Now You See the Sky

by Catharine H. Murray

  He gestured that I should lay Chan on the examining table. Lifting the bright eye of the stethoscope to Chan’s unmoving chest, the doctor listened. I did not miss the slight shake of the doctor’s head. He lifted Chan’s left arm and let it flop down. He did this three times (I was surprised—I’d thought that only happened in cartoons). When he pulled up Chan’s eyelids and shone his flashlight in, I didn’t need to see whether the pupils dilated or not; one look at his eyes showed me Chan’s life had left his body. The doctor wanted us to be satisfied, though, so he called in the nurse to take Chan’s blood pressure. I watched the mercury fall steadily, no hesitation, both times she checked. The doctor went to find another doctor to complete the examination with a second opinion. When he couldn’t locate one, he assured me, in his best medical-school English, “It is not my opinion. It is a fact. He is dead.”

  We asked about formalin, but upon discovering that it would cause a strong chemical odor, we decided to take care of preserving his body at home. I didn’t feel ready to pickle him. We squeezed back into the truck to continue our journey.

  Comic relief came when Tahn threw up all over himself and the car dashboard and floor while sitting on Cody’s lap in front. Dtaw and I were pinned down under Chan’s body, so we couldn’t help. Cody and Uncle Shoon had to handle it themselves. Cody had held Tahn in his lap for the whole three-hour journey to the capital.

  For the last half hour of the trip we all tried to distract Tahn from his car sickness by pointing out cars and trucks and water buffaloes and cows in the distance.

  “Umboh! Umboh!” Uncle Shoon kept calling, imitating the sound of a cow mooing. It worked until we were two blocks from home and Tahn threw up again.

  When we pulled up in front of the house, Dtaw’s mom and sister came out, sobbing, and Dtaw broke down again. By the time I carried Chan to the low wooden table they had readied for him in the center of the living room, everyone’s tears had stopped.

  PART 6

  Funeral

  “Suwoy mak! Keu bao dtai!” (So beautiful! As if he were still alive!) the elders murmured as they came close to pay their respects, touching Chan’s sleeve or straightening his collar. They were puzzled that his body didn’t seem to be hardening at all. By afternoon, my mother-in-law, along with one or two of the other elders, even took his head between her gnarled fingers to give it a shake. Her hands had the strength needed for a mother to raise six children, but this time she held Chan’s head gently between her fingers, curved like talons, as she shook it from side to side, testing the softness of his neck. The elders kept saying they’d never seen a corpse, even a child’s, that didn’t harden quickly. There was some discussion as to whether he was actually dead, despite my report of the doctor’s examination of him that morning. They had less faith in Western medicine than I did. Death was too much the realm of spirits for doctors to have much authority.

  Dtaw’s older brother Pong, the middle-aged abbot with plump shoulders emerging from the umber robes of his vocation, officiated over the proceedings. In Thailand, funerals are always in the dead person’s home. The first floor of the house, which had plenty of room for a coffin and guests, was cleared of all furniture except the low heavy table of polished wood that often served as a sofa or bed for family members to nap or sit on, to chat or watch TV, or to have a massage. During a funeral, it became the bier.

  Pong sat opposite me, next to Chan that first day, leaning over him, tenderly examining his face and hands and repeating, “He’s sleeping quietly,” refusing to let him be put in the coffin just yet.

  To add to the mystery of this look of aliveness, Chan continued to pee throughout the day, so that we had to keep changing the bedding under him until we finally just took off his pants and put a plastic bag and towel under him and a blanket over him. Pong kept putting off the hour to lay him in the coffin, which was fine with me.

  While Chan might have looked soft and alive, his torso had been cold since midmorning. By sundown, I knew without any doubt that he was dead, even if no one else was completely sure. His foot was arched unnaturally into a stiff point like an awkward ballerina’s, and by the end of the day his jaw seemed stiff. As darkness fell, I bent low over his face to kiss his smooth forehead and rest my cheek on his soft skin for almost the last time. The sour sweet scent of decay assured me he was gone. I told Pong it was time to put him in the long wooden box that Dtaw’s uncle had built for him that morning. Pong examined him again and agreed.

