“Hey, Paul,” I whispered up the ladder up to our sleeping quarters. “I think you want to get down here.”
On Agus’s instructions, we brought the remainder of our food to offer to Sanda—she would know we had brought it. We climbed into the back room, where Sanda lay on a dried bamboo mat. She was under a green plaid blanket, wearing an orange blouse and a pink scarf. Her purse was next to her, with food laid out. Her face was wrapped in cloths and had the rubbery texture I had seen so often in embalmed bodies.
Sanda had been preserved with formalin, injected by a local specialist. The family couldn’t do the injections themselves because the chemical formula was “too spicy” for their eyes. As successful rice farmers, Sanda’s family did not have the time to tend to her body each day, as the old ways would require.
Until she goes to her house-grave she will live with her family. They bring her food, tea, and offerings. She visits them in their dreams. It had only been two weeks since she passed through the soft, porous border with death. After the odor had dispersed, her family planned to sleep in the room with her.
Agus—who, remember, slept with his dead grandfather for seven years as a child—shrugged. “For us, we are used to it, this kind of thing. This life and death.”
BEFORE ARRIVING in Indonesia, I struggled to find descriptions of what rituals I would see in this area of Tana Toraja. Recent accounts—at least in English—are scarce. (Googling the ma’nene’ directs you to NeNe Leakes, the Real Housewife of Atlanta.)
Pictures are rare as well: the best images I could find appeared in the British tabloid the Daily Mail. I don’t know where they got the pictures; they certainly didn’t send a correspondent. The online comment section fascinated me. “OMG, whatever happened to RIP?” said one commenter. “Seriously, this is sooooooo disrespectful,” added another.
And indeed, had the commenter disinterred Aunt Sally from the local cemetery in Minnesota and driven her corpse around a suburban neighborhood in a golf cart, yes, that would be disrespectful. The commenter hadn’t grown up believing that familial relationships continue after the death of the body. For Torajans, hauling someone out of their grave years after their death is not only respectful (the most respectful thing they can do, in fact), but it provides a meaningful way to stay connected to their dead.
Being a mortician means everyone asks me questions about their mother’s dead body. You have no idea how often I hear: “My mother died eleven years ago in upstate New York, she was embalmed and buried in the family plot, could you describe what she’d look like now?” The answer depends on too many factors: the weather, the soil, the casket, the chemicals; I can never give a good answer. But as I watched the Torajan families interact with their mummified mothers, I realized that they don’t need to inquire with a mortician about the state of their mother’s body. They know perfectly well what Mom is up to, even eleven years after her death. Seeing Mom again, even in this altered state, might be less frightening than the specters of the human imagination.
___________
* When we did the math, I owed Paul $666 for the pig, the hotel, and Agus’s services as a guide. My 2015 tax return had a write-off for a $666 sacrificial pig.
** Which raises the question, why preserve the body so intensely if you’re not planning to keep it around, America?
MEXICO
MICHOACáN
A skeleton, wearing a black bowler hat and smoking a cigar, swooped down Avenida Juárez, his long bony arms waving madly. At fifteen feet tall, he towered above the teeming crowds. Trailing behind him, men and women cavorted and danced dressed as Calavera Catrina, the iconic dapper skeleton. A cloud of glitter shot out of a cannon as a phalanx of Aztec warriors twirled by on rollerblades. The crowd, tens of thousands strong, cheered and chanted.
If you have seen the 2016 James Bond film Spectre, you will recognize this spectacle of flowers, skeletons, devils, and floats as Mexico City’s annual Días de los Muertos, or Days of the Dead, parade. In the opening scene of the film, Bond glides through the mêlée in a skeleton mask and tux and slips into a hotel with a masked woman.
Except, here’s the trick. The Días de los Muertos parade did not inspire the James Bond film. The James Bond film inspired the parade. The Mexican government, afraid that people around the world would see the film and expect that the parade exists when it did not, recruited 1,200 volunteers and spent a year re-creating the four-hour pageant.
To some, the parade was a crass commercialization of the very private, family-centered festival that is Días de los Muertos—the two days at the beginning of November when the dead are said to return to indulge in the pleasures of the living. To others, it was Días de los Muertos’s natural progression to a more secular, nationalistic holiday, boldly celebrating Mexico’s history in front of a worldwide audience.
When the parade was over, we trudged through the sparkle carnage left by the glitter cannons. My companion was Sarah Chavez, the director of my nonprofit The Order of the Good Death. She pointed out the Días de los Muertos decorations that hung everywhere, in homes and businesses: calaveras and bright paper cutout skeletons.
“Oh!” She had remembered something important. “I forgot to tell you, they sell pan de muerto at the Starbucks by our hotel!” Pan de muerto, or bread of the dead, is a roll baked with raised human bone formations and topped with sugar.
The next day we would be traveling west to Michoacán, a more rural area where families have long celebrated Días de los Muertos. But here in Mexico City, there was a period in the early twentieth century when Días de los Muertos fell out of popular favor. By the 1950s, Mexicans in urban areas viewed celebrating the Days of the Dead as outmoded folklore, practiced by people at the outskirts of civilized society.