Posts
'
''
When my mother died a few years ago, she left behind clearly stated instructions as to what she wanted done. The woman who was to wash her and clothe her in her white funerary shroud was to be the mother of a man who we hired as a driver for her, on the occasions when he was needed. Al akraboon-a awla bil ma3roof, my mother likely thought. She gave no apparent thought, however, to the fact that the woman in question would have to get from Shobra El Kheima to Maadi in order to do that, and considering the other Islamic maxim that ikram el mayyet dafno, personal loyalty and burial haste would have to go head to head in pursuing these circumstantially contradictory wishes. In this case, personal loyalty trumped haste, and Umm Muhammad was indeed the woman to assist my sister and I in giving my mother her final preparation.
My mother’s other wishes were both few and pragmatic. She wanted to be buried next to her mother. She wanted no fuss made over her passing, and that included funerary arrangements. In fact, she did not want a funeral at all, and wanted a simple obituary written. She wanted very little space taken up in the paper, and seemed to want to leave this world with as little proof of her passage as possible. Here today, gone tomorrow, no exposition on the departure, nor any unnecessarily ostentatious displays of grief.
In the midst of “it” all, these last instructions were to pose complications and controversy for my siblings and I. Arab culture is not known for stoically bearing death, and we were a textbook example. Unable to interrupt this emotional demonstrativeness, we had to decide what to do while not in the rightest of minds. Muslims bury their dead quickly, and so the ticking of the clock was both rapid and deafening for all involved.
Let me interrupt my narrative here to explain why my mother’s wishes were controversial, and hope that the honesty of the explanation will forgive its crassness: That there would be an obituary was assumed. That it would be short was unheard of, except for families who had not the means for the per-letter fees. This did not include my own.
That there would be no funeral procession was also unheard of. Everyone got one, except for those who died unclaimed, having no family or none that cared. This did not include my mother.
Our camps were split. A couple of my siblings and I wished to respect her requests, and bury her in the pauperish style she’d requested. Others of my siblings felt that to let our mother go without pomp and circumstance would be a betrayal of her statures in our lives – that to give her what was culturally mandated, and to give her lots of it, was the one parting gift still possible to us (excluding prayer, of course). Thus do the dead leave us with remorse, and our desperate scrambling to do well by them thereafter.
The siblings on the side of the big funeral and the big obituary had my uncles on their side, who through gender and age superiority, trumped our own opposing desires. The big obituary ran, and the funeral arrangements were made.
My mother was buried next to her mother, and her obituary in the paper was one of the largest for that day. In it, that Dr. S_____ H______ K_____, daughter of F_____ A_____, sister of A____ K_____, M______ K_____, M_____ K_____, and M______ K_____, widow of M______ E________ and A____ B_____, mother to H______ E________, Y____ B_____, D___ E________, S_____ E________, and Mariam Bazeed had passed into the mercy of her Lord, and that the funeral would be held in so-and-so place at so-and-so time. Wa nas2alokom as-salah.
Our house was made open to those who wished to pay their respects. Regrettably, length of stay is equated in these situations with level of respect/love for the deceased, and so many came day after day after day, and sat hour after hour after hour, growing jittery with the black Turkish coffee that was continually served and continually drunk.
Conversation was strained, halting, more often than not providing further depression and next to no distraction from the newly created void that was the reason for gathering. One of these, when all who was present was family, concerned the rightness of what we’d done, whether to trump the wishes of the dead with the forcefulness and potency of the living in keeping with tradition was indeed the thing to do.
I asked why it all mattered. It seemed to me to be erring on the side of caution – even better, loyalty – to do as my mother had requested. “Who reads obituaries anyway?” I reasoned. Big or small, an obituary was a formality. I was sure that all who had come heard the news through the extended grapevine that transports both gossip and calamity so effectively through ever widening rings of family, friends, and acquaintances.
I was surprised at the chorus of voices that disagreed with me so strenuously. What did I mean, who read the obituaries? Why – everyone. I looked around, noticing that this “everyone” included only people in the room who were over fifty. Tante M___, my uncle’s wife, told me that she and her mother both read it every day. How else could one know that a friend or a distant relative had passed, if that someone was not close? Given that people are often buried the same day they pass, and that funerals occur rapidly thereafter, there was no time to be out of the obituary loop, and one needed all the notice one could get. So one read the obituaries, and one read them every single day.
I returned to silence then, having realized how superficially I knew this side of my culture. To pay one’s respects was a serious duty, and apparently if one was old enough to anticipate the need for that being frequent, one read the obituary.
I have since wondered at this phenomenon – the details and the technicalities of it all. I had so many questions, and no gentle way to ask them of those assembled who would know.
For example – there was the timing/scheduling issue. When do you begin reading the obituary? Is it a wake-up call kind of thing? Someone dies, you find out too late, and amend your behavior to avoid future oversights? Or is it preemptive for most people? Someone is diagnosed with a deadly disease, and you start their clock by picking up the newspaper thereafter for a quick scan? Or has it nothing to do with externalities, but is instead behavior triggered by an internal countdown, a deep-seated sense of time running slowly out for you yourself, and therefore most likely for your contemporaries. Is it the first adult tooth that detaches itself from your gums, signaling the beginning of an unstoppable downwards-facing spiral? The first liver spot, the first cataract? Or is it something even earlier: the first stiffening of the bones, the first wrinkles your naked eye can see, the first time you ache for no reason at all.
