From Here to Eternity

by Caitlin Doughty

  A mother unwrapped her son, who had died when he was only sixteen. At first, all that could be seen was a crooked pair of feet. Hands emerged, and seemed well enough preserved. Men on either side of the coffin pulled gently on the body, testing to see if they could lift it without the body crumbling. They managed to stand him vertical, and though his torso had been preserved, his face was skeletal, excepting his teeth and thick brown hair. His mother didn’t seem to mind. She was ecstatic to see her child, even for a moment, even in this state, and held his hand and touched his face.

  Nearby a son brushed the skin of his father, whose face was stained pink from his batik wrapping. “He was a good man,” he said. “He had eight children but he never beat us. I’m sad, but happy, because I can care for him as he did for me.”

  The Torajans talked directly to the corpses, narrating their next move: “Now I am removing you from the grave,” “I brought you cigarettes, I’m sorry I do not have more money,” “Your daughter and family have arrived from Makassar,” “Now I remove your coat.”

  At the grave by the river, the leader of the family thanked us for coming, and for bringing several boxes of cigarettes. He welcomed Paul to take pictures and me to ask questions. In return, he requested, “If you see any other outsiders to the village, do not tell them about this place, it is secret.”

  I flashed back to the boorish German woman at the funeral, cigarette hanging from her mouth, iPad shoved in people’s faces. I feared I had become that woman. Our desire to see something we had anticipated for months had driven us where we weren’t wanted.

  WE WENT BACK through the rice field, returning to the main road, to find that our host family had at last begun to remove and unwrap their dead. I recognized a man my age who worked as a graphic designer in Rantepao. He had arrived on his moped late the night before, climbing out of the wall as I slept. He pulled out a skeleton wrapped in gold fabric. “This is my brother, he died in a motorbike crash when he was seventeen.” He pointed to the wrapped body next to him. “That is my grandfather.”

  Down the hill from us, another family had laid out a picnic, complete with a gingham blanket, for their grandfather, who had died seven years earlier. This was his second appearance at a ma’nene’ ceremony and he was still in good shape, preservation-wise. His family brushed his face with a grass broom and flipped him over, peeling dried flesh from the back of his head. They stood him up for a family portrait, and the family gathered round, some stoic, some smiling. I was observing off to the side when a woman called me over to join the picture. I waved my hands, as if to say, “Nope, terrible idea,” but they insisted. Somewhere deep in Indonesia, there exists a picture of me with a Torajan family and a freshly cleaned mummy.

  I had heard of mummification occurring in very dry or very cold climates, but the lush, humid air of Indonesia hardly fell into that category. So how did the dead of this village become mummies? The answer depended on who you asked. Some claimed they would only mummify the body in the old way—pouring oils into the person’s mouth and throat, and spreading special tea leaves and tree barks on the skin. The tannins in the tea and bark bind with and shrink the proteins in the skin, making it stronger, stiffer, and more resistant to bacterial attack. The process is similar to how a taxidermist would preserve an animal hide (hence the word “tanning” in leather).

  The new trend in Torajan body mummification is none other than good ol’ embalmer’s formalin (a solution of formaldehyde, methyl alcohol, and water) injected into the body. One woman I spoke to did not want her family members to receive the more invasive injections, but said in a conspiratorial tone, “I know other people are doing it.”

  The villagers in this region of Toraja are amateur taxidermists of the human body. Given that the Torajans now use similar chemical formulas as North Americans to mummify their dead, I wondered why Westerners are so horrified at the practice. Perhaps it is not the extreme preservation that offends. Rather, it is that a Torajan body doesn’t sequester itself in a sealed casket, walled in a cement fortress underneath the earth, but instead dares to hang around among the living.**

  Confronted with the idea of keeping Mom in the house for seven years after her death, many Westerners picture the movie Psycho and its deranged hotel manager. The Torajan villagers preserve the corpses of their mothers; Norman Bates preserved the corpse of his mother. The villagers live with their bodies for many years; Norman lived with his mother’s body for many years. The villagers have conversations with their bodies as if they are alive; Norman had conversations with his mother’s body as if she were alive. But while these villagers spend an afternoon cleaning the graves, exuding a mundane normalcy, Norman Bates is the American Film Institute’s second scariest movie villain of all time, coming in behind Hannibal Lecter and ahead of Darth Vader. He didn’t win that sinister acclaim by murdering innocent hotel guests wearing his mother’s clothing; he won it because Westerners feel there is something profoundly creepy about interacting with the dead over a long period of time. (I’ve spoiled Psycho entirely—apologies.)

