A Funeral And A Strange Death

A Funeral

When a hearse passes down your road you ought to sit down, squat or bend a knee as one wishes not to be in the sights of the angel of death riding a black limousine through a depraved township.

Another Friday of returning corpses to whom we must show respect, otherwise your mother’s breast will fall into the pot it is said.

This day, a somber procession cruises down this muddy street, where death knocked a couple of nights ago never to leave without a prized soul awaiting relief from chronic pain.

As every street has a matriarch, or a number of such love stricken women who seem to wear midwives’ uniforms on their deepest of hearts, the departed was one remembered by many as a woman who sewed.

Her remains now stuffed in a bulgy casket, one wonders of the mammoth task those who washed her body must have undertaken.

MmaSontaha mended clothes and souls, yes; all rags most of us inherited from white children through our mothers’ thieveries having went between Sis Dee’s nimble fingers for resizing.

A myriad church uniforms she also sewed, from decorous Wesleyan Red and Whites to AME penguin attires for stout women of worship; ZCC greens and gold, for all ages and creeds in the vast tapestry of African spirituality as expressed in various colors.

In my morbid recollections of how swift death is, came another life affirming realization which stood to confirm that without dying, no-one would have proof of having lived.

It is said that she had grown rather horrendously fat, never having left her house for nearly three years, but still paddling on her SINGER sewing machine till the wee hours of dawn while her obesity grew to suffocate all her veins.

When news spread the secret tragedy that befell a family without sustenance, among stokvels and burial societies entrusted with money from her frail hands, rumor had it that there was no certainty about who will carry the cost of the funeral.

Distant relatives and children who drifted to greener pastures were still to be contacted, but as norm has it, it was upon the women of this decrepit street to summon their wits for the rescue of this dire situation.

There were disheartening, dried screams and frozen tears shed by those who looked after MmaSontaha before she was hospitalized, and their tales were as defeated as their remembrance of her final breath taken at Sybrand hospital.

A strange collision of memories rises like rabbles of living things in my forgetting mind, and on this day, these women were patching her last dignity with loins and blankets, candles lit in secret rooms were her box was to wait until its decent into the horrid oblivion of earth.

Young women hurrying about with tear soaked eyes preparing tea for parasitic pastors in faded blazers and bulky bibles, we also thinking fondly about this woman who clothed their illegitimate infants and naked brothers.

And as new hopes and new despairs can never divert attention from such dramatic events as MmaSontaha’s death, and as no loss deserves lesser expressions of affliction, this event however saw many relieved that she was no longer in pain.

 Hymns were chanted in shadows, in rooms masking silent cries and agonizing heaves; and tents were being erected on the street while silent mourners began streaming towards the vigil.

Smugness and falseness of tongues that triumphantly wagged were perturbed when the relatives of the deceased arrived in hordes, through whose eyes no defeat could be deciphered.

They were rather a proud people, not fazed by the depravation they suffered under death’s merciless hand, their energy contaminating even those easily brought to tears by even a mere sight of an old photograph.

And I felt like man who wanted to discover the origins of decay, when flesh has swum over the precipice of longevity towards a rapid discarding of lustful memory.

Her age lost in birth records of stars, this shedding of flesh that once harvested light and a wade into darker ponds of soul is the mystery of our pious fears, and ever since childhood, I have imagined a different scenario either that that of blond angels and golden streets.

I beget that death is a gate we cross without invitation, a time of no longer looking towards the sun, a seeming end to the existence of exactness and realness.

And yes, physical pain can be a chronic insult to the body and to empathize with the aggrieved, now I could understand their talk about having contemplated euthanasia as a final gift to their mother.

As is normal in this small township, traces of common ancestry linger among generations who never left for other opportune lands and you could hear many speaking about connections and matrimonial allegiances to the deceased, others even uttering scolding remarks about incestuous boys who impregnate their nieces.

 After sweltering cries to heaven spewed by a preacher with a tongue loosened by pain and fear, close relatives begin speaking in memoriam of this lady who helped many mothers build their first shacks when men were stolen for labor camps.

