by Sarah Murray
Reaching a glass door, I hesitate. After all, it’s not often in this era of e-mail and cell phones that one turns up unannounced at a stranger’s house. Seeing three people inside sitting around a circular wooden table, I worry even more about intruding. I knock gingerly.
From within come the words: “Is that Sarah?” I’m astonished. How can it possibly be that in this isolated mountain village, someone is actually expecting me? “Yes?” I answer, puzzled, as I push open the door. Stranger still, once inside, I know none of the people around the table. Then Neal, the photographer, introduces himself. Ah, now I recognize his voice. But what on earth is he doing here? It was only yesterday that we spoke by phone in Manila. Neal explains that he was given a last-minute assignment in Sagada and, with time to spare before heading back to the city, he decided to visit Villia. Just before I arrived, Neal was telling Villia and her friend Tessie that a writer called Sarah Murray might be contacting her.
This is extremely fortunate. For Villia explains that she often turns away strangers because they’re usually tourists wanting to see her home. And no wonder—she lives in what must be one of the most spectacular houses in the Philippines. Perched on the outcrops of limestone cliffs, everything is constructed around the rock face with furniture, fittings, and a state-of-the-art steel and granite kitchen all accommodating the stone, rather than the other way around. As evening draws in and the light dims, the floor-to-ceiling window becomes a giant mirror reflecting the rocky back wall, turning the place into a cave.
But it’s what’s outside the window that interests me, for the house has a breathtaking view over Echo Valley, the deep gorge in whose cliffs are lodged many of the hanging coffins I’ve come to see. The light is fading, so it’s impossible to make any out now, but, as the setting sun spreads a flush of pink across the gray rock face, I get my dramatic first glimpse of these intriguing burial grounds.
Villia invites me to sit and hands around cups of cappuccino (made, she says, with the milk of local water buffalo). She’s a tall woman with long gray hair, three earrings in one ear and two in the other, and she wears a deep indigo–dyed kaftan from Senegal. Without pausing for breath, she speaks passionately about everything you care to mention. She’s like a windup toy that only needs the key cranked a notch or two to set it sallying forth. (“You may have noticed, I talk a lot,” she tells me later.)
But in Villia’s stream-of-consciousness storytelling is a rich seam of information. After claiming to know little about death rites—“That’s not my field,” she tells me brusquely—she proceeds to explain in detail everything from all-night vigils to ritual pig slaughtering.
Soon Tessie, who was born in Sagada, joins in, matching Villia’s descriptions with memories of funerals she’s attended over the years. She remembers that an old woman from Sagada died recently—Mrs. Batnag, who once ran a local shop. The vigil is on Saturday and if I’d like to, she says, I can go along. The whole community attends funerals around here, so it’s no problem for a stranger to turn up, particularly if they bring gifts. Cognac and cakes are best, explains Tessie, and money, too.
By now, my mind’s reeling—barely an hour after arriving, I’ve been greeted by strangers who seem to know me; I’ve caught my first glimpse of Echo Valley; I’ve tasted water buffalo–milk cappuccino; and I’ll be here for the all-night vigil of Mrs. Batnag. I came here simply to see coffins hanging in caves, but I suspect that in this small mountain town I’ll encounter much more.
Then Villia hands me a photograph. It’s a shocking image. It shows a man strapped to a chair with a band across his mouth and his hands tied together in what looks to me like a hostage situation. What’s worse, the man appears to be suffering from some terrible skin disease, for his arms are covered with large blisters.
This, Villia explains, is the death chair and it’s part of the sangadil, the traditional way of preparing people for burial here. The deceased is placed in a chair and tied up in a sitting position. To keep the head upright and prevent body fluids from leaking, a band of bark is strapped across the mouth and fixed to the back of the chair. Cotton is wedged into the nostrils and ears. The corpse remains this way for several days and, since it’s not embalmed, it may shrivel, bloat, or blister.