  I was pleased with the hi-tech coffin we had chosen. There had been two options—a traditional box that would be shut tight to keep the smell of decay sealed inside, or the electric coffin with a cooling unit. We chose the electric option. Colorful, garish, painted in bright gold, red, and green carved flowers and goddesses, it was, in essence, a very large freezer into which we would slide the lidless wooden box Chan was in. He would be slowly frozen over a few days and then thawed the night before the cremation (to save on coal). A small window in the top of the coffin allowed me to check on him whenever I wanted. There was even a light to illuminate his angelic face. I loved watching him so peaceful and beautiful, a face so much easier to look at than the one tortured by pain and loss of brain function I had watched the night before.

  Chan’s friends in the neighborhood and his brothers expected that they would shave their heads and take monks’ robes for the day, the custom for boys and men when a family member dies. When Pong had had time to consider it, he decided that that custom was reserved for only adult deaths. As the little boys gathered around me eagerly awaiting the answer, and I delivered the news, their disappointment rose in silent looks and shuffling feet. Cody’s eyes stayed focused on the floor, not daring to meet my gaze, for fear of too much emotion welling up if he did, I supposed.

  Over the three days of the funeral, a dozen or so of Dtaw’s closest friends and one of his old uncles—the carpenter who’d built not only Chan’s casket, but also his crib—worked together to construct the spirit house. Tradition required that Chan have, at his cremation, a house the size of a child’s playhouse that represented the home Chan would have in his next life. Building it from wood donated by friends from the lumberyard, they sawed and measured and drilled and hammered and drank and talked far into the night. They decorated it with intricate paper cutouts, snipped while they smoked cigarettes and sipped whiskey and soda, working with utmost concentration, interrupted by only a joke and a laugh now and then. Dtaw’s uncle even fashioned two horse heads out of a banana leaf stem to adorn the roof of the house like the decorations on top of the temples.

  There were abundant flowers given by Dtaw’s eldest brother, and funeral wreaths of waxy blooms from schools and local businesses, and tray after tray of delicious foods, each day made by a team of women who set up an outdoor kitchen and worked all hours turning out hot, nourishing meals. Pots of sweet homemade soy milk boiled in the yard and fresh doughnuts sizzled in oil.

  We stayed up past midnight every night, talking and laughing and sharing funny stories and drawing comfort from each other. It was good to have people there around the clock. Each night Tong and Cam and Dtaw brought out a huge pile of blankets and pillows so everyone could sleep on the floor near Chan’s coffin. And twice every day, in the early morning and in the evening, a group of monks came from all of the different temples in town to chant and provide the structure we needed for mourning.

  Chanting is a soothing experience that seems to quiet the mind; I was grateful for that. And in Thai culture there is such a strong belief in karma—beyond a sense of punishment and reward, more of a rational yet unintelligible order to all events—that everyone was quite certain Chan’s death was something that could not have been avoided, and for that reason wasn’t some cruel and unbelievable tragedy.

  “He brought his illness with him,” and, “He was meant to finish this life early,” were phrases I heard over and over. Although I wasn’t sure I agreed, it did make it a little easier to think that all of it was part of some se
nsible order to the universe. And just as I would have at home, I often heard, “He’s no longer suffering,” which was the thing that I was most grateful for.

  I would much rather, however, have had him suffering a little bit and still be alive.

