Making an Exit

by Sarah Murray

  Which is why my heart starts racing as, at one point, I think I can see her breathing. Siegrid says she noticed the same thing. Perhaps it was a breeze moving the blanket, she ventures. We both agree that it was uncanny. Still, no one else in Mrs. Batnag’s sitting room seems to have registered the fluttering movement. With the matter-of-fact calm of people waiting for a bus, family, friends, and neighbors have all gathered to watch over the dead woman through the night.

  * * *

  With such a high demand for ceremonial pigs, Sagada’s town motto, “We share what’s good,” comes into its own after a death in the village. Friends and neighbors from the barangay bring food for the bereaved family and assist with chores, such as planting or finishing the rice harvest. Those who’ve helped neighbors out can turn to them for assistance when they’re in need, particularly when it comes to pigs for slaughter. It’s all part of a system known as supon—you slaughter my pig, I’ll slaughter yours.

  The whole village shows up at the burial, too. Once the deceased has spent its allotted time on the “death chair,” the relatives—no doubt trying to ignore the smell of the rotting corpse—untie it and wrap it in the traditional blanket. Young men compress the body, breaking bones in the process, until it’s in a tight fetal position. Securing their bundle with cord, they set off through the barangay and down the mountain slope toward the caves.

  Everyone battles to take a turn handling the body, which is tossed roughly from one person to another along the way. This is partly a show of respect for the deceased. But there’s another reason friends and family all want their moment with the corpse—any blood or bodily fluids that fall onto the bearer are thought to bring extremely good luck, and anyone marked in this way refrains from washing for twenty-four hours afterward. With all the jostling to grab the parcel of human remains, these ceremonies have acquired the name “basketball funerals.”

  As the cortège approaches the cave, children run ahead, rattling wooden clappers or banging on tin cans to let the ancestors know someone else is coming to join them. Once at the cave, the unpacking begins. The men lower the body gently into the coffin (which arrived earlier), chattering loudly in the process. But they’re not discussing the weather or where best to place the coffin—they’re talking to the corpse, explaining what they’re doing in the way a nurse might to a patient. “We’ll lay you out,” they say. “You have a blanket so you’ll be warm. You’ll be comfortable now.”

  Once this communal way of death was taken for granted. Take the drinking at Irish wakes. This arose because refreshments were needed to keep people entertained, since it was thought the corpse should never be left alone. In traditional societies, the bereaved did not “move on,” go straight back to work, or “keep busy,” as we’re often encouraged to do. They abandoned the rice harvest. They kept all-night vigils. They sang songs. They drank. They gambled.

  In the West, community participation in death survives most vibrantly in the Jewish tradition of sitting shiva. This seven-day mourning ritual observed by the closest relatives is part of a long series of ceremonies leading up to the one-year anniversary of the death, when the headstone is placed on the grave. Jewish rituals, like others, mark different stages of grief, but shiva is considered the most important, giving mourners time to move from shock and intense emotion to a state in which they can return to normal life.

  J. Leonard Romm, a New York rabbi, compares it to a pinky ball (the rubber interior of a tennis ball). “When you squeeze one of those things, it contracts and when you let your fist go, the ball springs back,” he told me. “That’s like the Jewish ritual—you’re contracting and then gradually expanding back out.”

  The process starts immediately after the funeral when the family returns to the house and remains there for the seven days of shiva. The first meal after the funeral, which is prepared by friends and neighbors and consists of eggs and bread rolls—round objects that imply an endless circle, a reference to the continuity of life.

  Everything, from domestic arrangements to habits of the mourners emphasizes the fact that this is an intense period of grieving. First, mourners sit on low stools. “Sometimes the funeral home gives you these little corrugated boxes,” says Rabbi Romm. “In the old days they’d give you wooden benches and some places have folding chairs where the legs have been shortened. But when you’re mourning you feel low, so you sit lower than the people who’ve come to comfort you.”

