She Was Still Warm When She Went Into the Ground

Many of the kids at NPH are orphans, but most are not. They are here on order of a judge who deems their family situation to be dangerous. Some were abused by parents or other adults. Some arrived malnourished. Many have parents who are alcoholics. A portion of the population of kids here will remain intellectually stunted due to being born with fetal alcohol syndrome, caused by mothers who imbibed while pregnant. Some are here because their parents are in jail. A few kids come from healthy families, but their parents are simply too poor to care for them and so have asked us to raise their children (we recently accepted a family of six, including an 18-month-old). Relatives have the opportunity to visit one Friday afternoon each month, with a longer all-day Sunday visit once every three months. Also, during school vacations (especially during the month of December) many of the kids leave us to stay with parents or other relatives.

Last week four of our children who still had their mother suddenly became orphans. The youngest is four; the oldest seventeen. I do not know the specifics of their mother’s physical or mental health situation, but understand she worked as a street vendor in the capitol. She had been here to visit on Sunday, and died suddenly early Wednesday morning, aged 34. She did not have a fixed dwelling, and her relations were limited to her kids (whose father died a year ago), two brothers and a mother.

Since none of her survivors had any financial resources, NPH arranged the transport of her body from the hospital and the funeral/burial. Her kids were told about their mother’s death just before leaving for church, where they went to wait for the body to arrive. Since bodies aren’t embalmed in Guatemala, the dead are buried within 24-48 hours. Generally a wake is held at the house, with the simple wooden casket on a table. Some have little doors that open up, allowing mourners to look through a piece of glass and see the face of the deceased. But since this family could not afford the costs associated with a wake (need to provide food and drink to visitors, as well as candles and other decorations) so Heidi body, placed in a simple wooden casket, was brought straight from the hospital to the church for the funeral in the back of a minivan.

In Chicago, funeral arrangements can be elaborate. Families often wish to meet to discuss and “plan” the funeral, choose readings and songs, discuss the possibilities of a family member’s giving a personal reflection during the service. The funeral is often several days after the death occurred, allowing out-of-town friends and family time to journey for the service. These days Saturdays are becoming more popular, so that people do not have to miss work in order to attend to their responsibilities to the deceased. 

In addition to the small group of family members, about seventy-five of the kids from NPH attended the funeral at the parish church in town, which took place at 2pm. I found myself staring into the wide and teary eyes of children who had just found out about their mother’s death an hour or so before. The other children from NPH displayed remarkable solemnity and reverence, despite my imagining that they would be somewhat “hardened” from all they have experienced. They are used to change here- staff and children leave the home on a regular basis. I often ask how they are doing when I learn that someone I thought was a close friend or confidant of one of the children leaves, and the usual response is, “it’s normal.” I can’t help but wonder what long-term impact it has on a child’s emotional life when there is no sense of permanence among the people children develop relationships with…

After the funeral Mass, we brought the casket to the municipal cemetery about a mile away, the children and their “hermanos and hermanas” from NPH walking in procession behind the minivan with the casket. This was a do-it-yourself cemetery. Although owned by the town, people are on their own to dig the graves and erect grave markers- crosses are made out of welded metal or cement, with information about the deceased written or painted on by hand. Cement block is sometimes used to mark the perimeter. The various plots seemed laid out in a haphazard manner to me, although perhaps there is some kind of master plan.

I had never seen a grave dug by hand- using pickaxes and shovels, they tore into the hard earth (it is the dry season right now, and so the ground is solid). The older boys working in pairs took turns… Digging down about 5 feet took almost two hours, while the rest waited, prayed and wandered among the other tombs. Finally, using a rope, they measured the coffin and compared that to the opening in the ground to make sure that it would fit. Then, using the same rope, eight or so of the boys carefully lowered the coffin into the hole they had dug, and then pushed and shoveled the dirt back into it. I was treated to a new sound for me- the dull thumping of dry earth landing upon a wooden casket. Within five or ten minutes the hole was filled, including a well-patted mound on top to make up for the settling that will occur once the casket starts to rot and caves in upon itself. I noticed that we had a nice view of the entrance to our NPH home from that spot…

The two middle children shed tears. The youngest likely didn’t really understand what was going on (he slept through part of the funeral), and the oldest maintained a stoic posture. The brother, a university student who is also an NPH pequeño, was somber… Given that Heidi  had been taken off of life support and pronounced dead at around 9am, just eight hours earlier, it occurred to me that she was likely still warm when she went into the ground.

We said some final prayers and headed back to the home to greet a group of visitors who had just arrived from Canada. The kids who lost their mother were back in their sections after dinner, and that was the end of that… They would be at 5am up for school on Thursday-

(Pictures from this might have helped to give testimony to the intensity of this day, but out of respect for the solemnity of the events I did not take any.)