The funeral was on Tuesday. It was one of our hottest days yet here. I had never been to a funeral in Mozambique... and it felt something like a cross between a market and a carnival. A business deal and a dance with death orchestrated together, at the same time. There were hawkers outside selling flowers, and as soon as I got out of the car, an opportunist, or just another poor person trying to feed himself, told me that he was in charge of guarding my car-- " you know, senhora, so nothing gets stolen." He would expect about 40 cents payment.
"Entao.. so," I asked rhetorically, " there are even ladroes, thieves, at the cemetery?"
"Always," he answered without batting an eye.
The family and friends were sitting on the grass under a tree, waiting for the coffin to arrive. People were chatting. Women were feeding their babies.
When the coffin arrived, the preacher, sweating under a cheap suit and faded tie, directed us toward the plot. There were mounds of earth everywhere, with no names, no headstones, just poor pathetic wilting flowers on top with metal plaques with six digit number painted on them. Like license plates. There was a big confusao about where the coffin should go. Over there? or over there? People were walking over the graves, trying to figure out where to go.
Confusao is an interesting word we have in Portuguese, but the way we use it in Mozambique, and in Angola, is different than anywhere else. It means something you cannot translate to English. It is not confusion. It can be chaos, arguments, any kind of disorder, or even refer to a difficult person--"She's a confusao." Our dog tried to attack the cat tonight, and Nalia said, "Mommy, that was a big confusao." She did not say confusion. The funeral here in Maputo was also a confusao.
Funerals are when our own deep-seeded cultural practices rise to the surface... how we respond to and perceive death is so much based on how and where we grow up, who our people are. I got a lump in my throat seeing people walk over the graves. We don't do that where I come from.
There was a discussion about where to start digging. They hadn't started digging.
The sun was penetrating, bone bleaching, and the heat had all of us dripping in sweat. The babies were crying. Fatigued, women started to sit on the graves and feed their babies.
Finally, the preacher summoned us, "Ok, let's get on with it. We can do the ceremony while they start digging. Does anyone have a song they want to sing?"
It felt like Sunday school...does anyone have a song they want to sing.
Almost as soon as the gravediggers started digging, they stopped. And started another plot. You see, there were about 6 or 7 ceremonies going on all at once.
Death is commonplace here. It is business.. it is still misery and sadness and loss, but when something is not relatively rare, like death is in the U.S., then it becomes more routine and business-like.
The gravediggers had stopped digging because they wanted a tip.
The preacher kept going on, asking people to sing.
Ruti, Oscar's illiterate orphaned 15-year-old niece, began to sob uncontrollably. Now, she has no one. And she is an illiterate teenage girl. Vulnerable anywhere on this planet.
All if this was going on at once. It was too much.
Finally, the cousin cut a deal with the gravediggers and the coffin was hoisted into the ground. The whole family surrounded the grave and filled in the dirt. Then they covered it with all the flowers that had already died too. The Sun in Mozambique in January is relentless. It doesn't care who you are... about your sorrow or your pain or your grief.
Oscar died at the hospital on Friday, January 20. For the first nights, I kept waking up at 2 or 3 am, thinking of all that I should have done....I should have taken him to another clinic or called my doctor friend sooner.
Then, I'd get angry. After being in the hospital nearly a month, Oscar still hadn't received an ultrasound for his tumor. He still wasn't being treated with antiretrovirals (ARVs), even though the Cuban doctors had recommended it 3 weeks earlier. Finally, after lots of talking with doctors, and doing some reading, I deduced that his tumor was probably internal Kaposi Sarcoma, common in the last stage of AIDS. Maybe the doctors and nurses had just decided there was no hope and decided to let him die.
But even before this, so many things had gone wrong. Oscar never told anyone he had AIDS. And as soon as he was admitted to the hospital, he refused to eat for 2 weeks, and started hiding his pills under his sheets. When I asked the nurse about this, she said, "They do that sometimes porque dizem que ja nao querem viver, because they say they don't want to live anymore."
It is almost too complex: a dysfunctional health system, doctors breathing pessimism, people with AIDS whose culture and country will not allow them to assumir-- admit it, accept it, and go on.
When someone dies of AIDS here, people will always say the cause of death was doenca, sickness, the vaguest of the vague. AIDS does not exist in people's houses, only on the TV ads and billboards telling people to use condoms. It is not mine or ours.. it is someone else's. But really, it belongs to all of us, not just Africa, but all of us. And accepting that it is our mutual burden is the only way we cay start to unravel its complexity.
Oscar Pinto Amade left this world on January 20. He was 28 years old. He had already lost two infant children.