  All mirrors in the house are covered. Some say this practice originates in an ancient fear that the soul might see the reflection of family members in the mirrors and steal them away, but other interpretations suggest that, like many shiva traditions, it’s a discouragement of vanity at a time of mourning. Moreover, Jewish tradition stipulates that prayers must not be said in front of mirrors, and during shiva mourners recite the kaddish, a beautiful prayer that is an affirmation of faith.

  As in so many traditions, clothing is important. Jews in mourning wear the kriah, a garment or piece of ribbon that’s torn by siblings, spouses, parents, or children at the funeral (a tradition rooted in early lamenting practices, where mourners would tear at their clothes). For bereaved parents, the kriah is worn over the left side of the body (over the heart), while others wear it on the right. Mourners wear no leather shoes. They’re prohibited from working or having sex and, beyond taking a shower a day, they’re not supposed to shave, wear makeup, or cut their hair.

  Most important, mourners are rarely left alone. For a start, the kaddish can only be recited in the presence of a minyan—a group of ten adult males (in less orthodox households, women can be included). “That’s another time you’ve got community coming to the house,” explains Rabbi Romm. “So during the week of shiva, there’s a lot of people coming over.”

  But mourners never play host to their visitors. Traditionally, arriving guests should not greet the family but wait for them to speak first. And during shiva, it’s visitors that bring food and supplies or help the family do the cooking. They may bring news of what’s happening in the outside world, but discussions often focus on the dead person, their life, achievements, and character. It’s a time for exchanging memories.

  “I know someone who described the process of sitting shiva by saying she felt as if she were wrapped in cotton wool,” says Diane, Rabbi Romm’s wife. “She said it was a point in her life where she felt very fragile and the community came and enveloped her in cotton wool. I thought that was a good image.”

  * * *

  What if there’s no one left to gather around your coffin all night or sit shiva in your memory? An alarming number of people die alone every year, with no relatives or friends to organize their funeral. Demographic shifts tell the story. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the proportion of households consisting of “one person living alone” rose from 17 percent in 1970 to 26 percent in 2005. That figure is rising. And since they produced far fewer children, baby boomers are more likely than the previous generation to end up alone in old age.

  Eric Klinenberg, a New York University sociology professor, has tracked the evidence of a society where more and more people are dying alone. In the research for his 2002 book Heat Wave, he found that, of the hundreds of people who died in the Chicago heat wave of July 1995, one hundred and seventy people initially went unclaimed by relatives or friends. Even after the Public Administrators Office conducted an extensive search program, about one-third of the cases were never resolved. Their personal possessions still sit in cardboard boxes at the County Building.

  There are places for the unclaimed dead. They’re called potter’s fields, a term used for the burial grounds of paupers, indigents, strangers, orphans, illegitimate children, unknown individuals, and those unwilling or unable to pay for a funeral. The term is thought to originate in the Bible, from a story in the book of Matthew telling of the thirty pieces of silver paid to Judas Iscariot for betraying Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. When a penitent Judas returns the money to the temple, the priests use i
t to purchase a plot of land, owned by a potter, which lies outside the walls of the city of Jerusalem. The plot is turned into a cemetery for foreigners.

  In the United States, the biggest potter’s field lies just east of New York City on Hart Island, a one-hundred-acre tract of land in the waters of the Long Island Sound. There the unclaimed dead are buried. Access to the island, which is owned by the city and run by the Department of Correction, is barred to all except those with relatives buried there. But, in the early 1990s, photographer Joel Sternfeld produced a series of images of the island. His photographs show a hauntingly lonely place, a scrubby grassland whose friendless monotony is broken only by abandoned buildings—a stable, a laundry, a butcher’s shop (where knives and saws still hang in boxes), and a warden’s house, shadows of the island’s former incarnations.

  Even when these buildings were occupied by the living, it was by the world’s unwanted. Hart Island has over the years been home to a lunatic asylum, a women’s charity hospital and workhouse for delinquent boys, and a prison. During the yellow fever epidemic of 1870, it was where the sick were quarantined. During the Cold War it was a base for Nike missiles. An attempt to build an amusement park on the island in the 1920s was abandoned.

