SAYING GOODBYE THE RIGHT WAY?

You have caught the Maori way in the first day in one shot! They are extremely into welcoming people in what to us Pakeha seems long winded and the same goes for death. Some of my best friends are Maori and they are always off to some wake or other. They never leave the body on its own until it is laid to rest in the ground! If it is not that they are at unveilings (of the stone), which I gather take place about 1 year after the funeral. It is considered very important too. So they really honour their dead BIG!! It has been in the news that they are now repatriating skulls from a French museum collection, that are several hundred years old. They lay so much importance on this. They also try to find out in this case from which tribe the skulls came, as they feel they need to be put to rest in the ancestral set up. So it is not just a thing for the present person dying, but something they feel necessary for long past generations.

Some of the Pakeha have taken this on too. They find this a wonderful way to be with the body until it is interred, talk to the person, cry together in privacy and heal any outstanding thoughts which were never expressed to the person, while alive.

I know one family a few years back, who were VERY,VERY angry with their father and husband for committing suicide in front of his wife, by sticking a carving knife concealed under his shirt into his heart. It is a family that considers themselves in the higher echelons of society and would not normally duck out of responsibility for anything. But he could not get over the fact that he had ridden over his daughter, when she was opening a gate on a farm and he had done something wrong while driving an automatic. She is still alive, was in hospital for 6 months, but will be in pain and not walk freely ever again. He could not live with this and decided his fate, a few weeks after his daughter left hospital and went back to her home in England.

Well that death was a real shocker for the family, but they insisted to have the body at home. They talked to him, put letters to him in the coffin. The grandchildren also could be near their grandfather. The family members were able to shout, cry and express any other feeling they wanted to. There was always someone with him until the day he was buried. It obviously did not help to heal everything in such a situation, but was felt to be a really good way to express their love, shock, disbelief, anger at what he had done.

I also feel this is a good way to have a send off. I do believe we Caucasians try to get rid of the subject of death in a too clinical way and often spend years getting over the death of people we loved due to this. Also people do not face their mortality and run around trying to be immortal. We should all have training on the subject of death, so that we do not try avoid it under all circumstances. I believe that many people who have for example cancer should/would benefit from facing the death and what it means to them in reality. Once you have truly faced your fears on the subject, you can honestly get on with living and trying to survive your fate/illness to the best of your ability.

When I lived in Germany I went through a course to become a telephone counsellor. We had hundreds of hours of training and also had to read piles of books and amongst them was a classic on death and what the dying have to say about it from Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. It is worth reading and even having permanently to refer to. I have made it one of the subjects I talk about freely, both to my daughter and also to Tom. He is 75 and I 62, but my daughter is just 22 and she is the one who I concern myself with and about, as far as my death is concerned, as we are VERY close. I was 40 when she was born and her father, who died last year shortly before Tom and I got married, was 57 at the time of her birth. She was here when he died and her first response was, Mum you've talked so much about death all of my life and have prepared me so well for this day, it is not such a difficulty now that it is here. I have been trained to expect it and think about it intensively.

Having said all of that, it would seem that even when we are expecting it, it always comes as a shock. It was hardly ever on time, there was nearly always some unfinished business. So in other words, the Maori way is something good. In fact my Maori friend Lynne, announced to me very shortly after I became friends with her, that she had told her family that they have to allow me to sit next to the coffin at her wake. At the time, didn't quite get the gist of this honour, but I have slowly through observation caught on to why they do things this way.

Enough of my ramblings!

Bridget