On Death and Dying

My neighbor died a few days ago. I’ve been to two other funerals in my town, both for people I’d never met. But this neighbor was actually someone I knew, and she was someone I would have like to have considered a friend. She was sick, always going to the doctor, too thin, and apparently had a blood disease. She was in her 30s.

My project partner came to my window to wake me up to tell me this neighbor had died. I was shocked and sad and went to see her mother. Her mother was a wreck. I’ve never been held so tight by a Dominican. She just sat, crying her daughter’s name, and then mine, and then her daughter’s… They bury the casket the day the person dies. The casket is wood with a window near the face. My neighbor looked exactly the same, but they’d bound a ribbon around her face, perhaps to hold her chin to her face.

I sat for a while in the house, listening to my neighbor cry and watching the reactions of people who came to visit her. A few hours later some snacks were given out and then we went to the town where we’d bury her.

I’d kept it all together until we got there. I didn’t break down, but it did finally reach me that my neighbor had died. It struck me when I watched the men in charge of moving her casket. One of the men was another neighbor, a gruff guy who carries himself like he’s a farmhand with somewhere important to go and then after work like he’s a guy with some serious rum to drink. Seeing him cry over the women who hardly had any visitors, but you could still tell everyone loved, was heartbreaking. I pictured this gruff guy going to school with her, back when they were younger; in my imagination they were the same age, though I don’t really know how old he is. Still, it pained me to look as he cried, openly in a culture where machismo rules. As I looked around at other people, it was the subtle ones that kept me thinking about how sad it really was, and how much it affected so many people.

You see, in this culture there tends to be either lots of acceptance or perhaps even encouragement for people (and particularly women) to be dramatic when someone dies. I’ve heard stories of women crying and screaming so dramatically that they pass out, and I saw people get so emotional that they had to be carried away, one because she collapsed and one because she couldn’t stop shaking. But, it wasn’t them that made me sad-it was all of the women whom I see on a daily basis whom I’ve never seem be anything but friendly and happy, who subtly reacted to the loss of their neighbor, a woman they’d known for their entire lives. But mostly it was the men.