The day after I arrived in Brazil was my mother-in-law’s funeral. She was laid in a casket, her body covered in flowers except for her face, which surfaced above. As she floated in blooms, her family and friends gathered around her and talked, remembering her together. Later, a priest offered a few minutes of funeral rites. After, to the sound of Chopin, her body was mechanically lowered under the chapel floor. She would be cremated.
Externally, my spouse and his siblings are handling the death of their mother very well. Internally, it is impossible to tell. Intermittently, memories bubble up and they become quiet or tearful. When this occurs, I do not know what to do except hold their hands and listen. I explain to them the feelings I had after my father died 15 years ago. The combined emotions of sadness, guilt, and relief are expected after the slow death of someone from disease. I try to normalize what they may be feeling by explaining my emotions as I went through grief over a decade ago.
The combined emotions of sadness, guilt, and relief are expected after the slow death of someone from disease.
In preparing this blog post, I searched “mourning rituals in Africa” on the Internet. Before doing so, I was well aware that Africa is a large continent with traditional religions, multiple languages and ethnic groups, Christianity, and Islam, all together. Even knowing this I hoped to find common themes surrounding death or mourning that would contrast with those events in Brazil or the USA.
Africa is geographically huge. It is 10,190 kilometers (6331 miles) from Cape Town to Cairo. To help in understanding this distance, that is farther than Paris to Bangkok, but slightly less than Paris to Honolulu. The road from Cape Town to Cairo crosses 10 countries. It is folly to think that a city dweller in South Africa would have the same death and mourning rituals as a villager in Burundi or an Egyptian living in Alexandria. My search for common themes was long and fruitless.
My mother-in-law’s funeral was the first time I had witnessed an “open casket” ceremony after death. Did seeing her body in the chapel provide her family better closure compared to a final good-bye to her body immediately after her death in the hospital? I do not know. After the service was concluded, Chopin began playing, and as her body was lowered under the chapel floor, tears came to my eyes. I would never see her again.
