April is the Cruelest Month

Since I’ve been at site, I’ve attended a handful of Azerbaijani funerals. [I must add a disclaimer here: I am no expert on Azerbaijani funerals. My intention here is to write about my immediate experience and share my cross-cultural perspective with you, my dear blog audience]. So I live in a large village. Considering that everyone from the dead person’s third cousin twice removed to his barber’s niece attends, it’s not unusual for me to go to a funeral in my village, even if I’ve never met the person before. There are five very important days following a person’s death: the first day after, the third day, the seventh day, the fortieth day and the one year anniversary. Each of these days is marked by a large gathering of people at the late person’s family’s home to mourn, drink tea, and eat a meal usually consisting of beef, potatoes, grape leaf dolma and raw vegetables [bread goes without saying]. For the most part, I’ve been a passive observer at funerals in my village. I’ll usually find out about it the day of the event, and before I find out the person’s name or who they were related to, I’ll be whisked away in a herd of teachers from my school. I find myself sitting on a long bench amongst at least two hundred other people, a beautiful display of dishes and silverware in front of me, being served tea with lemons and sweets. Men and women are separated, usually under two different tents, but sometimes just by tables and benches on opposite sides of the house’s outdoor space. Oftentimes, I have to remind myself that I am at a funeral. Although people are wearing black or gray clothing, speaking in hushed voices, and nodding gravely at the late person’s close family members, they carry on normal conversations and catch up on the latest gossip with their neighbors. Ironically, if one were to take two snapshots: one of the attendees at a village wedding and one of the attendees at a village funeral, it would be difficult to distinguish the two. But that’s a topic for a different blog post.

A few weeks ago, I had the unfortunate opportunity to experience a funeral as much more than a passive observer. My host mom’s sister’s daughter (aka: my host cousin), living in Russia at the time, passed away from cancer. She had been sick for a while, but her death came as a bit of a shock. She was only 30 and has two young children. A day or two after she died, her mom, sister, husband and husband’s family members from Russia brought her back to the village on Tuesday evening. They came by plane and then in an ambulance motorcade procession from the capital with other family members who traveled to meet them in Baku. A group of 100 or so people, including my host mom, two host sisters, host aunts and uncles, and me, gathered at their home and waited for them to return. As we waited, all of the women gathered in one room. The close family members (aunts, grandmother and cousins) sat at one end of the room and began to weep heavily while the rest of us, seated on rows of benches, sat solemnly. Some people cried. Most just watched the family members weep.

When the ambulance caravan arrived, the mourners gathered around to welcome the teary-eyed mother and sister. Upon stepping out of the car and seeing the crowd of mourners, the mother burst into heaving sobs. The sister however, turned pale and shot panicky glances around the gathered people. Her expression went from shock to terror as she began to scream. Her high pitched shrieks pierced the sullen silence and punctuated the heaving sobs of her mother. A mob of women gathered around them, most of them in tears, trying to force both of them to drink a medicinal calming remedy. Everyone, including the young men carrying the coffin, was crying by the time the coffin was brought out of the back of the ambulance. Upon seeing its emergence, the sister’s shrieks turned feral. Shaking violently, she looked up to the sky and fell into a chair one woman had put behind her knees. Men and women alike, dabbed their eyes with handkerchiefs and the coffin was brought into the room where the women had gathered initially. The woman standing next to me turned and told me that the sister didn’t know her sister was dead. Her family didn’t think she could bear the truth when someone told her, so they left it to time for her to figure it out. And that’s exactly what she did upon seeing the couple hundred people, teary eyed and dressed in black waiting for her at her house when she arrived. She had been told her sister was in a coma.

When both mother and sister were calm enough to walk, exasperated and empty looking, they led a procession of women behind a mullah into the mourning room—as I’ll call it. The mullah read from the Koran while the immediate family members rocked themselves with sobs. The rest of us took our places on the benches. When the mullah finished, the mother, clearly the leader of the mourning, sat on the ground at the head of the coffin and began to cry out to her dead daughter, speaking to her and about her while the rest of the women looked on. She would build momentum, encouraged by the humming cries of the other women in her family. Several times, her emotions heightened, she beat on her chest with both hands, and as another women forced her hands down, she threw her arms around the coffin. Her passion seemed to come in waves. When she became lost for words, one of her sisters, nieces or daughter would pick up where she left off and lead the room in deeply sorrowful cries repeating their deceased relative’s name over and over again, talking about their sweet memories from the past as well as the things they dreamed she would have been a part of in the future. This went on for several exhausting hours before the guests, slowly began to filter out and go home.

The next morning, the close female relatives gathered around the casket again to cry. A new crowd of people began to assemble starting mid-morning. Men outside, and women sitting on the benches in the mourning room. The mother, aunts, grandmother and cousin wailed their final goodbyes to the casket before it was taken away by the male relatives and carried to the cemetery. At this time, the female relatives wept even harder as onlookers stood by in support. Many women cried. Two of the aunts fainted as they followed the procession out of the house. After watching the men trail off down the street, the women returned inside, washed their faces and hands, and sat down to eat.

The third and seventh day went on in a similar fashion—a gathering of women in the wailing room followed by a large meal. Each successive day saw more people and a little less drama as news spread about the woman’s death. In these seven days, there were at least a thousand people who passed through the house. The meals seemed to recreate themselves..the same plates over and over again. My host mom and sisters would return home late each night, completely exhausted from the days events and turn around and go back the next. The custom is to never leave the immediate family of the deceased person alone for the first couple of weeks. My family upheld their tradition. The whole week, the house was either empty, having been left in haste, or inhabited by a few sleeping people, many of whom I did not know, who returned to catch a few hours of solitary sleep.

This was a unique experience for me. As in all village occasions, I don’t fit into any one social category. I don’t have a clear role. In this case, it was odd because everything was happening around me, and I was never sure of what the appropriate thing to do. I attended the funeral events after I finished my lessons at school and felt myself becoming quite sad. More sad than I’ve ever been at a funeral of someone I’d never actually met. At the same time, I still felt so far outside of my family’s grief. What really struck me was the communal aspect of the funeral tradition. I felt the women’s heaving and wailing to be authentic, the way I imagine one would feel upon losing her child, but also so deliberately public. To me, these things seem to be at odds with each other. I’m not sure exactly why.

Several people at the funeral gatherings asked me about our funeral traditions in America. My response was loose and open ended at best. 

Two weeks later, life at home began to look more normal again. I was happy when Kaklik started going back to school. Although, now I realize that this is not a universal thought to think that going back to work may make someone feel better after losing a loved one. In my mind at least, it was the first indicator that life would indeed return to normal for my family here. It was nice to begin to actually see my host mom and sisters around the house again. And to see Kaklik up drinking tea in the morning, doing her hair for school, without looking completely drained and exhausted did make me feel good. I hoped her mind was on something other than her beloved sister and niece. Thus, I expressed this news with my counterpart one morning as we walked to the lesson we teach together. She asked me how Kaklik was doing, and I cheerfully chimed in that today she’s going back to school. With a slight furrowing of her eyebrows, she responded, “Of course she is, Annie! Nobody dies with the dead.”