  The city purchased the island in 1869, and that April the first civilian burial took place, of the unclaimed body of Louisa Van Sluke. Photographs from the 1890s by Jacob Riis show a desolate stretch of flat land into which large rectangular pits have been dug and simple pine coffins are being laid, one butting up against the other. Today, inmates from the prison on Riker’s Island build the coffins and bury the dead—about fifteen hundred adults and a thousand infants every year.

  Once a year, those buried on Hart Island receive a visit. Every May, a group affiliated with Saint Benedict’s Roman Catholic Church in the Bronx goes there on Ascension Thursday to pray for the dead. Occasionally, individuals make it to the island, since the Department of Correction permits a family to take a final trip to see a relative who’s been confirmed as being buried on the island. However, no grave sites can be visited and no maps of the graves exist. Like the dead of Sagada in their caves, only disturbed when another cadaver arrives, the individuals lying beneath the ground on Hart Island are left alone. But, unlike the Igorot ancestors, these individuals have no one to invoke their names at ceremonies. They remain, for the most part, forgotten.

  * * *

  After I die, chances are there won’t be an all-night vigil with groups of villagers singing tribal dirges and Anglican hymns for me. No pigs will be slaughtered at my death. No one will sit shiva in my name. Do I mind? Not really. Because to have a community funeral, you need a community—and as much as I’m drawn to Sagada’s quiet pastoral idyll and the collective participation in life’s important moments, I feel the limitations of being part of a close-knit society would outweigh the benefits. For me, the greatest of life’s pleasures is freedom and the chance to travel, to meet new people, to gaze across an unfamiliar metropolis, or stick my toe into an undiscovered ocean. And if that means making my own funeral arrangements, that’s a price I’m prepared to pay.

  On the other hand, funerals are also for those left behind. So if after I’m gone, my relatives and friends want to gather to drink, gamble, dance, or whatever, I won’t (unlike my father) raise any objections, even if I could. In any case, trying to prevent people from commemorating your death can prove a futile exercise. The attempt by Thomas Hardy, a confirmed atheist, to avoid a funeral didn’t work out too well—in the end, the nineteenth-century English novelist was given the equivalent of a state funeral in Westminster Abbey, with ten pallbearers, including the prime minister.

  Like Hardy, my father didn’t want any kind of gathering to take place after his death. Unlike Hardy, he got his way. But while I respected and understood his feelings, I felt it was important to do something. My father was a man who engaged and entertained so many people. I was sure they’d want to celebrate his life. My mother and sister agreed.

  So instead, we decided to send out a simple white card announcing his death and suggesting that, at 6 P.M. on January 15 (which would have been his eightieth birthday), everyone should raise a glass in his honor.

  Getting the wording on the card right wasn’t easy. Sam and I had a moment of horrified hilarity when we realized we’d left out the essential phrase “wherever you happen to be,” before the instructions to raise a glass. We quickly added that in, lest the card look too much like an invitation to cocktails and, come January 15, everyone pitched up at our house in what would have been the precise opposite of what Fa had wanted.

  Of course, it wouldn’t have been that easy. These days friends and family are dispersed more widely than ever. Yet, as humans, we’re hardwired to form communities and get together at significant moments. In our globalized world, what we need are new ways, metaphorically speaking, of lining up our pigs for slaughter.

  And perhaps we can do that virtually.

  Adam Cohen learned of the death of his college friend Luke Cole in a car accident in Africa on Facebook. “After Luke died, his Facebook page became an online gathering place for his hundreds of Facebook friends,” he wrote in a New York Times article. Friends exchanged updates on Luke’s Wall and included photographs, reminiscences, as well as a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke. In a report on the cremation ceremony in Uganda, explains Cohen, “the post said Luke was sent off with Madagascar chocolate, root beer and a small ‘environmental justice’ note tucked in his pocket.”

