Tears and Ice Cream

The husband of one of the Nu’Kem weavers died last Saturday of a heart attack. Doña Esperanza and her late husband Don Victor are from an aldea of Tactic called Pansinic. They have six children, the youngest of them is only six years old.

Doña Esperanza was one of the founding board members of Nu’Kem. Though she was no longer on the board during my time with the association, she served as the community organizer and leader for the weavers of Pansinic. She is an excellent weaver (all the Nu’Kem products with “Esperanza” in the title are named after her because she was the person who created the design), and she doesn’t mince words, a quality that I vastly enjoy about her but unfortunately will get one branded as enojada (angry) here.

Since Doña Esperanza was the representative of Pansinic whenever I would schedule a meeting in that community everyone would gather at her house. I made countless trips out to Pansinic to talk about order deadlines, association news, quality control, and new designs. Through my visits I became close with Doña Esperanza and her family, and it breaks my heart to know the pain they are all in now with the death of Don Victor.

I attended Don Victor’s visitation, funeral, and burial on Monday. It was a day that was both saddening and angering.

It is the custom in Guatemala for the family of the deceased to provide a lunch to all the mourners on the day of the funeral. I arrived at Doña Esperanza’s house at 10 in the morning with the intention of paying my respects, leaving, and then attending the funeral later in the afternoon. But Esperanza and her eldest daughter Lily (she was also a Nu’Kem weaver) were so grateful to see me, I decided to stay.

I ate my portion of kak’ik and tamalitos in the company of Beti, a Nu’Kem weaver from the aldea of Chijacorral. From our spot in the corner, we watched as mourners filed into the room with the casket to make place a monetary offering in the basket for the family and as the Mariachi band entertained the gathering.

At 2:30 in the afternoon everyone piled into micros and the backs of trucks to make the journey to the Catholic Church in the center of Tactic. The funeral started at 3:00 pm and lasted for an hour. Afterwards the hundreds of mourners followed the casket, the family, and the Mariachi band in a walking procession to the cemetery over a mile away. A few words were spoken at the cemetery and Don Victor’s casket was placed in a concrete mausoleum. I walked home in the rain at 5:30 pm.

Funerals always make me cry, but as I said before, this one also made me angry.

The only other funeral I had attended here in Guatemala was that of Mynor, but I have gotten “invites” to many others. I have turned all the offers down, because although I have known people who have died, I was not closely acquainted with any of them. But funerals here are more social than sad. It is less about mourning the death of a person and more about just being a part of an event.

To be sure there are a lot people who attend visitations and funerals who are there because of some relationship with the deceased or in support of the family, but many others go just for the free food and the amusement seemingly derived from watching a family in bereavement. Is the wife going to faint? How are the kids holding up? Does he look very distraught?

As the procession made its way to the cemetery, people in the group were taking pictures of the casket and family with their camera phones. In the cemetery, ice cream vendors were making a killing off the apparently famished mourners. People would buy a cone and then climb up on top of one of the nearby mausoleums to get a better view of the action. The man delivering the final words could barely be heard over the conversations emitting from the crowd. This is not my culture and I shouldn’t judge, but I was infuriated by the complete lack of respect for the deceased and his mourning family.

The priest’s sermon at the funeral was the other thing that angered me the most during the day. In it he said the crying over the death of a loved one only shows a lack of faith in God. What a horrible and fallacious thing to say at a funeral. Why make an already devastated family feel even worse by asserting their tears signify that they don’t have enough faith in God?

Crying is a natural response to such an emotionally painful experience. It has nothing to do with faith, or lack thereof it. The children were crying because they lost their father. Doña Esperanza was crying because she lost her husband. Others were crying because they lost their son or brother or friend or community member. I was crying at the sight of Doña Esperanza and her family in so much pain.

But now the tears have dried. The funeral spectacle is over. The mourners have eaten their ice cream cones and gone home, but unfortunately the grief felt by Doña Esperanza and her children won’t dissipate as quickly as the public’s interest in it. Now they have to live in the painful reality of life without a father and a husband.