Becoming an Ancestor: The Isthmus Zapotec Way of Death

3. Artists of Bread, Flowers, Prayers, and Music

49 THE FIRST FORTY DAYS regain their composure. When the last of the candles is extinguished, the display of grief stops. How this happens differs from person to person, depending on personality and one’s own sense of propriety. Women and men are respectful of each other’s feelings and needs, neither needing nor demanding uniformity. By midnight everyone except the family had gone. RETURN TO THE EVERYDAY The next morning, I woke to relative silence; no bustle, no chatter. After Rosinda attended to Chu who wanted food packed for a trip to his rancho, she and I returned to the quiet of the altar room. We put fresh flowers in the vases on the altar. The vases placed on the floor and the flower-body that had accompanied them had gone with the end of the forty days. Berta’s spirit had gone too. With the lifting of this second flower-body, which like the first is taken to the cemetery chapel, she was freed to go to her resting place in the cemetery community of other spirits. Until this leave-taking happens, candles are kept lit in the altar room so that she does not lose her way. Now only one lighted candle on the altar and a small cross of palm in the grillwork of one window remain—these to keep her spirit happy in its new home. We folded and stacked the wooden chairs, swept and mopped the floor, and made everything tidy. Mavis and Berta joined us and we sat down to the task of counting the donations Rosinda had received over the last few days. It takes a long time to count, and we found ourselves laughing each time we picked up a discarded tissue that, to our surprise, still had money in it. As many donations as there were, the money still did not cover the expenses of the Mass, all the meals, the bread, and the tamales. Still, it does help defray the large expenditure. It is part of the system of reciprocity that binds Zapotec to each other and that makes possible a decent standard of living for most people. No one who participates in this web of relationship is allowed to go hungry or homeless or, indeed, to die alone. It also makes it possible to meet these impossible to anticipate, one-time, big expenses, which otherwise would be beyond the means of most families. Later in the afternoon, I accompanied Delia to Emma’s house to see how she was doing. We had visited on the day of her mother’s death, taking flowers and candles. The scene at Emma’s house was a duplicate of the one a month ago in Rosinda’s—flowers everywhere, candles overflowing improvised packing boxes, people coming and going, Emma seated in a big comfortable chair, dressed in black, caring for her mother’s spirit and being cared for by her own living family. Rosinda acknowledged the end of the forty days that evening by going to the market to buy the shrimp, the salty cheese, and the totopos for cena, the last meal of the day. With her mother’s illness keeping her close, and the 50 BECOMING AN ANCESTOR obligations posed by Berta’s death, Rosinda had scarcely set foot outside the compound for months. Saturday began as a quiet day. No one went to the cemetery because Saturday is the day that the Virgin makes her weekly visit to the spirits who live there. Rosinda was still cleaning her part of the compound. As she swept around the laundry basin, she found the small cross of palm that the wind had torn from the window. She brushed it off and put it back. Cemetery Visiting Early Sunday morning, Rosinda, Irma, and I went to the cemetery, chauffeured by Vicente. We had our arms loaded with flowers—two bunches of white mums, two of agapanthus, a triple bunch of lavender mums, and some cordoncillo from the patio garden. Cordoncillo is used as the base for the flower bodies laid out in front of altars and in the tombs; it is also a cleansing plant used to clean out flower vases, leaving them not only clean of old plant matter but also sweet-smelling. Vicente brought us buckets of water from the nearest water trough, and we set to work cleaning all the vases as well as the floor of the tomb. We filled the two large permanent urns at the...