and I joined the crowds on Kensington High Street to watch the cortège pass by on its way to Westminster Abbey. The atmosphere was unlike any I’d previously encountered in England. The city had fallen silent. The air was leaden. Barely visible, the ghosts of clouds lurked in the immaculate blue of a late summer morning. The only sounds were the tolling of a church bell and a few muffled sobs from members of the crowd.
Finally, draped in the Royal Standard, the lily-laden coffin emerged from the palace gates. It advanced slowly and majestically on a gun carriage pulled by the horses of the King’s Troop and accompanied by foot soldiers from the First Battalion Welsh Guards, decked out in their scarlet livery and bearskins. Following behind were the two young princes; their father, the Prince of Wales; their grandfather, the Duke of Edinburgh; and Charles Spencer, Diana’s brother. It was a state funeral, with all the trappings of a royal pageant.
Through it all, though, the modest box carrying the body of the dead princess appeared to float above everything, detaching itself from the pomp and circumstance swirling around it as it proceeded through Central London. How strange it was, I thought with wonder as it passed in front of me, that inside that box was a person—a person who had walked, talked, laughed, cried, eaten, bathed, made love, slept, and who had, on every morning until the morning of August 31, 1997, woken to a new day.
It was the death of this person—now a body in a box—that had sent British stoicism into a tailspin. Newspaper headlines talked of “A Nation United in Mourning.” TV newscasters spoke in hushed tones. I wondered, privately, if the country had gone mad. Plenty of my friends and fellow Brits, it turned out, felt the same. A few commentators claimed the media was overdoing it (as indeed it had during Diana’s life).
Nevertheless, the change of mood in the United Kingdom during that time marked a shift in the country’s emotional history. And the spontaneous outburst of mourning across much of the nation was about more than the loss of a glamorous princess. It was also, I think, a time in which everyone felt permitted to contemplate their own personal loss; to pull those deep reserves of grief out from their hiding places. In short, the occasion gave everyone in Britain a chance to have something they’d denied themselves for so long: a really good cry.
* * *
Ironically, the Ashura ceremony I most want to see—the reciting of the majalis, or lamentation—I cannot, since I’m a woman and so barred from the main hall of the mosque, where it generally takes place. But back in my hotel that evening, I catch one on Iranian television. The camera pans across a large hall (it looks a lot more comfortable than the Husseinia Maryam and I sat in) packed full of men sitting in rows. On a stage at the front is a man dressed in a gray suit, a cape, and a black cap. Speaking in Persian, he’s recounting in detail the suffering at the Battle of Karbala and the martyrdom of Imam Husayn.
At first he speaks in solemn tones, pausing for effect from time to time. But as the story unfolds, something strange happens. The leader appears to have something in his throat. He coughs and starts blowing his nose. Soon, whimpers accompany some of the phrases he utters. Gradually, full-blown sobs are being woven into his recitation.
Meanwhile, the same thing is happening in the audience. People start sighing and murmuring. Pained expressions come across the faces of many of the listeners as they break into quiet moans, many clasping their hands to their brows, hiding their faces with handkerchiefs or shaking their heads. Shoulders shudder and some people have tears streaming down their cheeks (the camera tends to zoom in on these ones). Pretty soon, the hall is heaving with sobbing men.
I’d heard about these lamentation ceremonies, but it’s still strange to see one, particularly since the participants are all male. In societies with lamentation traditions, men are not usually the weepers. Yet perhaps that’s the point. Here is a safe space where men are allowed—even encouraged—to cry.
* * *
Curiously enough, there was one thing that would unfailingly reduce my father to tears—the sound of English church bells. I remember him telling me this many years ago. Then, going through his essays and letters, I found a description of the effect they had on him. He’d experienced this, he wrote, from an early age and interpreted it as a child’s “involuntary, and deeply emotional” response to a sound. “I soon learned to control the visible signs of emotion,” he wrote. Even so, he went on, throughout his life church bells continued to work their “emotional magic” on him, “the reasons for which I have never yet found an explanation.”
Music and mourning have always had a close relationship. Music can move us to tears even without the presence of the dead, so it’s hardly surprising that it can also help give voice to grief.
