While we were in village at Nicole's house the grandfather of the family with whom she lived died. He was very old and had been ill for a while. While we were inĀ Natitingou he had gone to the clinic in the village and stayed. He came home one day looking better but soon went back to the clinic. He was then sent to the hospital in Natitingou but came home again because there was nothing that could be done.
Nicole and I were sitting under the piote (the covered structure in her backyard) playing spacey eights when a woman came through the gate and said, "Nicole, le vielle est parti" through tears. Nicole said she had to go to the front yard (the concession courtyard) but told me to stay behind. I could hear the wails of the women, high sustained notes of sorrow that rose at the end. I was freaked out and unsure what I should be doing.
I walked through the corn field behind Nicole's house to the road to the village. I decided I needed to try to find Edouard. Along the way I encountered an old
woman, drunk on chook and in high spirits, who grabbed my hands and danced in circles with me. When I reached Edouard's concession I found him busily working on his diesel generator. FIghting back tears, I explained how the grandfather had died and I didn't know what to do. He told me he would finish his work and come back with me to the concession.
On the walk back to the concession he explained that it was no big deal that the grandfather died: were it a child it would have been much more serious. When we reached the concession many people had arrived and were crying, talking, or silently pondering. We went to the back yard and the three of us sat and talked. Edouard is very religious and talked of heaven, while Nicole and I voiced our skepticism of life after death.
Meanwhile mourners brought a generator and many fluorescent tubes and were in the process of starting what would become a seven day party. Somewhere in the action I ended up in the front yard helping Edouard rig up the lights. I watched as they moved the body to Nicole's front porch: I slept on the other side of the wall from where a dead man lay that night.
The next seven days were a frenzy of activity in preparation for the funeral. The body was brought to a morgue in Natitingou. The following morning men in droves turned out to begin preparing the grave site. They removed all the plants and weeds from an area in front of the concession, shaded under several large trees, and dug a grave. Next, the mason was brought in and he lined the grave with bricks and mortar and poured a concrete slab that would seal the grave. There was leftover cement so he also poured a step outside Bernadette's room.
As the week went on so did the construction and chaos. Men built two covered areas in the concession, one extending off Nicole's front porch and the other opposite diagonally. Augustan explained this would provide coverage from the rain or sun. The workers would take time out to drink chook and would linger into the evening, drinking, talking, and sometimes shouting at one another.
Nicole and I got away to Natitingou and stayed at the workstation for Thursday through Saturday, a welcomed vacation from the chaos in the concession.
The following Tuesday, a week after the grandfather died, preparations for the funeral kicked into high gear. Family members from near and far had arrived and helped to prepare food, set up an altar on Nicole's front porch on which the casket would be placed, and getting ready for the funeral the next day. Nicole and I were called out from her backyard to watch them sacrifice a cow. They walked it into the concession then bound its legs and knocked it down on its side. The children were ushered away as it was believed that if they witnessed the sacrifice they too would die. There was a brief debate over who would perform the cutting and whether the cow would be given chook or water to drink. They wedged two long sticks into the binding holding the cow's legs and then cut the cow's throat, catching the blood in basins to use in sauces. They also cut off the tail, evidently to hasten the process of the cow dying. The ordeal was much less gruesome than I thought it would be: the cow died quickly and the butchers started to work. The hide would be kept by the family, who would wait a few days then make whatever then needed from it. People partied late into the night.
The next morning the concession was packed with family and friends. They returned from Natitingou with the body in its casket and people filed by to pay their respects. People sang, mostly religious songs, as three nuns had accompanied Simone, one of the sons and a Catholic priest, back for the funeral. They had a keyboard, electric guitar, and bass to play church music, and people sang and reminisced.
They put the casket in a truck and drove it across the village to the Catholic church. Nicole and I walked, taking the shortcut past the house where the church authorities stay, where Patron, the monkey, lives. We were invited in for a quick meal of hot chocolate and bread then went to the service.
Conducted in French, it was a typical Catholic service with prayers for the departed and a wonderful eulogy by Simone. Afterwards, a man spoke a short sermon in KaviƩ, the family's language. The church was packed and it rained lightly outside.
Afterwards we filed out of the church to a waiting crowd. The casket was carried out and balanced on the heads of two men and the party started again. Men were drumming and playing cowbells, a horn made of a cow's horn, and everyone was singing. They pulled branches from trees and waved them overhead. Everyone was in a jubilant mood, which was infectious. We made our way past the marche, bustling with activity, the casket being passed around overhead as people sang and danced.
I didn't watch the actual burial: there were too many people around the grave to see anything. Augustan's wives had all cut their hair very short. The women had skipped the church service to lay out a lavish meal of pate, rice, beef in a sauce, as well as other sauces. It was chaotic but the entire experience, my first
funeral by the way, was positive and changed my view on death.
I escaped to the buvette in the village for a bit to avoid some of the madness and to buy a bottle of pastis for the celebration. When I returned people were crazed on chook and music. I borrowed Nicole's tape recorder and recorded twenty-two minutes of drumming and singing. The chook flowed steadily. I ended up literally falling down drunk: hanging out in Nicole's backyard I went to lean against an exterior wall of her house but leaned on the screen door, instead, tumbling onto the concrete floor of her house backwards and banging the hell out of my elbow. I went to bed for a while: evidently Nicole tried to wake me but I had died. I woke up at ten, found Augustan in the concession, took two big swigs of pastis, and handed the bottle to him to distribute.
This whole unexpected experience opened my eyes to a completely different way of seeing death. Here in Benin they chose not to mourn but to celebrate the life, accomplishments, and the family that remained, a valuable lesson.
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