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.)
