Lightening Strikes

May 27, 2011

It’s something how a day can change. One hour you’re sitting under a bright blue sky on a school field trip while a few hours later it’s storming and you’re standing, soaked, in a living room looking into the open eyes of a man struck dead by lightening.

When word came up the mountain that two viajitos were stuck and killed by lightening my host mom left immediately, despite the persistent rain and lightening, to find out what happened. I went with her because it seemed like one of those things you just don’t say no to. We arrived after a 30-minute search soaked, cold, and more curious than ever.

Somewhere along the long walk I realized how terrible of a thing we were doing. Rubbernecking, but to an extreme. Hiking around the mountain trying to find the two dead, old men.

But when we arrived and were standing in the room looking at the dead body laying in the hammock surrounded by family, friends, acquaintances, and the curious that I realized the only thing worse than gawking is having an empty house and a dead body.

You want people to care and to be near you. You want them to grieve with you. You want people to follow your father as his bent body is carried in a hammock back home. It was as more of the town slowly filled his house and spilled outside into the rain soaked yard that I realized that my understanding of death and grief is, like everything about me, distinctly American.

Once he was placed on his bed in the middle of the living room, lit only by a oil burning candle, his children, grandchildren, cousins, nieces and nephews slowly lifted the old man’s body, washed him, dressed him in his finest clothes, and closed his eyes. My host mom held onto the shoulders of his thin, frail sister while she sat at her brother’s bedside rubbing his hand and weeping.

I excused myself outside where the rain was calming and the boulder filled mountainside was covering itself with a cold layer of dusty fog. I watched as neighbors helped make arrangements for the night. Men ran electrical wire through the forest to the nearest house so the family might have a light bulb by which they can pass the night at his bedside. Our town mayor called to have the casket, a simple wooden box, sent. Women brought food and cared for the grieving.

I pinched myself to wake up from the surreal Honduran moment but all I could see was fog and all I could hear was weeping.