Surprisingly, Sagadans find neither the sight nor the sickly-sweet stench of a rotting corpse upsetting. They treat the body in the chair as temporarily in the living world and visit it as they might a friend or neighbor. And it’s probably easier to have a conversation with a person who’s sitting up, rather than lying in a coffin. This is important because in Sagada friends, relatives, and neighbors come not only to pay their respects but also to talk to the dead person, exchanging last greetings, passing messages to the ancestors, and even—I like this part—venting their anger by having a good yell at the corpse.
* * *
I don’t remember the last thing my father said to me. But a conversation we had near the end of his life sticks in my memory. It took place one morning after a terrible night during which, consumed by illness and drugs, he seemed to have lost his mind. By morning, he was himself again, if terrifyingly weak. But he clearly couldn’t stay at home, so we got in my Renault 5, the smallest but most comfortable of the family vehicles, and headed to the Joseph Weld Hospice. When we arrived, I sat in the car with him, while Sam went to the reception desk to ask for a wheelchair.
Fa and I chatted quietly about this and that. But what I remember clearly is that he congratulated me on the drive there. Fa had always loved driving and he often told me he liked the way I drove. But for some reason, at that moment, it made me insanely proud to know that, in the midst of extreme pain, discomfort, and helplessness, he’d been noticing the way I was driving.
Grief, it seems to me, is often bound up in unfinished business—remorse for bad behavior or regret for the things we never got to say to those we’ve lost. When it became clear Fa’s illness was terminal, I thought a lot about whether I needed to tell him anything, something I’d wish I’d said after he’d gone. I could find nothing. Of course, I desperately wanted him to be around for longer so we could continue the conversations and jokes. But there were no grievances to resolve; no dark secrets withheld.
Except for one thing—something I knew I had to do with him before he died: to watch a movie. It starred Walter Matthau. Fa had videotaped it years earlier and had often tried to get us to watch it. He didn’t exactly sell it to us, saying merely that it was a “courtroom drama” (it’s called The Incident, I found out later, and in it Matthau plays a small-town lawyer who, during the Second World War, defends a German prisoner accused of murdering the local doctor). “How about the courtroom drama?” he’d say every time we’d decide to flop in front of the TV for the afternoon. “It’s brilliant, you know.” And every time, we’d roll our eyes and choose something else. Eventually, not watching it became a family joke.
One afternoon on a visit home during his illness, I told Fa straight out, “I can’t let you go to your grave without watching that movie.” He laughed (he liked it when we didn’t tiptoe around the subject of his impending death) and went off to find the tape. He and I watched the film from start to finish. The plot, it turned out, was gripping, with unexpected twists. The drama was well paced and Matthau was superb. “You see, wasn’t I right?” he said, smiling triumphantly when he saw how much I’d enjoyed the movie. “Absolutely,” I replied. “And I’d never have forgiven myself for failing to watch it with you after all these years.”
Remorse over unfinished business can be a destructive force—and often the business concerns more than a movie. Remorse, writes E. M. Forster in Howards End, is a wasteful emotion. “It cuts away healthy tissues with the poisoned. It is a knife that probes far deeper than the evil.” He’s right. When we feel we’ve failed them, we spend our time longing to talk to the dead, going over and over the things we’d say to them. If only we’d told them we loved them one more time, or made up after that terrible fight. If only we could have one la
st chance to sort things out, clear the air (or watch a movie), before saying good-bye forever. Well, in Sagada, thanks to the death chair, you have that chance.
* * *
I meet Siegrid at 8 A.M. in front of the Saint Joseph Resthouse for our tour of Echo Valley. She’s a remarkable individual. A small, self-possessed young woman, she has jet-black hair cut in a bob and bright, intelligent eyes. After working for several years at an insurance firm in Baguio, she returned to Sagada in 2001 for the funeral of her grandmother, who was killed in a bus crash on her way back from a wake. Although it was this double tragedy that precipitated her return, once back home, Siegrid decided to stay, preferring the clean air of the mountains to city life.
These days, when she’s not trekking around the valley as a guide, she works on her ceramics in a studio that sits on a pine-covered hill. Apart from its simple corrugated iron roof, the studio is open to the elements. In summer, the breeze keeps the place cool. In storms, the rains crash onto the roof in a thrilling cacophony of sound.
