Funeral

I attended my first Swazi funeral today. Words cannot express all that I felt.
Waking up, still cloaked in darkness, we drove out to Siphoceseni to arrive at Gugu’s homestead and bury her sister at 5:30 am. We stood on the hillside opposite the mountains and the rising sun. There was something sacred about that time.
There was no sterile funeral home with organ music and folding chairs, but Swazi church members singing softly and gently dancing.
There was no row upon row of cemetery plots to bury her among strangers, but a hillside of beloved family who had gone before her.
There was something special about the morning,- a sense of returning God’s Creation back to his creation.
But there was a sense of unrest within me that followed.
I counted 20 graves on that hillside, most too fresh to have grown grass.
She was laid to rest beside her infant daughter who died just two months ago.
I saw 3 little girls at the home who were now motherless. They each had a little bundle in their arms,- all of their worldly possessions. A blanket, a few clothes, one carried a little bench.
They were being taken to their father in hope that he would take them in.
“One has a different father, but we don’t know where he is,- if he’s dead. We hope the father of the two will take her anyway. If not we don’t know where she’ll go to.”
The three smiled and waved at me, seemingly unaware of what was about to happen. They were just following Gogo’s direction to take their things to the truck.
“Thank you for coming to us today.” Uncle said to us. “I can say, no matter where you have come from, you have shared with us in our bereavement. You are Swazi now.”
But I will never be Swazi.
I will never know the pain of burying my uncle, then my mother, then my niece, then my sister.
I will never have to bury my 6 children and then 5 grandchildren.
I will never have to harden my heart against the grief just to make it through the day.
I will never be Swazi.