When Steven Feld was studying the culture of sound in Papua New Guinea, he noticed that the mourning songs of the Kaluli people—whose weeping-singing voices are, according to Feld, intimately connected with rainforest birds, which are considered spirits—had common features. The songs were delivered in
breathy voices with “choking sounds and slight vibrato.” They were always descending in their melodic contours, and several songs could overlap, creating complex polyphonic layers of sound.
I once saw some of these musical traits at work in the performance of a Caribbean wake drumming song by Dominican singer-songwriter Irka Mateo. Accompanying herself with a small drum and a wood maraca, Mateo’s rendition started brightly with melodies rising sharply before falling again. Once more, rhythm played its part. But in addition, as the verses were repeated, her voice grew hollow, and her head sank lower over the drum. By the end of the song, a distinct breathiness had entered her singing and the performance ended in what was almost a sob, mixing music and mourning.
Toward the end of Fa’s life, it was music that turned my restrained sighs into tears. One evening shortly after returning from England—my last visit before his death, as it turned out—I was at home in New York, paying bills and filing papers. I put on a CD I’d ordered that had just arrived in the mail, a recording of Bulgarian choral singers. Halfway through the third track, “Kalimankou Denkou”—a slow wash of dissonant harmonies over which the powerful vibrato of the lead singer soars only to descend again and again—I found myself hunched over the table, tears running down my cheeks.
I let myself cry for a while. The tears seemed to be part of the music—soft and warm, like a consoling caress. My tears ended as the song drew to its quiet close, and I sighed again as I’d done often that year, but this time with breath drawn from the deepest recesses of my lungs. It was a new sigh—clear, unrestricted by tension, and one that seemed to bring with it a sense of calm I’d not felt in months. I was not in a Husseinia. This was no Irish keen or Greek funerary lament. Nor was it rehearsed or planned. But at that moment, I realized that—with the assistance of the doleful voices of the Bulgarian singers—I was performing my own mourning ceremony.
* * *
Crying might be good for you. It certainly helped me through a dark moment during my father’s illness. Still, I’m not sure I want to encourage public wailing at my funeral. Despite almost a decade in America, I can’t shake off my British discomfort at the thought of making a scene, even in death. And personally, I prefer the guidance of the old Hebrew proverb: “Say not in grief ‘he is no more’ but live in thankfulness that he was,” or the words of Henry Scott Holland, canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral, who in a 1910 essay suggested the bereaved should “wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow” but “laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we enjoyed together.”
I’m not the only one who feels like this. Romantic poets, tragic heroes, and dying heroines have often entreated those left behind not to weep too much at their deaths. In one of the most moving death scenes in opera, Henry Purcell’s Dido, of Dido and Aeneas, tells the audience that when she is “laid in earth” they should remember her, but forget her failures and misfortunes: “May my wrongs create no trouble in thy breast,” she cries as her life slowly ebbs away. Others have specifically forbidden any weeping by their graves. In his 1812 poem “Euthanasia,” Lord Byron asks that no “band of friends or heirs” attend his funeral:
But silent let me sink to earth,
With no officious mourners near:
I would not mar one hour of mirth,
Nor startle friendship with a tear.
Perhaps a similar sentiment lay behind my father’s last request. Maybe Fa’s wish that there should be no funeral or memorial service for him was motivated by this same idea—a desire to save us all from an event bound to provoke tears.
2
Beautiful Fire
A BURST OF FLAMES IN BALI
If there were an award for the world’s most elaborate funerary tradition, the Balinese would surely win it—and their victory would surprise no one. For on this small Indonesian island, even banal daily activities are executed with the utmost grace and style (and usually a ceremony or two). In Bali, dance dramas in dazzling costumes are staged at the drop of a hat and even rice gets treated to elaborate rituals. To prevent tower blocks from marring the lush green skyline, the law stipulates that buildings can rise no higher than the palm trees. Oh yes, and the trash trucks are painted with pictures of lotus flowers. Of course Bali’s funerals are fabulous.
Even for non-royal individuals, cremations are astonishing affairs, accompanied by spectacular decorations taking weeks—sometimes months—to construct. Often involving the immolation of dozens of individuals in a single day, these events are more carnival than funeral. Immense floats made of paper and bamboo deliver the bodies to the pyre, drummers cavort around the procession, and street traders sell snacks and drinks to the crowd.
