Brain Aneurysms, Rainstorms, and A Life Well Lived

In my last post, I left you hanging at the beginning. I'm ready to talk now because I think I finally have things sorted out in my mind. So I'll probably spent the next few days writing this post and sorting my thoughts into words...

One of the greatest people I have had the opportunity to work with here died suddenly of a brain aneurysm on Thursday. Pak Gono was 38, and he left behind a wife and a young daughter.

Every single time I go to a funeral in Indonesia, I come home feeling very upset, and not only for the obvious reason that someone I know just died. There's more to it than that. It wasn't until I went to Pak Gono's funeral on Friday that I finally realized why. Sometimes I'm a slow learner...

The kind of death that I grew up with is not the same kind of death that I find here. Yeah, death is death. It always equals a loss of life. But death in America is somehow... softened. We make it prettier than it actually is. Because things that look pretty maybe aren't so difficult to face. 

When someone dies in America, a stranger comes and takes the body away, and a medical professional generally performs an autopsy or, at the very least, states the cause of death so that the family can have the closure of knowing exactly what happened. Then we pay professionals to dress and preserve the body and to make the deceased look as healthy/happy/peaceful/lifelike as possible, because that's how we want to remember them. And families have three or four days to grieve privately before they have to face the funeral and the onslaught of family, friends, neighbors, and near strangers coming to pay their respects. We put our dead in fancy boxes that shelter them for as long as possible from the elements, because there is some solace in knowing that we are protecting them, even in death. We use fancy cars to transport them from the funeral to the graveyard, and we say some comforting final words there before we leave. Someone else lowers the casket and buries the body safely, deep below ground and puts up the expensive headstone that we picked out. We don't have to hear the thud of the dirt hitting the casket. It might be too much finality for us. We have an entire multi-BILLION dollar industry built to soften the blow of death.

When someone dies in Indonesia, the family washes and dresses the body themselves. No makeup or preservation tool of any kind is used. No doctor is consulted, no autopsy is performed because - let's face it - dead is dead, no matter what caused it. If the family can afford it, a small wooden box is ordered for the body. If not (or if the family is Muslim), the body is just wrapped in strips of cloth. It is laid out somewhere prominently in the home for mourners to see - often on the kitchen table or on top of sawhorses in the front room. The family stands around the body, greeting and receiving condolences from those who come. Then, the family often undresses the body (dead people don't need pants) before nailing the lid on the box. Men from the neighborhood carry the box to the closest graveyard where they unceremoniously drop it into a hand-dug hole. Then the family stands around and watches the hole get filled back in. Sometimes the family themselves shovel the dirt back into the hole. The headstone - a piece of wood or a block of cement with the deceased's name carved into it - is stuck into the ground somewhere in the fresh mound of dirt. And all of this happens within 24 hours of death. It has to, both for religious reasons and also because bodies have a tendency to decompose quickly in this heat.

It is hard for me to comprehend why one of my friends wears the same pair of shoes his grandfather wore at his own funeral. Or how my other friend carried her mother's freshly dead body to the backyard and used a hose to wash her off. Or how yet another friend can even eat off her kitchen table anymore after her mother's body laid there for an entire day. I don't understand why mourners would want to look at a dead body that hasn't been preserved in any way - the jaw sometimes hangs slack, and weird fluids sometimes bubble out of the nose, and it ALWAYS smells - who wants to remember someone that way?! I have a hard time wrapping my mind around these things because I am so used to the way Americans do death. It is prettier. It is gentler. It is easier.

Pak Gono's funeral was the hardest one I have ever been to. His house has two doors - a front door and a side door. Usually mourners go in the front door, but it seemed like everyone was going through the side door, so the group of people from school that I had come with got in line. I hesitated because I didn't want to see his body. That is the worst part of every funeral for me. I hate looking at the body, I hate that that is the last view I have of them. We didn't know yet what had killed Pak Gono - we only knew that he had been found dead in his room by his nephew after complaining of  a headache and going to lay down - so I didn't even know what condition to expect his body to be in. Even as I hesitated, one of my friends grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the line and told me not to worry because the body wasn't inside. I was confused, but knowing that I wouldn't have to see the body made it easier to go in. 

