Tales Untold at Funerals

Death is a truism. Funerals are a tradition, like marriage or christening ceremony. The gathering of people is part of the paraphernalia that goes in each of these traditions. There are moods that live through the rituals – some surreal, but mostly the stream of consciousness taking the sublime. You often know through death that this is what will happen to you to. You get to see a live show of what will happen when you are dead. The person dead is suddenly called not by the name – but in non-animate words – body, It, corpse, and yes off course in the singular tense. Grammar changes soon after life is transformed to no-life or death.

Taking my parents to a funeral of a close relative is a moment when truism struck. Death always happens to the other. You are still spared of it. Dad's cousin has lost his wife. This is one uncle I am fond of. I am not too fond of too many of my relatives - I maintain a quiet distance from most and abstain from personal attachments. I walk up to him and quietly make little enquires of how it all happened. There are a couple of my aunts whom I like (for there is no apparent reason why I should not otherwise). They too soon got into the conversation of narrating stories of the wonderful person the deceased was.

Narrations of events, stories of growing up and the bonding of the couple, the wife leaving her husband in this world, all inter-weave into one ‘narratology’. My uncle speaks of how wonderful his wife was (the past tense soon taking a syntactic change in death). Everyone around endorses this, often sighting that this nature had come to the deceased through her mother. It is said that when my uncles mother-in-law passed away, the cow that was attached to her had wept and not eaten for many days to come - such was her nature.

The conversation continues of the age of uncle’s wife. The theory that saves emotional outlet is to rationalize death: She died “fairly” young and saved the family a lot of pain, dying peacefully in her sleep. Treating her through the years, because of a bad kidney transplant was painful. The husband was always kind-hearted and despite his inability to cook, he had dutifully followed instructions: the amount of salt needed to be put into the stew, the methods to cut vegetables, and the number of cups of water needed to cook rice. He had learnt to scrub the utensils to its right shine and administer the medicines to her regularly.

What touched me most was that here was a husband who was trying to hold on to the person - that had suddenly turned to a memory through the stories- while she was right there. Laid on the floor, dressed in her wedding sari. Incense sticks letting out the smoke filling the room with a strong smell, conflated with muffled sobs of her children and loved ones.

Everything sounded grand and perfect and free of human failings. I like to hear the perfect stories of liberated individuals. Here was a woman who had not asked anything from her husband – not a house, not jewellery and silk saris, not anything. Therefore, he felt he needed to thank himself for such a marriage to a woman who was one of a kind. The pangs of seeing her go before him is something he needs to learn.

My aunts and my father though thought it was a wonderful way to die. To die in sleep, quietly, without a fuss. Then the theories of what could have been the last few moments of her death is discussed with greater intensity. Each ones impression of the last moments of death is interesting to hear. The dead person is not there to correct them of their fantastic tales of the probable.

The dutiful husband’s yearning for his lost wife, fit in well to my romanticism of marriage, love and death. To hear my uncle say that he was privileged to serve a wife, a kind hearted mother, sister and all the roles she took, one who was always giving and not asking for anything back, fit in well of the romantic and grandeur notion of an ideal marriage and a dutiful wife. My heart was touched hearing this. Uncle had done much for his wife, through the illness and beyond. Each of the mourners that thronged the house discussed this aspect in what were clearly different impressions of a grand tale of the dead.

My aunts who are widows, thought that it was a good death that my uncles wife should have got – she had died “muthaidi” - died such that she was ordained in her wedding saree and her mangalsutra was still on her. Unlike my aunts who had to remove all those symbols of a married woman. To be a widow meant removing the essence of life. It struck me that my aunts who retired as schoolteachers should speak like this. I wondered if they wished they had passed away before their husbands, or they just glorified the patriarchal narrative that is etched in their consciousness.

No matter what the tales are and how the story ends, no matter what cultural consciousness people live and die with, it does not matter how you die. What matters is how you have lived your life.

The stories told in a funeral are often one that is civil and polite. It struck me then (as it does with the rare funerals that I have been to) that it is better to live a life such that when you die, you do not have people saying “Thank god for Death that this person is gone!”


~~~~***~~~~