There is a possibility that I am over-reacting to much of this, as is my wont. There is a possibility that I am generalizing, as is also my wont. Finally, there is a possibility that I am dissecting behavior that does not warrant dissection, behavior that constitutes just one more thing people do.
And yet, consider this. Consider the qualitative difference that this behavior can impose on a life. The day you begin reading the obituary is the day you reckon, with any true understanding, with the mortality that surrounds us always, but that goes unnoticed or ignored in much of our lives. It is true that we all understand, at a young age, our inevitable demise….but this is a cerebral, hypothetical mortality, a “some day” mortality with little power to truly move us, let alone change our behavior. The smoker continues to smoke, and we do not say “I love you” any more frequently than we had been. We continue to sweat the small and the moderately-sized stuff, and we live as if we know that we will not die tomorrow, as if we can afford routine and boredom.
With the obituary, we invite death into mundane life, into the ravages of routine and habit, where it becomes just one more thing we do. W do this knowing that one day we will spill our tea, leap up from our chairs in a disbelief quickly replaced with memory and crushing, crushing loss, as we read the obituary. And despite all of this, the smoker continues to smoke, and Arabs do not say "I love you" any more often than anyone else, if at all. If reading lists and lists of the newly dead will not change us, what can?
'
My mother’s other wishes were both few and pragmatic. She wanted to be buried next to her mother. She wanted no fuss made over her passing, and that included funerary arrangements. In fact, she did not want a funeral at all, and wanted a simple obituary written. She wanted very little space taken up in the paper, and seemed to want to leave this world with as little proof of her passage as possible. Here today, gone tomorrow, no exposition on the departure, nor any unnecessarily ostentatious displays of grief.
In the midst of “it” all, these last instructions were to pose complications and controversy for my siblings and I. Arab culture is not known for stoically bearing death, and we were a textbook example. Unable to interrupt this emotional demonstrativeness, we had to decide what to do while not in the rightest of minds. Muslims bury their dead quickly, and so the ticking of the clock was both rapid and deafening for all involved.
Let me interrupt my narrative here to explain why my mother’s wishes were controversial, and hope that the honesty of the explanation will forgive its crassness: That there would be an obituary was assumed. That it would be short was unheard of, except for families who had not the means for the per-letter fees. This did not include my own.
That there would be no funeral procession was also unheard of. Everyone got one, except for those who died unclaimed, having no family or none that cared. This did not include my mother.
Our camps were split. A couple of my siblings and I wished to respect her requests, and bury her in the pauperish style she’d requested. Others of my siblings felt that to let our mother go without pomp and circumstance would be a betrayal of her statures in our lives – that to give her what was culturally mandated, and to give her lots of it, was the one parting gift still possible to us (excluding prayer, of course). Thus do the dead leave us with remorse, and our desperate scrambling to do well by them thereafter.
The siblings on the side of the big funeral and the big obituary had my uncles on their side, who through gender and age superiority, trumped our own opposing desires. The big obituary ran, and the funeral arrangements were made.
My mother was buried next to her mother, and her obituary in the paper was one of the largest for that day. In it, that Dr. S_____ H______ K_____, daughter of F_____ A_____, sister of A____ K_____, M______ K_____, M_____ K_____, and M______ K_____, widow of M______ E________ and A____ B_____, mother to H______ E________, Y____ B_____, D___ E________, S_____ E________, and Mariam Bazeed had passed into the mercy of her Lord, and that the funeral would be held in so-and-so place at so-and-so time. Wa nas2alokom as-salah.
Our house was made open to those who wished to pay their respects. Regrettably, length of stay is equated in these situations with level of respect/love for the deceased, and so many came day after day after day, and sat hour after hour after hour, growing jittery with the black Turkish coffee that was continually served and continually drunk.
Conversation was strained, halting, more often than not providing further depression and next to no distraction from the newly created void that was the reason for gathering. One of these, when all who was present was family, concerned the rightness of what we’d done, whether to trump the wishes of the dead with the forcefulness and potency of the living in keeping with tradition was indeed the thing to do.
I asked why it all mattered. It seemed to me to be erring on the side of caution – even better, loyalty – to do as my mother had requested. “Who reads obituaries anyway?” I reasoned. Big or small, an obituary was a formality. I was sure that all who had come heard the news through the extended grapevine that transports both gossip and calamity so effectively through ever widening rings of family, friends, and acquaintances.
I was surprised at the chorus of voices that disagreed with me so strenuously. What did I mean, who read the obituaries? Why – everyone. I looked around, noticing that this “everyone” included only people in the room who were over fifty. Tante M___, my uncle’s wife, told me that she and her mother both read it every day. How else could one know that a friend or a distant relative had passed, if that someone was not close? Given that people are often buried the same day they pass, and that funerals occur rapidly thereafter, there was no time to be out of the obituary loop, and one needed all the notice one could get. So one read the obituaries, and one read them every single day.