  Fire

  It was late afternoon on December 24, 2004, midwinter, but warm enough for me to be comfortable in a loose white cotton shirt and black silk pants, traditional colors for mourning. The cremation ceremony at the temple was over, and Chan’s body was burning in the huge brick oven inside the crematorium, its chimney like a cylindrical church spire. A few of our closest friends stayed and sat with me and Dtaw amid the scores of folding chairs still set up around the crematorium, or mayn. The word for crematorium in English is not right. It sounds too industrial and practical. Nowadays, when outdoor funeral pyres are only found in remote Thai villages, almost every temple compound includes a mayn as one if its central buildings. The architecture is in the style of the rest of the temple, without the brightly colored ornamentation of the largest temple building that houses the Buddha image. Bright white walls lean in toward a steeply peaked roof, graceful lines sweeping heavenward with steps that lead up from three sides to the small area in front of the metal door of the oven. The oven itself is a large room with rails like train tracks leading to the center. The tracks make it easier to slide the coffin in and shut the heavy metal door. The smooth cement floor in front affords enough room for the coffin and a dozen or so mourners at a time as they file by, laying flowers and incense on the body. The mayn at this temple, one of seven in the town, was large enough so that we and all eighteen members of Dtaw’s immediate family could stand on one set of steps and stare solemnly into Dtaw’s cousin’s camera for the funeral photos.

  Dtaw’s family had chosen this temple for Chan’s cremation because it was where Dtaw’s father’s ashes were kept. His grandparents’ ashes were at the temple at the end of their street. This temple was farther out of town, across from his family’s farm, but it was often visited by one of the most highly revered monks in Thailand.

  The ceremony had started just after dawn, with chanting at our house before the procession to the temple behind the oxcart and pickup truck that carried the coffin, friends and uncles and cousins packed in tight around it, still holding Chan by keeping their hands on the wooden box. Now at midafternoon, most of the other guests had gone home. We felt no desire to leave. What was there for us at home? Our friends An and It and their young son Phu sat with us. Dtaw’s lifelong friend and neighbor Jan and his wife Lek stayed too. All of them talked together with an ease I rarely saw in my American world, where a certain awkwardness seemed to pervade social situations, especially funerals. But the people I knew in Dtaw’s world seemed at ease with their fellow beings. And a funeral was a sad but normal event. That afternoon they chatted not about Chan, but about old friends’ misadventures or where to buy the best shiitake mushrooms or mountain bike tires. I listened some, but my mind and eyes were on the heavy door behind which my son’s body was slowly turning to ash. I wanted to go up and look, but I was afraid the people around me would try to stop me. I wasn’t sure I had the courage anyway.

  I got up to visit the outhouse across the temple yard behind the mayn. My sandals crunched over the yellow blades of dead bamboo leaves littering the ground and speckled gold in the afternoon sun filtering through the treetops. As I walked, I determined that I would look in on my way back. I hoped that if I cut around to the side stairs and stepped quietly enough, I might not be noticed until I reached the door. It wasn’t that I didn’t want people to know what I was doing. It was that I was afraid they would come at me, loud with caring protest, interrupting with their concern the silence of my isolation.

  I lifted my tired legs up the cement steps and thought, Do I really want to do this? I told myself it was not Chan. It was an empty rotting corpse, fit only for burning or burying. Convinced, and refusing to be intimidated by my own fears, I fixed my gaze at the top of the steps and steeled myself for what I would see after I reached that spot. I stood before the solid metal door, the mechanics of its spoked wheel and levers like the door on the hatch of a submarine. I leaned in toward the thick glass that covered the small window in the center and looked. Much to my relief, because of the small size of the hole, I saw only dancing gold flames and nothing else.

  I was exhaling with relief and turning away when the old man whose job it was to tend the fire all night came hobbling up the stairs. His gray hair was cut close to his scalp and the stubble of his whiskers prickled along the flesh of his loose jowls. His eyes seemed sleepy and dull, but as the keeper of the fire, he had spotted me as I crept up to the door.

  He spoke to me in the local dialect: “Come, I’ll open it up so you can really see.” He spoke without adding any of the usual terms of endearment an old person uses with someone my age­—little mouse, small one, customary syllables that would have softened his tone. He spoke to me directly, without the slightest hint of pity. I was grateful for this. I dutifully returned to the door, and he leaned his stocky body back, pulling against the weight of the lever. As he did, it gave way and swung open, splitting the top half from the bottom and affording an unobstructed view of my son’s burning corpse.