Until I got in. I really think that Ibu Erna, Pak Gono's wife, was still in shock. It hadn't yet been 24 hours since she got the call that her husband had died, and he'd been in Jakarta at the time, so she had only seen his body for the first time 3 hours before people began arriving for the funeral. She was sitting on the kitchen floor leaning against a wall in her pajamas, sobbing into a dish towel. I can count on one hand the number of times in my life I have seen someone so broken down. I wanted to leave. I wanted to scream at everyone else in that room to leave. To let her mourn in peace. To hold her daughter. To give her time to wrestle with this and to say her goodbyes without a room full of people watching her. But that's not the way things work in Indonesia. 

I don't know if it was because she was sitting on the floor or because of some other religious/cultural custom that we all dropped to our knees as we entered the room. We literally crawled across the tile floor to her to shake her hand, give her a hug, and whisper meaningless condolences into her ear before crawling back out to sit in the street for the remainder of the funeral. As I exited the side door and passed by the front door, I noticed several people I knew standing there, so I went over to say hello. Some other men were ripping up strips of fabric and carrying them in through the front door. I asked what was going on, and Pak Jono, our school driver, told me that they were going in to wrap the body up. I asked why they had the body in a separate room, and Pak Jono told me very matter-of-factly, "Because he's still bleeding out his nose and mouth".

I wish I didn't know that. Because even though I never saw his body, I still see the blood in my mind every time I think about him. That information though is what makes us think he probably had a brain aneurysm. And with that, I am choosing to believe that he died peacefully and painlessly in his sleep.

As I was talking to Pak Jono, some men carrying an odd looking contraption came, and I moved out of their way so that they could get in the front door. They were carrying a piece of wood about 6 feet long and 2 feet wide with 4 or 5 bands of metal arched up over it. I didn't realize it right away, but that was the coffin. The next part happened so fast, it kind of seems like it didn't really happen at all. But as the men carried the coffin into the front room, I was walking away from the house and felt jostled from behind. I turned around to find several men carrying a table OUT of the house - they had accidentally bumped a corner of it into me. I didn't even realize what the table was for at first, but out of the corner of my eye, I noticed something shiny on it. I glanced at it. It was a blood slick. It was the table Pak Gono had been laid on, and his blood was on it. The blood from his head. The blood that was still coming out. I thought I was going to throw up. I don't know how long I stood there, staring at that blood. It can't have been long. I must have gone pale or something, because suddenly, a co-worker materialized by my side and told me to close my eyes and follow her.

I did, and she led me over to some chairs set up under an awning in the street. Shortly after, several men carried the body outside and the funeral began. The wrapped body had been placed on the piece of wood, and a tapestry of sorts had been laid over the metal bands. A priest began speaking in Arabic as several people placed flowers on top of the coffin.

Right after the ceremonial part of the funeral started, the skies opened up and began to POUR rain. Everyone tried to cram under one of the three canopies set up in the yard and in the street, but it still wasn't enough to cover everyone. As we all huddled there, attempting to stay dry, I looked around for the first time and realized how many people had come. Hundreds. Some simply stood in the pouring rain because there was no place dry to go.

I've always thought of a full house at a funeral as a sign of a life well lived. And Pak Gono's was. He was always willing to lend a hand any time someone needed help with anything. He taught me a lot of the Indonesian and Javanese words that I know. He ALWAYS made me laugh. One of my favorite memories of him is how he would come to school in the morning singing and dancing ridiculously just to make everyone smile. It worked every time. He painted my classroom for me last summer. The color looked great on paper when I picked it out, but I've always kind of hated it on my actual wall. But now I know I can never re-paint it.

There are no words to express how much Pak Gono will be missed in our community. The chair that I'm sitting on is wet with tears even as I write this.

I think I could live here the rest of my life and still never get used to the rawness of Indonesian funerals. But I know that I'll never stop going to them. It doesn't matter how nauseous I feel or how much I hate dead bodies or how hard it rains - I'm learning more and more that even in all its harshness, I NEED that time to honor the dead, to show respect to the living, and to allow my heart to say goodbye. I'm slowly learning to accept the way Indonesians do death.


(** All pictures taken from Facebook**)