  Yesterday I had met the son of John Hans Tappi. Today I was going to meet John Hans himself. He was laid out, basking in the sun in plaid boxer shorts and a gold watch. His chest and abdominal cavity had been infused with formalin when he died, which explained why two years later his torso was flawlessly preserved, while his face had gone black and pockmarked, revealing bone below. When the family had to clean inside his boxers and brush around his mummified penis, they looked just as uncomfortable as you would expect. They made a self-deprecating joke and got the job done.

  Small children ran from mummy to mummy, inspecting and poking them before scampering away. One girl, about five years old, climbed up the side of a house-grave to join me on the edge of a roof, above the bustle below. The two of us sat in silence, bound by a kinship of awkwardness, of preferring to watch from above.

  Agus spotted me up there and yelled, “Look, makes me think about how I’m going to be like this. This is going to be me, eh?”

  Back at the house where we were staying, a four-year-old boy watched us eat bowls of rice. He popped his head up from behind a railing and squealed with delight when I made faces back. His mother told him to leave us alone, so he found a paintbrush. He moved through the courtyard and squatted next to a dried bamboo leaf on the ground. He began to brush it, fully concentrated, hitting all the crevices. If the tradition of the ma’nene’ continues, chances are he will grow up to do that to a body, perhaps one of the people that we met here in the village.

  THE NEXT MORNING John Hans Tappi had been redressed in new clothes, a button-up black jacket with gold buttons and navy slacks. He was making a move today, to a new house-grave down the road, light blue and topped with a white cross. The decoration on the grave was a cultural mix: traditional symbols of the buffalo, but also the sacred heart of the Virgin Mary, photos of Jesus praying, and a full rendering of the Last Supper.

  John Hans’s family propped him up and posed with him for one final picture in his new garb before placing him back in his coffin. They put his shiny black dress shoes next to his feet, and pulled blankets over him, tucking him in. Closing the lid, they polished the sides, and carried the coffin down the road on their shoulders, drumming and chanting as they went. That was the end of the excitement for John Hans, until three years later when he would emerge again.

  As I loaded the SUV, Agus remarked, “You know there is a body in that house?” He pointed to the Torajan house next door to the one we had been sleeping in, all of ten feet away. The family had been waiting to see how we’d react before telling us about a woman called Sanda, a seventy-year-old who had died two weeks earlier.

  “Do you want to see her?” Agus asked.

  I gave a slow nod: somehow, it made perfect sense that we had been snoozing corpse-adjacent our entire stay.

  “Hey, Paul,” I whispered up the ladder up to our sleeping quarters. “I think you want to get down here.”

  On Agus’s in
structions, we brought the remainder of our food to offer to Sanda—she would know we had brought it. We climbed into the back room, where Sanda lay on a dried bamboo mat. She was under a green plaid blanket, wearing an orange blouse and a pink scarf. Her purse was next to her, with food laid out. Her face was wrapped in cloths and had the rubbery texture I had seen so often in embalmed bodies.

  Sanda had been preserved with formalin, injected by a local specialist. The family couldn’t do the injections themselves because the chemical formula was “too spicy” for their eyes. As successful rice farmers, Sanda’s family did not have the time to tend to her body each day, as the old ways would require.

  Until she goes to her house-grave she will live with her family. They bring her food, tea, and offerings. She visits them in their dreams. It had only been two weeks since she passed through the soft, porous border with death. After the odor had dispersed, her family planned to sleep in the room with her.