  Very little was recognizable. The skull which I looked for at the top of the oblong blackened pile must have crumbled to ash already because I couldn’t make it out. The only parts I thought I could recognize were two very long bones, which at first, because of the way they stuck out perpendicular from the body, I thought to be his upper arm bones, but which I realized because of their size must have been his thigh bones. I had seen enough, I thought, but the old man walked a few steps away and picked up a blackened, long-handled trident missing the middle tine. He then lifted it and poked it into the fire to jab what must have been Chan’s back and turn the body over.

  I backed away and turned around as this part of his body seemed to have more charred intact matter than the rest of it. I feared I would see some bit that still looked like Chan. When I saw bits of red where the points of the fire tool poked in, I foolishly thought it was blood, but later I realized it was probably his favorite red polyester soccer shirt I had dressed him in for the funeral, refusing to burn.

  I joined my friends, glad I hadn’t been too disturbed by the sight and glad they didn’t reproach me for going up. Chan’s friend Phu, who had been born just a month after Chan, went skipping boldly up the stairs and peeked through the hole and came down telling his mom brightly, “It smells like a barbecue!” She shushed him and I tried to tell her not to worry. I had already noticed that. Indeed, that was what had come to my mind when I saw the burning corpse: a very large and overdone barbecue. Strange, I always thought the smell of a burning body would be worse than that, but it wasn’t.

  Remains

  The next morning before sunrise, Mei Ya stood in the street under our window and called out her son’s name: “Dtaw! Dtaw!” The insistent staccato shouts rose above the ragged cries of the roosters and through the mosquito net around the bed where Dtaw, our two remaining sons, and I slept. She hurried us until we were all crammed, limp and bleary-eyed, into our cousin’s car. Stoic relatives crowded into the bed of the family pickup truck to follow us out of the village and down the misty road past mango and tamarind farms.

  At the temple we uncrimped ourselves from the car and stepped through the darkness up the steps of the crematorium. Yesterday’s firekeeper and another old stubble-scalped man came up from where they sat at a small fire in the dirt. All night they had tended the fire so that it would consume my child’s body by daybreak. One of them opened the thick door, sliding out the iron bed that now held glowing coals and nothing I could recognize as the thirty-two-pound boy in a glossy-red soccer suit under a mound of paper flowers I had pushed into the massive oven the day before. The men shoveled the embers onto a piece of corrugated tin which they carried to the ground and doused with water.

  The whole family crouched d
own in the dark and chill of early morning and began to pick through the wet ashes. In the glow of the flashlights the old men held over our shoulders, the treasures of bone, small gray shards, were sometimes indistinguishable from the lumps of wet coal.

  My brother-in-law, the monk, handed me a slender stick of bamboo, split halfway up the middle like long takeout chopsticks, so I could avoid burning my fingers on any coals that weren’t wet. I wiped the wet ashes from my fingertips and set to work with Cody, Tahn, Dtaw, and the rest of the family. The bits of bone mixed in with the ash were small and light, and I thought of a bird’s skeleton. There were a few larger ones, but as the family dug through them to choose which to keep and which to throw into the jungle, I didn’t take time to identify them.

  We dropped the ones we wanted to keep into hollow sections of banana tree trays that the men had cut by removing the inner layers of the tree’s trunk. As we worked, the old men picked up these fragments and rinsed them in a bucket of water before putting them in the clear plastic pickle jar Mei Ya had brought.

  When we had enough pieces of bone in the jar, the old men’s hands formed the wet ashes into the rough shape of a human. They stuck small yellow candles into the figure at places prescribed by tradition. Mei Ya brought out a Tupperware box of coins and we distributed them over the figure. Someone said he hoped Chan would be rich in his next life. Cody said, “I hope he can buy a lot of horses.” They all spoke in the local dialect, the one my children spoke before they learned English. It’s closer to Laotian than Thai and easier for me to understand. It is the language of home.

  Ushered into the high-ceilinged temple, open on all sides to the morning air, we knelt before the monks seated on the platform and joined in the Buddhist chant that begins every one of the countless ceremonies I have attended in Thailand. It was the same one we chanted with family and neighbors to welcome my babies into this world and the one we chanted to send my father-in-law into the next when I was pregnant with Cody.