We had to cut sewing class short this week due to a death in the community. My counterpart's 94 year old grandfather and host father's father passed away, and the people of El Zarzal, as they do, dropped everything and came together to arrange two nights of
vela coffee and refreshments, a mass, and a funeral procession.
This was one of my first experiences going to all the parts of a death ceremony in El Salvador. While there were plenty of wakes and burials in El Cocalito, most of them were
not deaths by natural cause, and frankly, I am never in a rush to stay up all night, drinking sweet coffee and eating tamales with chicken feet inside. Especially for
manosos y ladrones.
As luck would have it, my host family isn't terribly keen on staying up all night either. So the next morning around 10 we walked down to the wake and had our coffee and bread. They looked into the casket, and I did not. Then we just sat there for awhile. It was only women at the time since the men tend to stay up all night, playing cards and having some nips from a bottle of guaro. The conversation centered around a few topics, death, Christ, and then the bonus of going to a vela in the morning, you have an excuse to leave the chores of the house to wait for a few hours, at least. There are tortillas to make, floors to sweep, and clothes to wash, so while reflecting on Dios el Poderoso and the fragility of life, you might as well take a load off, let someone bring you some sweet bread and have a good gab session with the other ladies while you're at it.
The next day was mass. Afterwards we left the church, crammed into a bunch of truckbeds and moved at a snail's pace behind the body along the curving highway to the cemetary of La Palma. We spent an hour getting there, 35 minutes by the gravesite, another 1.5 hours in disorden buying popcicles, chips and suckers and getting everyone back to the trucks and 30 minutes getting back to El Zarzal.
When we arrived back home, there was a small smudgy fire of pine boughs on the patio. You have to stand in the smoke and let it blow all over you, to remove any dead spirits that might have hitched a ride back on you from the cemetery.
I have to say though, if I were buried in that cemetary, I would've taken off ASAP, too, even if it meant clinging to a mourner passing by.
When I die, I want to go into the ground. I don't want to be put into a metal box, which is then slid into a cement box which is then blocked up by bricks and mortar. That's like putting banana peels and apple cores into a plastic garbage bag. It never gets back to where it should, which is the earth. I told my host brother this over our beans that night, and he said, yeah, but that's kind of a dumb idea. "Imaginese. If I were buried in the ground and woke up, how would I have the strenth to get out from under all that dirt? I couldn't. At least in one of those tombs, I could move around some, make some buya."
While passing all these cement graves, you notice little quirks. I remember in Mexico my study abroad teacher pointing out the remesa houses that had rebar still sticking up from the roof. For when there is enough money to build a second floor, he said. Here, the same applies for houses and graves. Many of these cement graves were prepped for upward constuction. I can only imagine a widower thinking, as he gives directions for the construction of his wife's grave: leave me 4 inch pegs, we're in a quake zone, and I want this to be bien hechito.