  Agus—who, remember, slept with his dead grandfather for seven years as a child—shrugged. “For us, we are used to it, this kind of thing. This life and death.”

  BEFORE ARRIVING in Indonesia, I struggled to find descriptions of what rituals I would see in this area of Tana Toraja. Recent accounts—at least in English—are scarce. (Googling the ma’nene’ directs you to NeNe Leakes, the Real Housewife of Atlanta.)

  Pictures are rare as well: the best images I could find appeared in the British tabloid the Daily Mail. I don’t know where they got the pictures; they certainly didn’t send a correspondent. The online comment section fascinated me. “OMG, whatever happened to RIP?” said one commenter. “Seriously, this is sooooooo disrespectful,” added another.

  And indeed, had the commenter disinterred Aunt Sally from the local cemetery in Minnesota and driven her corpse around a suburban neighborhood in a golf cart, yes, that would be disrespectful. The commenter hadn’t grown up believing that familial relationships continue after the death of the body. For Torajans, hauling someone out of their grave years after their death is not only respectful (the most respectful thing they can do, in fact), but it provides a meaningful way to stay connected to their dead.

  Being a mortician means everyone asks me questions about their mother’s dead body. You have no idea how often I hear: “My mother died eleven years ago in upstate New York, she was embalmed and buried in the family plot, could you describe what she’d look like now?” The answer depends on too many factors: the weather, the soil, the casket, the chemicals; I can never give a good answer. But as I watched the Torajan families interact with their mummified mothers, I realized that they don’t need to inquire with a mortician about the state of their mother’s body. They know perfectly well what Mom is up to, even eleven years after her death. Seeing Mom again, even in this altered state, might be less frightening than the specters of the human imagination.

  ___________

  * When we did the math, I owed Paul $666 for the pig, the hotel, and Agus’s services as a guide. My 2015 tax return had a write-off for a $666 sacrificial pig.

  ** Which raises the question, why preserve the body so intensely if you’re not planning to keep it around, America?

  MEXICO

  MICHOACÁN

  A skeleton, wearing a black bowler hat and smoking a cigar, swooped down Avenida Juárez, his long bony arms waving madly. At fifteen feet tall, he towered above the teeming crowds. Trailing behind him, men and women cavorted and danced dressed as Calavera Catrina, the iconic dapper skeleton. A cloud of glitter shot out of a cannon as a phalanx of Aztec warriors twirled by on rollerblades. The crowd, tens of thousands strong, cheered and chanted.

  If you have seen the 2016 James Bond film Spectre, you will recognize this spectacle of flowers, skeletons, devils, and floats as Mexico City’s annual Días de los Muertos, or Days of the Dead, parade. In the opening scene of the film, Bond glides through the mêlée in a skeleton mask and tux and slips into a hotel with a masked woman.

  Except, here’s the trick. The Días de los Muertos parade did not inspire the James Bond film. The James Bond film inspired the parade. The Mexican government, afraid that people around the world would see the film and expect that the parade exists when it did not, recruited 1,200 volunteers and spent a year re-creating the four-hour pageant.

  To some, the parade was a crass commercialization of the very private, family-centered festival that is Días de los Muertos—the two days at the beginning of November when the dead are said to return to indulge in the pleasures of the living. To others, it was Días de los Muertos’s natural progression to a more secular, nationalistic holiday, boldly celebrating Mexico’s history in front of a worldwide audience.

  When the parade was over, we trudged through the sparkle carnage left by the glitter cannons. My companion was Sarah Chavez, the director of my nonprofit The Order of the Good Death. She pointed out the Días de los Muertos decorations that hung everywhere, in homes and businesses: calaveras and bright paper cutout skeletons.

  “Oh!” She had remembered something important. “I forgot to tell you, they sell pan de muerto at the Starbucks by our hotel!” Pan de muerto, or bread of the dead, is a roll baked with raised human bone formations and topped with sugar.