  Like Cohen’s friends, others are gathering online to announce a death or remember a life. Web site postings are starting to replace the newspaper death notice and, even better, allowing friends to send in messages, to post photographs, and to exchange memories. The funeral industry is stepping in with technology allowing live webcasts of funerals to be broadcast globally via high-speed Internet. Meanwhile, collective mourning is now possible on social networking sites such as MyDeathSpace.com, as well as through online organizations with names like Virtual Memorials, Remembered Forever, Tributes.com, and SadlyMissed.com.

  For my father, the snail-mail version seemed more appropriate. So soon after Christmas, we sent out the cards. I was still on my trip to India. Working on a travel writing assignment, I was comfortably lodged in the Imperial Hotel, a grand old Delhi institution with twenty-four king palms flanking its entrance and a turbaned Sikh at the door. On January 15, at 11:30 P.M. (6 P.M. Greenwich Mean Time), I made my way to the hotel’s Daniell’s Tavern. There, surrounded by the slightly soulless décor of a recent refurbishment, but in the company of a friendly barman, I toasted Fa with a glass of Indian red wine from the state of Maharashtra.

  Back in London, Kate was in the kitchen of her flat, a child in one arm and another on the way, breaking off briefly from stirring pureed vegetables to take a quick sip of wine. For both of us, the setting was entirely appropriate—Kate as the mother she had always longed to be, me out and about in the world again. Fa would have been amused and pleased.

  For my mother, the card was a wonderful thing. In the weeks after it went out, friends and relatives sent her letters recounting their favorite stories of my father. They were letters of condolence, but people also described where they’d been the moment they raised their glasses, some adding that for the occasion they’d opened a special bottle of wine. Rather like a postal version of sitting shiva, reading through the many letters helped Sam navigate her grief in the knowledge that, at 6 P.M. on January 15, an entire community—albeit a geographically dispersed one—had raised their glasses and celebrated my father’s life.

  7

  Foreign Fields

  FAR FROM HOME IN CALCUTTA

  If ever Tears deservedly were Shed

  If ever Grief was due to Virtue Dead

  Thy Merit Martha, and thy spotless Ways

  Claim Tears from all, for all allowed them praise.

  So runs the first stanza of the tombstone poem of twenty-three-year-old Martha Goodlad, who died on March
21, 1789. Martha’s grave sits among the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tombs of South Park Street Cemetery, a bucolic burial ground running wild with bougainvillea, oleanders, and other flowering shrubs. With its ancient trees, rampant greenery, and elegiac tomb inscriptions, South Park Street Cemetery is the most English of resting places. Except that it’s not in England—it’s in Calcutta, the chaotic capital of the state of West Bengal, part of Bharat Ganarajya, or the Republic of India, an independent nation once ruled by Martha’s compatriots.

  Among the emotional, social, legal, and familial problems death presents, the most immediate one is physical—what to do with the body. And with the “what” comes the question of “where”? If the family cemetery is nearby, then perhaps the answer is easy, for in most societies the desire to be buried at home is the strongest one. But what about those who die far from home? And for some—expatriates, immigrants, those who’ve married into another country or culture, or globetrotters like me—there’s a bigger question: where is home?

  No doubt Martha Goodlad thought of India as home. After all, when she was alive, Calcutta sat on British territory. Until the administration moved its headquarters to Delhi in 1911, the city was the dazzling capital of a colossal empire stretching from Canada to Australia, taking in everything from Caribbean islands to African savannahs. British bureaucrats governed more than a fifth of the planet’s population, and in Calcutta, the Brits erected mansions, hotels, cathedrals, banks, railway stations, and courthouses that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the grandest of London’s streets. The scale of these buildings says something about the state of mind of colonial planners—they were in India for good.

  A long-stay mentality governed the approach to death and burial, too. South Park Street Cemetery is filled with pyramids and obelisks, oversized Roman sarcophagi, Greek tombs, and Palladian mausoleums the size of small houses topped with all manner of cupolas, rotundas, and pediments. They were built to last for eternity—one in which the ground sheltering the bodies of the British dead would forever remain British soil.