“Untimely Death”

And wishes, had he any?
Just his sigh, accented,
Had been legible to me.
And was he confident until
Ill fluttered out in everlasting well?

 And if he spoke, what name was best,
What first,
What one broke off with
At the drowsiest?

Was he afraid, or tranquil?
Might he know
How conscious consciousness could grow,
Till love that was, and love too blest to be,
meet — and the junction be Eternity?     E. Dickinson

 My ESL class was abruptly interrupted in the middle of a substitution drill; a supervisor burst into my classroom and sombrely sent me to the office declaring to my students that he would be taking over for the day. This only happened in emergencies. Everyone in the office wore an empathetic grimace as they stared at the receiver on the Director’s desk. 

-“Your father is on the phone”. The secretary muttered. I hesitated for a minute before picking it up, but I had been hinted on an ongoing illness threatening the life of my cousin, so in a sense I was ready for this, or so I thought.

-“Piñón is dead”, he said – plainly and bluntly. Little did I know that with those three words, Pandora’s Box had been opened and my life would never be the same thereafter.

Píñón was my cousin’s pet name- pine nut, because when he was born, my mom mentioned that his skin was rosy like a pine nut. He was 25 years old, this was my first truly shocking experience with death. Older people died, that is natural, but death had penetrated my generation and the first hand knowledge of my vulnerability scared me terribly. He was only five years older than me. I was deeply disturbed and fell into a deep depression since I had been granted unsolicited acquaintance with my own mortality and was not prepared to deal with these feelings.

Piñón´s wake was held at his home. This was a new experience to me, in my short lifetime I had had my share of eclectic funerals, but this one was truly a cultural example. Holding a wake in a home is beyond eerie, never again have I walked through that door into the living room and not envisioned his casket there, in the middle of the room, right where the coffee table now rests, almost 30 years after.

The living room was filled with strangers, some ate tamales, others drank champurrado, they all ate or drank and kept silence. The house smelled like a FONDA, all scents of Mexican comfort food filled the air. I was appalled and confused. Who would think about eating at a time like this? It was as uncanny as a coroner eating a sandwich while performing an autopsy. Piñón had died of hepatitis and an open casket was denied. Those who wanted to say their last goodbyes to my cousin, leaned over a sealed glass above his face and spoke softly or just wept, my dad and his brothers even kissed the glass. I was physically unable to get close to the casket, I was horrified, petrified.

Food kept coming in the kitchen, every mourner brought something to eat in big canisters which smelled delicious… deliciously nauseating, due to the circumstances. My aunt Conchita, Piñon´s mom, stood diligently by the stove stirring the hot chocolate, and making pots of traditional coffee with cinnamon and molasses.  My uncle had died the year before and his ashes still rested inside Piñon´s closet in the bedroom he shared with his brother Pepe.

-“Your uncle´s ashes have not been disposed of yet and now Piñón… what am I going to do now? How many loved ones must I lose before I depart?” – She mumbled desolately as her tears rolled down her cheeks and into the big pot of chocolate which she kept stirring assiduously. This was an eerie piece of information I would’ve rather not known, but for some unknown reason, I was peculiarly mesmerized by this death. I needed to know more to make it factual. I had to see, know, smell, taste and feel it all to make it real. I followed Pepe to his bedroom, asked him to show me Piñon´s closet; my uncle’s ashes, more specifically. There was no urn, just a small cardboard box and inside, a clear plastic bag lodging those ashes. I was disgusted, surely MY ashes deserved a nice urn, why not his?  My father walked in and with no second thought to his actions, grabbed the box, put his hand inside the bag and scooped out some ashes.

-“Look, they did a horrible job, lots of small bones, it should be all ashes, hopefully the oven will be working well when Piñón goes in”, he said unsympathetically and left the room.

As he walked away, I saw how he wiped his hand back and forth on his shirt to clean any residue of ashes. I was shocked and disgusted, my stomach turned and I ended up in the bathroom. Lenny was right, I cannot handle death.  I excused myself with my aunt and went home to cry my eyes out, this was so unexpected, so surprising, so mind bobbling. Next day I accompanied my family to the crematorium. This was my biggest mistake ever.  A crematorium in a third world country – that is, the first public crematorium in the city in the late seventies, was the finest example of barbarity. Funeral parties lined up awaiting their turn to surrender the casket of their loved one to some unimpressionable youngsters who snacked, smoked and carried on with their menial conversation aloud, interrupting the tragedy that surrounded the rest. The crematorium was adapted in a building that used to be a paper factory. The entrance to the smouldering oven was in full view of all of us. As we approached the “entrance”, we could see other caskets being opened, the bodies taken out, stripped in full view of the mourners and thrown inside the yellowish flames inside. Two guys were in charge of this while a third one swept ashes from the bottom of the oven towards him, he then picked them from the floor and put them on an oversized industrial metal dust bin. You could see half skulls, sternums and femurs still not fully disintegrated inside that oven. Whose bones were those? He lined up the dust bins and wrote a last name on a piece of paper by the bin, this is how he knew whose ashes were whose once they cooled down enough to be placed in plastic bags. The radio played folk music, music proper to parties from those belonging to a lower social class. We all had to listen to their distasteful music. And while this was carried on the ground, the air filled with the stench of burning human flesh and the skies wore a black dusty ribbon that spread where the winds desired to take it. The old industrial pipe that once polluted the city with residues of the makings of paper, now spewed particles of human flesh unto the land that once saw all those people being born.

The line moved slowly. Finally, It was our turn. I stood assiduously next to my cousin’s casket awaiting for him to meet his fate. As the casket was being opened, my father pulled me aside and held me tightly by the arms, hurriedly leading me away from this scenario. I kept turning around, I needed to see. For some unknown morbid and obscene reason, I needed to see, to smell, to touch, to hear… to make it real. This was such a surreal situation, I was stripped of all emotions, I was numb, it was like being out of my body observing the holocaust. My father kept hauling me away from the pandemonium, but I was drawn to it like a magnet, I felt I needed to be there. We both sat on the grass by the parking lot; I could only distinguish the big pipe at the distance. The stench was distinctive. That smoke carried my cousin’s remains, that ribbon on the sky wore his name, I knew that smell was of his flesh, I knew that his ashes would accompany those already scattered on the grounds around us, ashes that lost momentum when the winds died down and lied flat on the surroundings.

-“Goodbye Piñón, sorry I did not get to know you better, sorry you were shun because of your disabilities and inadequacies. Sorry that you lived in a time when not many opportunities existed for you. Thank you for loving my father as your own, and waiting for him to be by your side, to die in peace. Goodbye.” – I garbled to myself while looking at the sky.

An hour later my father approached the “entrance” and picked up my cousin´s ashes. The kid in charge emptied the contents of the dustbin that carried his name inside a plastic bag, and gave my father a box to put them in. My dad closed the box and we all went home with a warm box filled with a mixture of ashes of many people before him whose bones had not yet been disintegrated by the time another body was thrown in. I looked at the people behind us, they too would carry my cousin’s ashes in their boxes, mixed with those of their loved one.

-“What is the sense of all this?” – I thought to myself. –“Whose ashes will we be spreading anyway? What is the sense of all this?”

For the first time in my life, I knew death was forever and it crept unexpectedly at any age. I felt threatened. I felt lost. I went home and hugged my kids tightly and forever.

I could not let go of them, ever, never.

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