  The next day we would be traveling west to Michoacán, a more rural area where families have long celebrated Días de los Muertos. But here in Mexico City, there was a period in the early twentieth century when Días de los Muertos fell out of popular favor. By the 1950s, Mexicans in urban areas viewed celebrating the Days of the Dead as outmoded folklore, practiced by people at the outskirts of civilized society.

  In an intriguing twist, one of the main motivators in changing that perception was the southward creep of Halloween from the United States. In the early 1970s, writers and intellectuals came to view Halloween as, in the words of journalist María Luisa Mendoza, a “fiesta gringa” with “witches on a broom and pointy hats, cats, and pumpkins that are a pleasure to read about in detective books but are absolutely unconnected to us.” Mendoza wrote that her fellow Mexicans were ignoring the children who begged for pennies and cleaned car windshields just to survive, while in rich neighborhoods, “our bourgeoisie mimic the Texans and allow their children to go into others’ houses dressed ridiculously and to ask for alms, which they will receive.”

  During this time, as scholar Claudio Lomnitz wrote, the Days of the Dead “became a generalized marker of national identity” that stood “opposite of the Americanized celebration of Halloween.” Those who had once rejected the Días de los Muertos (or who lived in areas where it had never been practiced at all) came to see the celebration as very Mexican. Not only did Días de los Muertos return to major cities—looking at you, James Bond parade; the festival also came to represent the struggles of many disenfranchised political groups. These groups adopted Días de los Muertos to mourn for those kept from the public eye, including sex workers, indigenous and gay rights groups, and Mexicans who had died trying to cross the border to the U.S. In the last forty years, Días de los Muertos has come to represent popular culture, tourist culture, and protest culture throughout Mexico. And Mexico itself is viewed as a world leader in practicing engaged, public grief.

  “I GREW UP with elders that were self-hating Mexicans,” Sarah explained, as we sat in our hotel room in Michoacán the next day. “They were taught they had nothing to be proud of and everything to be ashamed of. They needed to assimilate. To be happy in America was to be as white as possible.”

  Sarah’s grandparents moved from Monterrey, Mexico, in the early twentieth century and settled in the East Los Angeles neighborhood known as Chavez Ravine. In 1950, the government sent letters to the 1,800 families of Chavez Ravine, mostly low income Mexican American farmers, informing them that they would have to sell their homes to make way for public housing. The displaced families were promised new schools and playgrounds and housing priority when the developments were finished. Instead, after removing the families and destroying a community, the city of
Los Angeles scrapped the public housing plan and partnered with a New York businessman to build Dodger Stadium. Supporters of the new stadium, including Ronald Reagan, called the critics “baseball haters.”

  Mexican Americans from Chavez Ravine were driven further east of Los Angeles by discriminatory housing practices. Sarah’s parents came of age in this environment of displacement. They had Sarah when they were both nineteen.

  “To this day, when my grandmother and aunts and uncles talk about Chavez Ravine, they are heartbroken. They miss it so, so much,” Sarah said.

  When Sarah was born, she was not allowed to learn Spanish. She had lighter skin, which made her the favorite grandchild. Her Mexicanness was confined to the home. Growing up in Los Angeles, she bounced between a distant mother, her Hollywood costumer father (who to this day identifies not as Mexican, but as ‘American Indian’), and her grandparents. Sarah grew comfortable being an American who happened to be Mexican, but felt little tangible connection to her family’s culture.

  In 2013, after ten years as a preschool and kindergarten teacher, Sarah fell in love with her partner Ruben* and the pair felt ready for a child of their own. She became pregnant. To Sarah, this child represented a chance “to be a real family, my family, a chosen family, something no one could take away from me.”

  This dream was not to be. Her son died when she was six months pregnant. The months that followed the death were a time of “nobody and nothing.” Sarah was estranged from her parents. She felt alone. There were days when she wanted to wander into the field of orange trees behind her house and disappear. Then there was the blame: Did I lift a heavy thing the wrong way? Did I eat the wrong thing? “The archetypal woman is as a bringer of life,” Sarah said, “but my body was a tomb.”