On our way to Echo Valley, Siegrid and I pass the Church of St. Mary the Virgin and its cemetery before descending into a verdant landscape of bamboo forests and fern thickets framed by the same strange limestone formations that decorate the sitting room of Villia’s house.
After a few minutes, Siegrid points up toward the first coffin on our route. I can barely make it out as the wood has faded to the same pale gray of the stone in which it’s lodged, but there it is, sticking out of a narrow crack in the rock. Above, in an arched opening high in the cliff face, is a collection of coffins. Different shaped caskets are piled on top of each other. Most look like what I think of as a coffin—long, narrow boxes. But some are short and squat. These, Siegrid explains, are sections of hollowed-out tree trunks and contain bodies in the traditional fetal position.
We pass through caves where coffins sit in unruly piles, and gaze up at limestone cliffs where they cling dramatically to the rock face, supported by pegs driven into the stone. One of these, Siegrid says, was erected only a couple of years ago. She remembers the smell lingering for months after it was put in place.
Two of the coffins we see have wooden chairs tied up with them—their death chairs. Several are painted in blue and white, decorated with names of the deceased. One has a wooden crucifix attached to it—signs of Christianity’s penetration of these tribal burial grounds.
Anglican missionaries arrived here just before U.S. military forces took control of the Philippines in 1905. In Sagada, the missionaries found a small enclave that had never submitted to Spanish rule or to the Catholic religion of the sixteenth-century colonizers, who sometimes literally lost their heads trying to penetrate the region of fiercely independent tribal warriors.
In 1904, the Reverend John Armitage Staunton, the “engineer-priest,” established a mission in Sagada to “civilize” what one of his chroniclers, William Henry Scott, describes as “a population only three generations removed from raw head-taking paganism.” It was Staunton who built the Church of St. Mary the Virgin. Its cross, writes Scott, “was to rise like a beacon above the heads of pagans seeking a better goal, and whose tower clock was to symbolize the changes that would accompany the process.”
Whether Sagadans saw it quite like that is another question. But like an extra spoon of sugar in a cup of tea, Anglicanism slipped into the way of things here. This was partly because early missionaries accommodated existing traditions. Soon after arriving, Staunton visited the biggest of the burial caves, Lomiyang, and gave it his blessing (Siegrid jokes that luckily the missionaries could tell locals how Jesus, after his death, also spent time in a cave).
Yet Christianity penetrated Igorot culture incompletely, for tribal traditions remain strong—and nowhere more so than in death and burial. What’s more, explains Siegrid, the painting and naming of caskets is a new phenomenon. “We don’t visit our dead,” she tells me, “so we don’t need to name their coffins.” This becomes clear when she tries to take me down a less well-trodden trail leading to a place where she knows there are more coffins. When we arrive, the path is so overgrown we have to turn back.
Perhaps Sagadans don’t visit their dead because they don’t need to. Since they can intervene in the fortunes of the living, bringing wealth or illness, the spirits of the dead are called upon at all ceremonies. And, explains Siegrid, it’s not only friends and relatives who are acknowledged—the spirits of dead enemies are also invoked. Their remains may be hidden in the thick undergrowth or perched on an inaccessibly high cliff ledge, but in Sagada, the dead are constantly present. They remain influential members of the community.
In some cultures, remembering the dead is limited to specific times or places—prayer sessions, church services, or graveyard visits. In others, the ancestors are constantly present, as for the Chinese, who place their effigies on altars in the home. But even in the West, we’re finding ways of keeping the dead with us, particularly when deaths have been tragic. Take roadside monuments, floral tributes on bridges, or memorials on school lockers. Then there are ghost bikes, part of a global movement in which bicycles painted white are locked to street signs or railings near a crash site—reminder of a tragedy. These improvised memorials put the dead directly into our lives in ways that weren’t possible when their only marker was in a graveyard on the edge of town.
So are the dead influential members of my community? In some ways, they are. For one thing, I’ve yet to erase deceased friends from my contact book, although at some stage I suppose I should. The dead pop up in other ways, too. My grandmother comes to my mind whenever I add capers to a dish of pasta or fish. In her later years (she lived to one hundred), I’d give her a jar of capers every Christmas because she loved them, and because what else do you give an extremely thrifty nonagenarian? (In her late nineties, she turned down my mother’s offer of a new pair of shoes, saying, “I’ll never get the wear out of them.”)
