Making an Exit

by Sarah Murray

  Death can also trigger an unfortunate change in status for those left behind. In Sagada, a surviving spouse is considered something of an outcast. While this practice is fading, it’s still reflected in mourning rituals, since for a certain period of time, the widow or widower is supposed to remain inside, in one corner of the house.

  Often, of course, it’s the women who suffer most. In India, the Hindu rites performed by a widow on her husband’s death reflect her diminished standing. First, she must break the dozens of glass bangles she’s accumulated on her arms. Then the red vermillion spot—the sindoor, worn on her forehead since her wedding day—is wiped off. In poor rural areas, widows may still be expected to shave their heads, sleep on the ground, and remain unseen by men for the rest of their lives.

  Happily for Indian women, the practice of suttee is now outlawed. But in the Rajasthani city of Jodhpur is a chilling a reminder of a time when this tradition required the widow to throw herself on her husband’s cremation fire. On the wall of a gate at Mehrangarh Fort is a series of handprints representing the fifteen wives and concubines of Maharaja Man Singh, women who in 1843 committed suttee on his funeral pyre. Several of the prints are clearly those of young girls.

  If it hasn’t actually precipitated forced suicide, the requirements of some death rituals make Sagada’s pig-slaughtering obligations look positively benign. In Fiji, according to early anthropologists, mourners would cut off the tops of their fingers for the dead. “So common was the practice of lopping off the little fingers in mourning,” noted anthropologist Sir James George Frazer in 1913, “that till recently few of the older natives could be found who had their hands intact.”

  And you might think that carpeting a grave with thotho (grass) sounds romantic—that is, unless you happen to be the wife of a Fijian chief, in which case it once meant being strangled and used as thotho to create a cushion for your dead husband’s body. Sir James, who described this grim practice, found that the same was not true for a husband after his wife’s death. “The great truth that all flesh is grass appears to have been understood by the Fijians as applicable chiefly to the flesh of women,” he writes curtly. Death demands its pound of flesh—quite literally in some cases.

  Some of the old rules might not be life threatening but just seem outdated. When my friend and fellow writer Diane Daniel’s mother died, she was appalled at the black outfits of the undertakers who, at four in the morning, came to pick her up. “I couldn’t believe what the two youngish guys from the funeral home were wearing,” she told me. “Full-on suits and starched shirts—right out of the Munsters. It was so incredibly ghoulish. I wanted to scream, ‘Get out of those ridiculous costumes!’ I’d rather have seen them in medical scrubs if they had to dress up.”

  * * *

  If death brings together the community, it also has a way of forcing us to dig deeply into our pocketbooks. While Piluden-Omengan applauds the comfort Sagada’s communal death rites bring the bereaved, she also notes that these rituals can be costly. “The expensive death practices are a serious burden for Sagada folk,” she writes. “The family concerned spends beyond its meagre income just to comply with the excessive and elaborate rituals and practices that are prescribed by tradition.”

  But Sagada’s rituals are nothing compared to the money lavished on funerals in some places. In the United States, of course, Jessica Mitford accused the funeral industry of perpetrating “a huge, macabre and expensive practical joke on the American public.” Today, the average cost of a US funeral runs six or seven thousand dollars.

  Still, beside Ghana’s citizens, Americans start to look positively thrifty in their funerary spending. Like weddings in India, funerals in Ghana are huge community parties, often attracting hundreds of guests, who all expect to be fed, watered, and entertained with live music, drumming, deejays, and dancing. Funerals, more than any other ceremony, are opportunities for Ghanaians to display their wealth. In a country where many citizens live on a few dollars a day, families shell out thousands of dollars on funerals—sometimes remortgaging their homes.

  To bide time while amassing funds for the party, the body is kept on ice. This can also play into a game of one-upmanship, with a long mortuary stay for the corpse indicating that elaborate planning is going into the funeral, suggesting a lavish event. The high prices charged by mortuary managers add to the family’s prestige.

