Death rites in Georgia

Sadly, I am now qualified to write on Georgian death rites.  My friend and karate instructor lost his 12-year old son this weekend, struck by a car while crossing the street.  Today was the viewing and I went to pay my respects.  Besides being heartbreakingly sad, it also provided a window into Georgian culture, albeit a window into which I would have preferred never to have peeked.

Georgian viewings are not held in a funeral home or a church.  Funeral homes here have the job of simply preparing the body for burial.  (Cremation is frowned upon by the Eastern Orthodox Church.)  They pick up the body from the hospital (which serves as the morgue), embalm it, prepare it for the viewing, collect the casket from the casket seller, and deliver the casket to the home.  That’s where the viewing takes place – in what 50 years ago we would have called the “parlor.” 

On the way to the viewing, I stopped and bought flowers.  The traditional arrangement for funerals is lilies shaped in a cross.  I then drove to the town of Rustavi, the 3^rd or 4^th largest city in Georgia, about 30 kilometers (18 miles) outside of Tbilisi.  My friend’s family lives in a 40-year old, nine-floor Soviet-style apartment building, without a working elevator, on the top floor.  As I entered the building, I heard wailing echoing down the steps.  Not crying, not sobbing but wailing – heart rending wailing that stirs up emotions thought buried by thousands of years of evolution.  I climbed the concrete steps to the top floor, torn between my duty and desire to pay my respects to my friend and my brain’s reptilian complex telling me to run back down the stairs, leap into the car, and drive away as fast as possible.  At about the fifth floor, flowers have been taped or tied to the handrail.  Both handrails from here to the top floor are covered with flowers.  On the steps lie more flowers, as if someone simply got tired of attaching flowers to the rails.   

At the top of the stairs is a small landing, perhaps 5 foot square.  On that landing are crammed ten or so folding chairs, so close they touch.  On each chair sits a man, each dressed in a black shirt, silently smoking.  They are male relatives of the family.  They greet me with a nod and go back to focusing intently on the end of their cigarettes.  My friend meets me on this landing.  I shake his hand and kiss his cheek, the traditional Georgian greeting.  I express my condolences and he ushers me into the apartment. 

It is a small but well-kept apartment.  The floors, like the walls and the ceiling, are cement.  The floors are covered by worn but brightly colored rugs and the walls by wallpaper that was probably hung when the building was built.  From the ceiling in each room hangs a naked bulb from a wire.  I’m escorted through the foyer, past a very small kitchen with very old appliances, into the parlor.  It takes all my effort to keep from gasping out loud.

In the center of the parlor, on the floor, sits the casket.  It is an adult-sized casket and fills the vast majority of the room.  The entire top of the casket is glass, and inside is my friend’s 12-year old son, wearing his best “school clothes.”  I place my flowers on the floor next to the casket, adjacent to a framed 8x10 school picture of the child.  Surrounding the casket are 20 or so folding chairs on which the female family members sit, all in black with their heads covered by black scarves.  I follow someone else who is there expressing his condolences.  We walk around the casket, expressing our sympathy to each of the women.  The mother is leaning on the casket top, wailing to her son.  This is the sound I heard when I entered the building.  It is a pitiful crying as she calls to her son. 

When the mother tires, another female family member picks up the crying.  It is a constant background sound throughout my visit.  The weeping is constant and very loud, as if Death could be scared away by the sheer force and volume of the heartfelt sobbing.

I move back to the landing, again expressing my condolences to my friend and I leave.  One does not stay long at a viewing unless family.  (Family members are expected to stay at the home during the entire one-day viewing period.)  The lamentations follow me down the steps, guaranteeing a long and sober drive home. 

The funeral, held at the local church, will be tomorrow.  The funeral home will come to the apartment tomorrow morning to pick up the casket, giving the child one more night in his home.  From there it will be delivered to the church.  Funerals are traditionally attended only by family members and very close friends.  After the funeral, the casket will be taken to the gravesite where the family will spread food and drink on a picnic table (Graveyards here in Georgia are all well equipped with picnic tables and concrete benches.) and have a family meal.  The casket sits on a rack, hovering above the open grave.  The headstone is usually black marble engraved with a photo of the deceased.  When the family leaves, workers will come and fill in the grave by hand.  And my friend will take his family back to their apartment and try to make sense of this tragedy.  He will fail, as do all parents who lose children.  And next week he will return to work at the Academy where I work, and his wife will return to her job, and their remaining son will go back to school, and they will try to pick up their lives.  And in that they will succeed because my friend is strong.  It is a strength he would have been happy never to have known he has.