[Morbid] Cultural Milestone

This is Jennifer. I don’t think I’ve ever written a blog post before, but today’s experience was so unusual, I really wanted to write about it. Let me warn you now that if you’re easily freaked out, you probably should stop reading about here.

After living in Brazil for almost 4 years, we went to our first Brazilian funeral today. Weddings and funerals are great ways of seeing a culture’s value system, so I knew that we would get an authentic glimpse into Brazilian culture and family life by going. I’m not going to tell you about the actual funeral service in the chapel (because we were 10 minutes late and missed the whole thing) but I’ll tell you about what came next. I want to be clear in saying that you can’t make generalizations about a country (or even a city) by going to just one funeral, but I’ll tell you what we observed.

First of all, the dress code for funerals here is whatever you happen to be wearing. I thought that surely we should at least wear our nice every-day clothes, but no – I could have worn any old jeans and a t-shirt and I wouldn’t have been out of line.

Second, embalming is not really practiced here so funerals take place within a day of death.

Okay, now for the interesting part. We drove to the “cemetery” only to find that instead of a grassy field, it was an immense 5-story mausoleum complex. Imagine an apartment complex in the US (with little roads through it and everything). This place was enormous. There were a bunch of chapels (I think 10-20 of them) and the hallways were lined with plates in the wall with peoples’ names and pictures. I had heard that sometimes people in Brazil are buried in the same grave as their family members in order to save money, but I didn’t realize that this is the norm. After the service, we followed the casket down the hall to the appointed square in the wall. The employees of the mausoleum pushed the casket into the slot, then pushed 2 plastic bags in after it – one long and one small. I thought, surely those aren’t other people’s remains. I asked a Brazilian man about it and he said that he didn’t think they’d be in plastic bags, but then I asked some other people and they assured me that yes, those were the bones of other family members. Wow. After the employees put everything inside the vault, they put the cover back on and started slapping cement over it to seal it up again. As we walked away, I looked at the hundreds of other squares on the walls and noticed that most of them bore the names of at least 2 people, and many of them had entire families on them. Pretty amazing. Tonight I’m thinking of the unfortunate person who has the job of opening the vault and consolidating the decomposed remains in order to make room for the new casket. I’m told that all of this happens while the family is in the chapel having the memorial service. Definitely a cultural milestone.