Gossip mongers hardly dampened the conviction of her children to give their mother a memorable funeral, and by the hour of the vigil’s dispersal many a folk from around the township were sharing fond memories brewed in delirium after loss.

Listening with mounting excitement to their stories, while standing among idle young men who offered the elderly seats, I realize how even the scepter of death could never crush the ever blossoming courage of downtrodden people, these poor black debris of freedom’s orphanage.

The troubled calm among listeners to a souring prayer made me realize how death also serves to make the divine seem plausible, for even the most ardent of atheists dozed under shut lids while a litany was hailed heavenward by a pastor drunk on faith.

His faith that he could pray for the deceased and resurrect her was an inexcusable insult, but the congregants conceded to remembering in fondness MmaSontaha’s pride and demeanor even during the most trying of times.

Before many left, a throng of women clad in shoals and blankets queue towards the room where the deceased rests guarded by her kin.

Brave women, who would huddle through the gnashing silence that will fill the room only disturbed by sobs of the night, drenched in thoughts of words hardly spoken to her when she was still alive.

With the unknowability of the after-life making it a perfect destination for those who see death as transition from a thorny world to the next, I pondered the last moments of a person suffocating, strangled by their own clotting blood in arteries and varicose veins.

Perhaps in their immense pain a euphoric serum is spread across their poisoned bodies, sedating all edge and nerve shattering collapse of internal organs and brains deranging themselves.

But I can never be certain because only death is witness to his own deeds and aftermaths thereof, and only in death would I know what dying feels like.

Does my accepting the act of dying with gleeful abandon ascertain my surrender to death?

Death; that elixir for those entering shadowy gates of heaven – an intoxicating pinch that awaken us from a phantom slumber in the warm holds of flesh.

Death; a starry eye leading souls through caves of resolute memory, frozen memories about themselves and others - a torch shedding mirages of un-chosen and unlived moments in time.

And when age does not become me, would death be a better absolution with all illusory safety of the body dissolving into space dust yet inevitably, tomorrow will be Saturn’s day and the hearse will loll down the sloppy road towards an ignoble cemetery.

Sermons will be recited by hearty pirates of scriptures, and last tears will fall on clumps of soil strewn by weary hands on the defeated MmaSontaha.

Prayers will monitor the soul’s rise towards new lands and in no time, when all have forgotten the brute nurture of death, township life will skip on hot coals of uncertainty with a reasonable melancholy that makes all fear graveyards just a little more intimately.

***

Gusts of impatient winds roar through dried streets on this dusty day and blobbing tents shaking on their pillars welcome congregant mourners in best black shades of funeral suits and dresses.

Attires sewn by her hand adorn worshiping ladies who own every Thursday, who on this day will pay their tribute to the seamstress of the clergy.

Priests struggle out of rackety vans with gagutum gowns clumped uneasily at the waist, bibles and verses for servicing death readied by pamphlets sold every Sunday during tenths’ collection time.

I will however not make the journey to gravesite as is our custom as men of our homestead, but my respects will be tailing the humming throng pacing behind a dark limousine towards the mud gates of heaven carved in the earth.

As a child, I attended numerous funerals, my grand-father’s included; and yet there still lingers some sour memories of that death which impacted my disdain for such displays of fictitious affection.

From an early age I was aware of hypocrisies that mar such events, with even the worst of enemies allowed a day of watching and ogling the defeated laying in a plywood coffin.

Concealed delights and mocking sympathies from siblings of the deceased told behind mobile lavatories or among sizzling pots and rancid smoke; we can all relate to such galleries of inner monstrosities that are laid bare during funerals.

But as an innocent child who felt robbed by mysterious carriers of loved ones towards stingy angels and devils, I realized how just as man never appreciates one in life, the pretense of appreciating a man in his death is a cunning slander.

It later occurred that in maturity when I asked some of my relatives to take me to my grandfather’s grave, not one of them could remember beside the old man who was herding nearby, who once knew grandfather and was in attendance on that fateful day.

It was to this incendiary memory that I believed that those who bury their dead do so out of a mere obstinate compulsion and opportunistic revenge for their untold malice; and as this crowd follows a corpse to Neverland, I wonder who are harboring sinister smiles beneath pious tears.