  In fact, fees for holding dead bodies help keep many Ghanaian hospitals afloat, according to anthropologist Sjaak van der Geest. At one private health center, the Agyarkwa Hospital, he found that, after investing in the necessary equipment, the hospital could accommodate up to three times as many corpses as living patients. Storing the dead had proved more lucrative than treating the sick.

  Money is what anthropologist Marleen de Witte calls the “social glue” behind death in Ghana. Guests, she writes, donate money to the family, which in theory covers the cost of the whole affair. And it’s all very public—a table and donation box are placed prominently at the funeral ground, with staff assigned to count the cash as it comes in, to record names and amounts, to issue receipts, and to announce the arriving donors and their gift amount through a loudspeaker. Managing funeral finances is a tricky balancing act, though—spend too much and invite too few contributing guests and, instead of money left over, you’ll be stuck with a sizeable debt.

  In Mitfordian tones of outrage, commentators in Ghana’s newspapers regularly berate the public for excessive spending on funerals, accusing families of investing more in the dead than they do in the living. Even international financial institutions have advised the Ghanaian government to persuade its citizens to spend less on death rites. Others, however, claim that the commercialization of funerals in Ghana has created jobs for carpenters, caterers, seamstresses, musicians, and others.

  The “dismal trade,” like any other, has innovators and entrepreneurs. It has successes as well as excesses. But while the funeral industry is often criticized for making money, we seem happy to accept the profit motive in other businesses. Most of life’s rites of passage—baby showers, births, christenings, weddings, bar and bat mitzvahs—precipitate shopping sprees that are less frequently questioned. And anyone who finds the plethora of funeral paraphernalia on the market today a little de trop should look at the many ways the baby-care industry has found of selling a stroller.

  Death is, for some reason, different. It’s a rite of passage many feel should be left in the hands of God, not Mammon. Yet, why shouldn’t we be able to spend on funerals as readily as we do for christenings and weddings? Certainly, those who want cheap, simple versions should be offered them. But if someone really wants a lavish send-off in a coffin decked out in the Mets team colors—or, indeed, one shaped like the Empire State Building—shouldn’t they be able to buy one?

  * * *

  Traditional death rites can be harsh or overly pricey. And yet, without any ritual, we seem lost. A friend recently confided her dilemma about how to approach a colleague who’d lost his wife to cancer. “Should I talk to him about it? Should I e-mail, phone, or send a card?” she asked me. In the absence of guidance, she chose the worst path—she did nothing. Meanwhile, bereaved friends have often told me how isolated they’ve felt after hearing nothing from acquaintances or noticed people crossing the street rather than having to talk to them. “I don’t care if they blurt something that’s totally inappropriate,” one told me. “I just want my loss to be acknowledged.”

  It’s true, rituals can seem awkward or artificial. But they do give us a framework with which to get through difficult moments—hooks on which to hang our behavior. Ritual and action step in when words fail.

  Emily Post, the great authority on etiquette, knew all about this. She called etiquette “the science of living,” and in death it was the “time-worn servitor, Etiquette,” she wrote in 1922, who “decrees that the last rites shall be performed smoothly and with beauty and gravity, so that the poignancy of grief may in so far as possible be ass
uaged.”

  Perhaps, even the dress code has something to be said for it. Some of my friends would agree. Debbie Hartley, who was born in a Greek community in Australia and now lives in New York, wore black for a month after her father died. She remembers the striking effect it had on friends. Back in Sydney for the funeral, she went out with her mother and sister-in-law—both also dressed in black—to buy a new pair of shoes for her father to wear for his burial. On the way, they ran into an old family friend, also from Sydney’s Greek community.

  The friend initially smiled at seeing Debbie in town. Then she noticed the three black outfits. “Her face turned,” Debbie told me. “Within seconds she knew something was up and when she came up to us, she immediately asked who had died. That’s when my mother broke down. But the fact that someone from twenty feet away from you knows your personal situation—there was something very powerful about that.”

