Wake........and funeral part 1

I wish I could really describe this so that you could completely visualize it in your mind...............  I'll just have to share a little and hope you get a glimpse of our experience.

Our street is all one family.  They own all of the houses.  The owners of the house we live in are the daughter and son-in-law of the main couple who started out with this land.  The mom still lives here, but she and the dad have been separated for years and years, so he lives down the road a little on their farm land.  Well, he died last week on his 63rd birthday.

He had been in the hospital for 2 weeks in a city about 5 hours from here.  They brought him home finally the night before he died.  He arrived around 1 a.m. and then spiked a fever of 40* Celcius and died at 6 a.m.

Custom here is to go and sit with the family until the funeral, which takes place somewhere around 24 hours later.  His was the next afternoon.  John and I went over that afternoon/evening to sit with them and visit for a while and then I came home to stay with the kids.  John went back and stayed with them all night.  They brought him home at 5:30 a.m. and he took a little nap and a shower and then we went back for the funeral service and burial.

I don't even know how to describe it.................

I think it was honestly the saddest funeral I've ever been to.  I've been to funerals in Brasil and the States and John has been to some in Costa Rica.  But the family was so upset and it just had such a "heavy", "hopeless" feeling.  

We got to his farm and it was extremely simple.  We're talking a barn for cows, a concrete floor and a roof with several "rooms" divided out that were open areas.  A curtain hanging over a tiny closet-sized space for the bathroom.  I'm not sure if it was a real toilet inside (I don't think so) or a bucket or what....  We sat among the chickens, the grandkids went around gathering eggs, and everyone just watched the family walk around and cry and serve us.

The man was buried in his mariachi outfit.  He was a cowboy........more on that later.  They had a lot of flowers and candles all around the casket and also had incense burning the whole time.  His casket was very different---- the top part lifted, but then there was a glass window-like part you had to look through.  I'm not sure if it was for smell or what.   Many of the funerals I've been to is just just a body with mosquito netting over it and quarters or something over the eyes to keep them down.  Flies swarming everywhere.  It wasn't like that this time, so I was surprised.

I'll write part 2 so it's not so long.............