I returned to silence then, having realized how superficially I knew this side of my culture. To pay one’s respects was a serious duty, and apparently if one was old enough to anticipate the need for that being frequent, one read the obituary.
I have since wondered at this phenomenon – the details and the technicalities of it all. I had so many questions, and no gentle way to ask them of those assembled who would know.
For example – there was the timing/scheduling issue. When do you begin reading the obituary? Is it a wake-up call kind of thing? Someone dies, you find out too late, and amend your behavior to avoid future oversights? Or is it preemptive for most people? Someone is diagnosed with a deadly disease, and you start their clock by picking up the newspaper thereafter for a quick scan? Or has it nothing to do with externalities, but is instead behavior triggered by an internal countdown, a deep-seated sense of time running slowly out for you yourself, and therefore most likely for your contemporaries. Is it the first adult tooth that detaches itself from your gums, signaling the beginning of an unstoppable downwards-facing spiral? The first liver spot, the first cataract? Or is it something even earlier: the first stiffening of the bones, the first wrinkles your naked eye can see, the first time you ache for no reason at all.
There is a possibility that I am over-reacting to much of this, as is my wont. There is a possibility that I am generalizing, as is also my wont. Finally, there is a possibility that I am dissecting behavior that does not warrant dissection, behavior that constitutes just one more thing people do.
And yet, consider this. Consider the qualitative difference that this behavior can impose on a life. The day you begin reading the obituary is the day you reckon, with any true understanding, with the mortality that surrounds us always, but that goes unnoticed or ignored in much of our lives. It is true that we all understand, at a young age, our inevitable demise….but this is a cerebral, hypothetical mortality, a “some day” mortality with little power to truly move us, let alone change our behavior. The smoker continues to smoke, and we do not say “I love you” any more frequently than we had been. We continue to sweat the small and the moderately-sized stuff, and we live as if we know that we will not die tomorrow, as if we can afford routine and boredom.
With the obituary, we invite death into mundane life, into the ravages of routine and habit, where it becomes just one more thing we do. W do this knowing that one day we will spill our tea, leap up from our chairs in a disbelief quickly replaced with memory and crushing, crushing loss, as we read the obituary. And despite all of this, the smoker continues to smoke, and Arabs do not say "I love you" any more often than anyone else, if at all. If reading lists and lists of the newly dead will not change us, what can?
'
'
1 comments:
It rings true for many of us.
I recall as a child, watching my mother don a black dress on a bi-weekly basis, to attend the funeral of a distant relatives' passing (a third-cousin's father in-law, etc.), or an acquaintance from the sporting club, or a friend's uncle, etc. There seemed to be someone dying that we knew of, every other week. And my mom would casually explain to me who that person was (or more importantly, how they're related to us, or why we should care) on the way to dropping us at the club or to my grandfather's house to babysit us while she answered the culturally mandated call-of-duty to attend the funeral of someone she barely knew.
My grandmother was the information czar: she closely-examined the obituary page of the Ahram newspaper for an hour each morning, with her morning coffee in her garden, after checking her fortune for the day (in the zodiac sign section) and reading through Anis Mansour's column. She would then scan the obituary 2-page spread for any family name that was familiar. She would round the troups (my mother and her siblings) and attend funerals. To be clear, by funeral, I am referring to the memorial service, dubbed '3aza' where one visited the family of the deceased in their household to pay their respect. It remmains uncommon for anyone but the immediate family to take part in the burial rituals (where the deceased is lowered to the ground wrapped in cloth).
Interestingly, my grandfather, who read the obituary page just as religiously each morning, never took part in this recurring weekly pattern of socially-mandated visits. He would only attend funerals of immediate family members (uncles, aunts, etc.) and deaths of family members of close friends (which at age 90-something, were only a handful remaining), and thus was assigned baby-sitting duties while my grandmother and her daughters paid the due respect to the dead, citing his age as an excuse for his absence at such social functions.
My grandmother, given her side of the family's extensive social network since the Nassar days: all her siblings were part of the free officer movements, and all were subsequently assumed roles as governors, ambassadors and ministers in one Nassar/Sadat/Mubarak administration after the next. the result was that at age 80, at least one person of that extensive social network was passing away on a daily basis. I came to learn later in life, that to not attend a funeral for someone was tantamount to social suicide, as i observed how my mother kept track of who, of her distant relatives, friends and acquaintances did not pay her a visit when her own mother died. My mother, who is otherwise a kind, gentle, forgiving person (forgiving her own sister for not attending her wedding), would not let such thing slide when it came to death: anyone who did not attend my grandmother's funeral (even if it was a friend who hasn't spoken to my mother in years, and may not have read the obituary page) was banned from any future family social function, and my father was barred from ever mentioning their names again (such was the case of the couple who had introduced my parents to each other 30 years ago, and were now never to be mentioned by name again in the presence of my mother). In matters of death, oversight can have grave consequences on social standing. One simply could not afford to not read the obituary page.
Post a Comment