  Sarah Callaghan, a British friend, also wore black for a month after her mother died. “It was a way of paying respect to her, and it was a personal thing that I think helped me though my grief,” she told me. When the month was up and Sarah donned more colorful clothes, she was struck by the feeling, marking the passage of time after her mother’s death. “The morning I put on a change of color, it was as if something lifted from me,” she says. “I realized that she wasn’t coming back and I felt refreshed. I didn’t feel guilty—just the sense that it was okay to move on.”

  Different colored clothing plays an important role at funerals in Ghana, too, with red distinguishing close relatives from acquaintances and friends dressed in black. As the funeral moves from one ceremony to the next, the colors change, explained Patrick Awuah, who I met while commissioning my coffin in Accra. “On Saturday, you wear black and red,” said Patrick, as he described details of his father’s funeral. “Then on Sunday it changes to fabric in black and white. And for me the color really mattered. The white was so light after the heavy red and black of the day before. Even the conversation seemed different on the Sunday—by Sunday, it was more of a thanksgiving than a mourning.”

  Like the drumbeats of the funeral march, ritual procedures and mourning codes keep us moving through our grief. First, they give us something to do. They also imbue seemingly meaningless loss with reassuring significance. But most important, familiar procedures known to all in the community bring social order to the chaos sparked by a death.

  So in the absence of these rules, with no pigs to slaughter, how do we manage grief and dignify death? In Britain, those without a faith to guide them can have a “humanist funeral.” A humanist funeral, explains the British Humanist Association, recognizes no afterlife, “but instead uniquely and affectionately celebrates the life of the person who has died.” The association has produced a book called Funerals Without God, giving practical advice on how to structure humanist ceremonies, including a selection of prose and poetry.

  In the United States, the New York Society for Ethical Culture—which describes itself as a “humanist religious community”—takes a similar approach. The society was founded in 1876 by Felix Adler, a Jewish intellectual who felt the need for a new religion that focused on ethics rather than doctrine, one open to diverse forms of belief. The society conducts ceremonies on behalf of members and nonmembers, including funerals. “People who’ve grown up without a more traditional religion still want to mark this moment somehow,” says Anne Klaeysen, one of the society’s leaders. “And ceremonies play an important role. Their job is to give you a good footing on which to carry on in your grief.”

  And even in faith-based ceremonies, we’re introducing more personal elements into the proceedings. Where the presence of a member of the clergy was once at the heart of the service, today the eulogy—where friends and family read or speak about the deceased, reflecting on their achievements and character—takes center stage. With the help of videos, photo displays, treasured possessions, and favorite pieces of music, more time is spent remembering the lives of the dead than reciting the liturgy or praying for their souls.

  Some people are finding even more creative ways of saying good-bye to their dead. Take the family of Katie, my friend and hairdresser in New York. Her great aunt was fascinated by Viking history, so when she died, one of her relatives built a model Viking ship. The family attached messages and photographs onto the sail and took it down to the edge of a lake, where everyone placed a handful of ashes into the hold. Then, setting the vessel on fire, they launched it out onto a lake in Minnesota.

  And like the clients of Ghana’s fantasy coffin makers, some people are using the iconography of their lives to shape their final exits. Harry Ewell, whose business in life was selling ice cream from trucks around Rockland, Massachusetts, arranged to have his old ice cream van lead the funeral cortege to the graveyard, where ice cream was served to the mourners. Malcolm McLaren, the “godfather of punk,” was sent off in a coffin emblazoned with the words, TOO FAST TO LIVE, TOO YOUNG TO DIE. As he’d requested, many fans held a minute of mayhem—rather than the traditional minute’s silence—in his memory.