And though he has no memorial plaque or gravestone, Fa appears in my consciousness whenever I hear a piece of music he’d have enjoyed or come across a book I’d have bought for him. They’re sad moments that sometimes take me by surprise. But they’re sweet moments, too, because they keep me connected to my father.
Of course, the memories gradually blur and we’re left with shadows, approximations of a person, names in an address book, jars of capers, faded flowers on a bridge. Like copying an original drawing over layers of tracing paper, we track the marks of those we’ve lost as closely as we can. But while the outline may become distorted and veer off in places, the essence of the image remains.
* * *
Most of Sagada’s householders raise pigs. You see them snuffling around in the gardens and yards of the barangays. But don’t be misled. The motive for swine farming here has nothing to do with the popularity of pork or financial dependence on trade in livestock. It’s ceremonial. Most occasions in Sagada—marriages, births, breaking ground on a new house—require the sacrificial slaughtering of pigs. You need a good supply of hogs to keep up.
Death is particularly expensive in porcine terms, precipitating the slaughter of more than twenty animals over a period of a year. Advances in swine husbandry and use of fast-maturing, nonnative pigs means the whole thing can be wrapped up in less time these days, but that’s still a lot of pigs—and after the death of wealthy individuals you need an even greater supply.
You also need a good head for detail. An astonishing array of rules govern death in Sagada—on everything from how many pigs to butcher (the number of animals killed is referred to as limina), the dates and times at which each butchering should take place, and when to distribute the meat among relatives and neighbors (bingit). Variations in these procedures arise, depending on the age, gender, and social status of the deceased, and local divergences mean a family in central Sagada might follow different rules from one just across the valley in eastern Sagada.
The rules on death clothing are complex, too. For a man, there’s a black-and-white s
triped vest with orange patterns on it, a seven-foot-long piece of fabric making up the lower garment, and a dark blue headband. For women, a wraparound skirt of three pieces of dark blue cloth has red eye-shaped designs on it, while a long-sleeved blouse in white is decorated with black designs. Women also wear the blue headband.
The subtle variations are mind-boggling—it’s a wonder anyone manages to remember them all. And getting them wrong can lead to dire consequences. Failing to dress the dead in traditional mortuary clothes, for example, may prompt their spirits to return, causing an illness in the family.
Fortunately, there’s a book that can help. In 2004, Dinah Elma Piluden-Omengan, a native Sagadan, documented the rules of local funeral rites in a book called Death and Beyond: Death & Burial Rituals & Other Practices & Beliefs of the Igorots of Sagada, Mountain Province, Philippines. Browsing though its pages gives you an idea of the complexity of dealing with the dead in Sagada. And though it records the funeral customs of just one tiny mountain community, it runs to more than two hundred pages.
Rules on how to respond to mortality are among the most carefully defined of cultural conventions. Today, many have disappeared. And, in some cases, that’s no bad thing. It seems astonishing, for example, that in Victorian Britain, widows were obliged to wear mourning dress for two years—and not just any old black. For the first year, the fabric had to be parramatta, a silk blended with wool or cotton to give it the special dullness deemed appropriate for the widow’s gloom. For the next nine months, it was black silk trimmed with crepe (a silk with a crimped texture—also not attractive). For the last six months, the widow could (yippee!) add in a little gray or lavender.
Even in Bali, where cremations are spectacular, joyous events, the courtly hierarchy has a darker side. Anyone violating local regulations and religious obligations may be expelled from the banjar (the local committee that arranges rites such as cremations) and barred from worshipping at temples or using the cemetery for burial and cremation. Anthropologist Carol Warren cites the story of a man who repeatedly failed to join in the communal tasks required at cremations. When it was his turn, the banjar members kept picking up and dropping his bier until the cremation tower broke and his body fell out. In Bali, disruption of death rites is a serious matter, for the fate of the body governs the soul’s ability to reach the afterlife.