My first Guatemalan Funeral

Late Saturday night I was woken up by the clanging of pots and pans and the rev of the blender. “What in the world is going on?” I thought to myself. Usually by 10pm everyone in the house is fast asleep. In my sleepy stupor, I decided not to give it much thought and go back to sleep. Sunday morning, while trying to take advantage of the hour of no rain, I ran into my host mom and asked her what was going on. “Don’t you know that Licena’s dad died last night!?” Apparently, in addition to being a Peace Corps volunteer, I am a mind reader.

The father of Licena, my host mom’s daughter-in-law, has been sick for a couple of months now and was diagnosed with cancer recently. He passed away around 10:30 Saturday night and they say he died peacefully, after an evening of chatting and heavy breathing, he decided that he wanted to sleep and died shortly thereafter.
The moment someone dies here, it’s time to work. You not only call family members to advise them of the death, but you begin the “velorio” wake. In order to prepare for the wake, you have to make MASSIVE amounts of food. My host family killed a cow, grinded 2 quintales of corn to make hundreds of tortillas, ordered five baskets of bread and countless pounds of vegetables. People from all over the community gather at the house to pay their respect and lots of people stay the entire night to mourn the death. So the morning after the family had to provide breakfast, then lunch, then dinner, then coffee with bread throughout the entire night (no one sleeps), then breakfast before the funeral. The coffin and flowers were arranged in the front room of the house for all to see the moment they walked into the house. Apparently the night before the burial, the body started to smell and everyone dashed to find incense and candles. I had wondered how they could have put formaldehyde in the body so quickly…answer is…they didn’t! (sorry is that TMI? My censor for that went out the window month three of this experience).

Another interesting thing I learned, aside from the insane amount of cooking and money spent on food for family but also for strangers just looking for a free meal, was another difference between Catholics and Evangelicals. Oh yes, the constant battle about who is the better Christian, pictures this: Jesus is in the middle of the playground and the Evangelical girl with pigtails yells “No I have accepted him into my heart not you!” and the Catholic girl turns to her good friend Virgin Mary and wonders what’s wrong with the pigtailed loud girl. Anyway, they were all going on about how amazing it was that he accepted Jesus into his heart before he died. This was shocking to me because everyone is either Catholic or Evangelical so how could it be that he was neither? I asked, “so he didn’t have a faith?” The women quickly replied “No, he was Catholic. Thank God that he accepted Jesus into his heart and is now with God in heaven!” For the Catholics reading this…surprised! Apparently, we’re going to hell because we haven’t accepted Jesus. No no, it doesn’t matter that we read the same bible, praise Jesus, nope only Evangelicals can get into heaven. Pretty sure Christianity was the umbrella that Catholicism was under but I guess I’m just a Catholic and wouldn’t know any better. Alright, I’ll step off my soap box now. It just gets under my skin sometimes.



So we went to the cemetery, the pastor gave his last prayer, and they placed the coffin into a tomb (above ground) and someone bricked the opening shut. I found myself getting emotional during these past days. At a funeral, you can’t help but wonder…who’s next? I thought of my family, of how far away I am from home, of my grandparents, of how heartbroken I would be if it were one of them instead. To properly deal with those thoughts, I had to distract myself with quotidian matters.
At the burial, my sitemate noted something I found particularly interesting, she commented on how people’s behaviors suddenly change when a family member dies; you realize how you took that person or life in general for granted. Family members who fought now get along; but the change is ephemeral. Sad isn’t it? Let’s try to remember the delicate nature of life and appreciate one another.