 And as the throng slinks past the corner house, as slight calm engulfs everything, children have stood up to hide from the hush that surrounds infinitesimal space left by the many souls who attended the funeral.

For as her life occurred as a spot in the one wide daub of existence, she was now on her sacred chariots towards continents in the sky, I hope.

And if there be life in the unseeable, then envying the dead is truly a pardonable appreciation of the doddering expanses of their unending journey and a glimpse at the secret of immortality.

A Strange Death

Among those whom wisdom distinguished from the common people, was one young man who grew to become a dexterous blacksmith and immaculate welder.

After years working as a boiler maker in one of the exploitative firms of rural Losberg, he was diagnosed with lung cancer.

Surgeries removed the rotten lung and doctors prescribed medication which proved toxic over the duration of his rations.

And one Saturday, as a hearse was departing for the gravesite carrying his deceased neighbor, he became very sick and an ambulance was called in the heart of a boiling summer’s day by his panic-stricken wife to take him for observation at a nearby hospital.

When people returned from the cemetery to dismaying news of the sudden emergency, many started mumbling about witchcraft, about how death always strikes twice and seldom thrice, where one death is like an ordinary shower that eventually becomes a cloudburst of misery.

Exhausted priests were summoned to say prayers for the sick, and while others queued for overcooked vegetables, interceding pleas were wailed and the departed beckoned to rebuke death’s hand reaching too close to home.

Cheap prophets squirmed into prestige and emolument by lazy worshippers also joined the prayer campaign, earnest and devoted falsifiers of truth with their sensitive prejudices, disregarding the gravity of the funeral rites over which they have just presided.

By late Sunday afternoon, reports came from the house of the disease stricken that he had committed suicide by jumping from the 7^th floor and falling on water geysers of the hospital.

The shock caused by the news made me wonder why such a death should be of lesser repute among black people, and after being buried for moments in profound meditation I realized that death by own volition is a concern mainly for those pent on descendents and bloodlines.

I could speculate about reasons for his suicide, but those would be mere assumptions without merit or proof.

But it is said that upon being given intravenous medication he went utterly berserk, and his collapsing vestiges of sanity rent through his body a dual persona, poles in conflict, which the jumper won.

To imagine how suicide holds a spectacular status among taboos of our superstitious folk, first as it dishonors the travails of one’s mother, then castrating progenitors of each bloodline and engendering a genetic mutiny, I could only think of his young wife’s dismay.

A glint lingers in The Kid’s eyes, as tells me the news and my hair stands on end as I began to wonder if this parable of three consecutive deaths on one streets meant some ferocious peril for me.

This man was a friend to every soul on this street, greeted every elder with a concern of a devout monk, and also spilt prophesies of bright futures to many a derelict youth who had lost hope to binges and cheap drugs.

And as with all that lose their supposed god through such untested misfortunes, I found it difficult to reconcile suicide as a brave act even though I doubted the existence of divine witnesses.

That there is a mortal resistance to everything unpreventable, that the sole cause of most profound pain is the negation of the evident, is a small truth I came to hold as dear and sacramental.

***

Then it occurs to me that like automatons led by a cloud of misinformation by day and a pillar of frightened prayers by night, mankind now seems in a frenzy of someone who yearns to stop death.

I wondered if our resistances would dissipate voluntarily in the face of a proven fact of death in the face of all oppressive dogmas assaulting our cosmic pilgrimage.

But I was left to disbelieve such a possibility, as I am afraid humanity will not acknowledge death as that which should be their primary pre-occupation in life.

Man will continue to invent phantasms that negate scientific logic and facts regarding death experiences, while meta-scientific truths about the existence of souls, no matter how un-divine, will be relegated to the realm of neo-mystical myths.

All internal distances of the soul’s journey prior and during its tenure in flesh, if viewed as sedimentary layers which have fossilized the most rigid substance of the soul’s memories, can be deciphered once one has exited the plane of the flesh.

And if dreams can be more than just wisps of the super-real experiences of the soul, why can’t the soul therefore be a protagonist more suited for climates of the dreamscape?