  So what’s happening here? As we struggle to redefine our relationship to death, it seems we’re yearning to rediscover some meaning in rituals (our own meaning). We’re rescuing death from the clutches of the dull anonymity and professionalized mortuary services that began with the funeral reformers of the late nineteenth century. Out with the suits and starched shirts of the mortuary men; in with Viking-style send-offs, funerary ice cream vans, and minutes of mayhem—it’s death, Jim, but not as we know it.

  * * *

  On Saturday night, Siegrid and I go to Mrs. Batnag’s vigil. We arrive at the house at about 9 P.M. I leave a cash donation for the family, a gift of loaves of sweet bread (I couldn’t find any cake), and a bottle of cognac. It’s rather like the Ghanaian system, where contributions to the family help cover the costs of the funeral. So does gambling, I notice—in a yard at the back of Mrs. Batnag’s house, dozens of men are gathered around a game of cards.

  Siegrid and I sit for a while under a tarpaulin erected over the courtyard to keep the rain off the visitors. Friends and relatives sit four rows deep with others perched on a pathway to the side. Most are older people. The women wear an assortment of head scarves and woolly hats (it’s a chilly night by Filipino standards).

  As warm, sweet tea is handed round, everyone sings quietly, alternating between the traditional tribal dirge—the baya-o—and renderings of Christian hymns delivered in quavering voices (“How beautiful to walk in the steps of the Savior” is being sung as Siegrid and I arrive). In between the hymns and dirges, people chat and joke. A few of the older members of the party have fallen asleep. In an adjacent shed, an old man in a cowboy hat tends the flames of a fire that’s boiling water for the tea being passed around and that will later roast the sacrificial pigs. Another will be butchered at midnight.

  Siegrid and I go inside to see the coffin, which is in the main room. Wood planks line the floor, and walls painted in an arresting shade of green have an assortment of objects hanging on them—a map of the Philippines, a pair of deer antlers, a triangular black velvet souvenir flag from Amsterdam, a clock with an ornate gold plastic frame, a picture of Christ wearing the crown of thorns, and a promotional calendar from D’Rising Sun Transport System Inc. On the wall above me, a couple of dusty laminated photographs depict Mrs. Batnag and her husband, who’s still alive. A green plastic rosary hangs between the images of husband and wife.

  Siegrid and I sit down on a bench beside the coffin. There on the floor in front of us is Mrs. Batnag, in a plain wooden box with angled shoulders and sides that taper toward the end—a classic toe pincher. To keep away the flies and mosquitoes, an old woman waves a fan of torn strips of newspaper on a stick over Mrs. Batnag’s face. White cotton fabric lines the coffin—a modern addition, as traditional coffins have no lining—and two large candles flank a carved wood crucifix that’s watching over the corpse. Covering the body is the death blanket, in whit
e with blue lines on it: tribal tradition again meets the trappings of Christendom.

  The room is filled with friends and relatives, all packed onto wooden benches against the walls. In here, too, some people are dozing. Siegrid tells me locals joke that it’s important to make sure at least one person stays awake during the vigil. If not, when they awake, the dead person may have disappeared.

  I’m taking a close look at Mrs. Batnag. Hers is the first dead body I have ever seen, unless you count mummified corpses. At first, I find her presence shocking. Then, as I get used to the fact that I’m inches from a cadaver, I start wondering whether, after I die, I’d want my body laid out in a room full of everyone who knew me. The answer is no. While for some, a recurring nightmare is appearing naked in public, mine is finding myself surrounded by crowds of people who’ve been watching me while asleep. In these dreams, I always tell the onlookers to go away and leave me alone—something I wouldn’t be able to do if I was dead.

  Still, Mrs. Batnag doesn’t seem perturbed by the presence of an audience. She died several days ago, but unlike the blistered corpse in Villia’s photo, she’s been embalmed, since the family had to wait for some of its members to travel back to the Philippines from overseas before holding the funeral. Her face looks strange. The skin is grayish brown and her lips are a disturbing purple-black color. Her eyes are tightly shut. But, unlike those dozing opposite her, she doesn’t look like she’s sleeping. She’s unmistakably dead.