Cremation Season

Shortly after we moved into our house, we learned from our gardener, Wayan, and housecleaner, Nyoman that our village, Bentuyung, was preparing for their Cremation Ceremonies. We would learn more about the cremation ceremonies in the weeks to come, as Wayan and Nyoman had to take occasional days off to help with the preparations. Cremations ceremonies take place once every five years, they are, as we would discover,  a big deal.

           

 In the weeks to come, we watched the progress of the preparations, without really knowing what we were watching them build or prepare for. Women put together stacks and stacks of offerings. Men built platforms for offerings, and life size piñata like horse and bulls covered in brown fabric, with gold horns and other accents. The faces of the horses and bulls have grotesque exaggerated features like many of the traditional Balinese masks, large red lips and white teeth, flared nostrils, and their mouths shaped into a seemingly happy but devilish kind of grin.

            Our gardener, Wayan, informed us, that cremation and ceremonies are expensive, so they used to exhume the bodies and cremate them all at once in a big ceremony. But now they just do a symbolic cremation, because they were having a problem with witches in the village stealing bones and pieces of hair for the evil spells they cast on people.

           

            The Cremation Ceremonies takes place over several days, but Wayan invited us to the main day, where they would parade the horses and bulls down the main road into the sacred site around the Banyan tree. My husband and I, dressed in our sarongs, along with our toddler son, walked up to the road for the festivities moments before the parade started. The street was closed to outside traffic and full of families all dressed up in traditional sarongs and sashes. We saw Wayan playing the cymbals of the gamalan along with other men of the village, while our Nyoman’s husband, Ketut, helped direct crowds but stopped to say hello to Fyo. 

            As the music of the gamalan got louder and more intense, twenty men, acting as pall bearers of the life size horse piñata came charging down the street. The men stop and raise the horse up and down, then continue on as another twenty men come down the street with the bull. They stop with the bull and raise and lower it as if it was getting ready to charge. The intensity of emotion, sight and sound surprise me; without knowing why, I discover I am crying. 

            Later, we watched the families of the village load the animals with offerings of food, clothes, sarongs, and sheets, things you would find in a hope chest of an older generation. When the animals were full, they light each one on fire, burning the animals and all the offerings inside. The spirits then know to follow the smoke onto the next world. 

            The next day, we drove by the grounds where they burned the offerings, and we see black piles of ash still smoldering. For the first time in weeks, driving through the village, we saw no people. Some had taken a portion of the ashes to the beach, some had taken another portion to the mother temple, while others took some of the ashes home.

            Our understanding of the whole process remains kind of cryptic. Wayan's English is pretty good, but not good enough to explain all the cultural beliefs. We don’t quite know why the cremation ceremonies are only once every five years, nor what they do immediately after an individual dies.

         Not long after the Cremation Ceremony we were driving back from the beach at Candidasa, and we passed a smaller family procession, with six men carrying a body fully wrapped in batik printed sarongs. The image stuck in my mind the entire way home.

Talking to my friend Ginny, she tells me how her pembantu’s (aka nanny) father died and they were invited to his individual cremation ceremony. She described how the entire family washed his body, then dressed him and wrapped him in sarongs, and finally carried him in a procession to the sacred site in the village, where they cremated him in full view of everyone.  Ginny said, as I could only imagine, it was a bit intense. The body begins covered, but as the fire burns, it burns the cotton first, so you do actually witness the cremation of the body. 

            Ginny points out that in the West, we keep birth and death hidden. She thinks doing so messes with our emotional process of it.

I don’t doubt this and I’ve heard this argument before. But now, when Ginny says it, I think of my “process” and the death of my step-dad, Mike, who died suddenly of a heart attack over a year ago. Even though I was home within 24 hours of his dying, and even though I helped my mother make the funeral arrangements with the funeral home, and even though I saw Mike’s ashes, I never saw him dead. I’ve seen other relatives dead, and given that they look like they’re sleeping, but like they’re cold, I don’t know that it helps me grasp that they are dead. For me, birth and death remain a mundane yet surreal abstraction, as my head struggles to wrap itself around the notion that someone is there one moment, and not the next. (Or in the case of the birth of my son, not there, then there) Mostly, I reside in the place of denial. I haven’t ventured into any other stage of grief. It seems to me, that Mike is just on vacation, and that when I go home in September, he could just walk in the door, back from the dog walk that he started when he had his heart attack.