All illusionary vainglories of common suppositions about the soul’s immortality and its eternal bondage to a divine god can be faulted, because I would even argue that there is but a single soul that perpetually reincarnates itself through billions of species living on this planet.

Death may be admired as a vehicle to the after-life but it is not a trustworthy one as it is continually providing souls with new openings and closings to life’s various levels, and forcing oneself through one gate to the after-life does not mean cowardice or abandonment of orderly lore.

The remotest regions of the soul could possibly lie in those gulfs between living in flesh and living beyond flesh, or in those moments of death, where one is finally able to perceive their soul’s likeness which would be euphorically overwhelming.

But how sad, that the allegorical personage most responsible for the success of all spiritual religions – the soul, is shown the least amount of charity and the most consistent abuse by those who most unctuously preach the rules of altruism.

If the soul does not acquire stringent discipline through self-flagellation or fasting, it is suggested that that soul will dissipate and or lose its inner infernal purity, but I disagree.

I believe all experience, no matter how grueling or pleasurable, is capable of imparting great knowledge to a soul on a journey of self-discover.

I believe that if a soul becomes inextricably engaged in a brutally frank talk with itself about the repression of its humanity's carnal nature, all phony pretenses at piety in the course of an existence based on dog-eat-dog material pursuits would fall by the wayside.

Should we then think of the soul as an organism that needs no base, a gleam that will shatter, that needs nothing of finality?

When all unmannerly derisions of religion are hushed could we recapture man's mind and carnal desires as objects of celebration by a soul departed?

Should the soul be preoccupied with flattering one little god, or exhort his hearers to forsake their altars upon which had burned unheeded lights?

The soul is inextricably bound up with all the other aspects of being, among its many other transcendental functions, and should therefore aim at triumph over awful odds against the flesh.

A soul foaming with new expressions is only free once the coils of his little moral horizons relax their constrictions, and only then can he redesign all fruits of life’s unexpected oases into miracles, incredibilities of lives and of sanctified thoughts.

Dogmas that have solidified out of the vaporings of poisoned minds will henceforth never drag the soul under currents of intransigence.

And with regards to suicide, the sharpened horns of this dilemma, will the deceased be punished by militant angels with a darkness of night and a blackness of the unborn?

Or will they be celebrated as those who dared practice death while anticipating its untimely arrival?

***

As I stand now glaring at crowds and their unfocused priesthoods gathering for Friday evening vigil, choral cliques clap rhythms of praise while large automobiles cram the street jostling little children from their sunset games.

So enthralled are the women with head wraps and shawls around their waists, all momentarily devoid of sanctimonious platitudes as suicide warranted no sympathy.

The Kid and I had stood by as preparations were made to receive the corpse and the family was so overawed they hardly dared look into his face and most ran outside sobbing inconsolably, that I could only imagine what they had laid eyes upon.

Prayers were coughed up banishing infernal demons and wrong angels and profound feeling was aroused in me, who was contemplating his own mortality on a mirror of death.

The yard was saturated with an intense awareness of death, and later I wondered what specific preparations I should make for guiding my dying.

It is yet another dubiously chaotic day in Kokosi, with everyone else strangling their weary struts on dust for their rendezvous with cologne drenched mates and possible husbands to bury.

Teenage girls were flaunting their summer wear under a sky glistening with stars and flights to distant lands, thighs glossed in slim sweat paraded before mourners whose eyes could not be diverted from their sorrow.

Mumbling mother hissed their disgust and holy words slouched over diced vegetable and unkempt peels, while men sat in sour silences, eyes gasping for breath of young air fanning the night with virginal perfumes.

Fire crackers rang from another street and sky glittered in motley sacrilege while stereos continued their duels for airwaves in a nauseating cacophony of deliberately kitsch festive hits.

 The dead was to be buried in the morrow still, and life would collapse into its dreary dream and illusory factions of the living dead, and raucous debauchery was the order of yet another December’s evening in a place where rosters of the dead circulate through church meetings.

As the hymns begin solemnly under a red and white tent illuminated by a dizzy bulb crowded by moths and other insects, I slink back into my reverie and awe, clarity slowly gripping my gut, and absence of thoughts, linked inextricably with each other in one taste of rot.