“It is in their cremation ceremonies that the Balinese have their greatest fun,” wrote Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias in his 1937 book, Island of Bali. “Hundreds of people in a wild stampede carry the beautiful towers, sixty feet high, solidly built of wood and bamboo and decorated with tinsel and expensive silks, in which the bodies are transported to the cremation grounds.” Everything, he explains, is set on fire, with “hundreds and even thousands of dollars burned in one afternoon in a mad splurge of extravagance by a people who value the necessities of life in fractions of pennies.”
Most dazzling of all are royal cremations, throwing power, politics, and status into events that, even for ordinary citizens, are packed with drama and spectacle. On July 15, 2008, a royal Balinese individual is to be cremated—Tjokorda Gde Agung Suyasa, first son of the tenth child of the last king of Ubud, a small hillside town at the center of Bali. I hear about it a couple of months before it’s due to happen. Because it’s to be a Pelebon, a royal cremation, it will be on a grand scale. In fact, I’m told it will be the biggest of its kind in three decades. Thousands will probably attend.
Knowing this comes as something of a relief. For on one Web site, I learn that the island’s funerals are visitor attractions. “If you go to the local tourist center in your town in Bali, you should be able to find out if there are any cremation ceremonies taking place,” writes one travel blogger. For about fifteen dollars, the writer explains, local guides will pick you up from your hotel and take you to the ceremony.
Fortunately, the Ubud royal cremation will be such a huge event I won’t have to contemplate the grotesque prospect of paying to see a funeral. And since it will be so public, I’ll have no worries about the prospect of intruding on private grief. Still, if I want to explore the world’s death rites and burial traditions, being part of the tourist industry is something I’ll just have to get used to—the dead and their grave sites are firmly on the tourist trail.
After all, cemeteries such as Père-Lachaise in Paris, London’s Highgate Cemetery, and Arlington National Cemetery in Washington often welcome more tourists than families visiting relatives. And, of course, some of the world’s most visited tourist sites are mausoleums or memorials—think of India’s Taj Mahal, China’s Ming Tombs, or Egypt’s pyramids. The Egyptian dead have always been huge visitor attractions. The unwrapping of mummies brought back to England by Victorian archaeologists drew large audiences, and in museums the sections displaying mummies of the pharaohs are always packed. Embalmed dictators pull in the crowds, too, most famously Lenin in Moscow, Mao in Beijing, and Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese leader (who in fact wanted to be cremated). Death, in short, is a crowd pleaser.
In Bali, death is perhaps at its most spectacular. And aside from wanting to attend what will clearly be a once-in-a-lifetime event, I’m curious to see what a “happy funeral” looks like. Bali’s royal cremation will surely have drama and ritual to match the mourning ceremonies laid on every year in Iran for Imam Husayn. Death is certainly not hidden away in Bali, far from it. But rather than favoring rituals intended to provoke weeping, as the Iranians do, the opposite applies here—no one is supposed to cry.
The blatantly celebratory mood of Balinese cremations might seem inappropriate at events many of us would consider distressing. But the Balinese believe any sadness or st
rong emotions displayed at a cremation will hamper the journey of the soul into the next life, so visible signs of grief are frowned upon. Instead, elaborately choreographed ceremonies are designed to elicit the laughter and joy needed to liberate the souls from their earthly bonds. I like this idea—death as a happy ending and a glorious beginning.
Too bad the latter isn’t part of my belief system. After my death, I foresee no beginning, glorious or otherwise. Nothing in my upbringing prepared me for it. Apart from a brief spiritual awakening at age nine (which consisted of me purchasing a plaster angel at a yard sale and imagining myself looking angelic as I knelt before it in the small chapel I would ask Fa to build in our garden), I had a thoroughly nonreligious childhood, and not just at home. At school, “divinity classes,” as they were known, focused not on the Bible but around social issues such as poverty and drug addiction (I still have a surprisingly accurate drawing I did as a twelve-year-old of what my caption explains is a “joint or reefer”).
“But what if we end up at the gates of heaven only to find we’ve made a horrible mistake?” a friend asked me many years ago. “It simply won’t happen,” I told her, and I’d say the same today. Still, my certainty on this front poses a more difficult question—if nothing follows death, how can I approach my own expiration date without fear? Should I belatedly embrace a religion? Should I invent some new philosophy in which I can envisage an afterlife? Perhaps the Balinese way of death will offer some inspiration.