My wife looked up me after checking her phone and I immediately knew something was wrong since she must have had a dozen missed calls in the past hour. I too had a few. It was her mom, her brother, and sister calling one after the other as if they were saying to drop everything and just go. Her grandmother had passed away and she needed to get back to her parent’s place in the countryside as if nothing else needed to be explained. My wife and daughter packed a bag to leave early the next day and I would join later in the evening after finishing work.
The next evening I finally arrived at the funeral, I noticed that the immediate family members were all dressed in white robes and wore head wraps that symbolized rank according to the proximity to the deceased as well as age. Other close relatives wore white headbands, the younger children in orange headbands, and everyone else wore dark clothing and black headbands. A funeral band played traditional Vietnamese music with the droning sounds of wooden flute and a twangy harp playing to a steady beat with a singer chanting a melancholy tune. Visitors lined up to burn incense at the altar and pay respects to the deceased and family who stood at the front for a marathon forty-eight hours. However, this tiring feat seemed irrelevant in the grand scheme of an entire life that they mourned.
Funerals in my wife’s countryside typically last three days, the immediate family stands vigil next to the deceased while relatives and friends come to pay their respects at any given time during this period. On the third day the coffin was lifted early in the morning onto a pedestrian driven carriage that was gloriously decorated for what might seem to the foreign eye like a government leader’s funeral. It was led by a group of elderly women dressed in dark brown robes, then the family and friends in what looked like a slow march with hundreds of people filing out of the hamlet to the open rice fields that eventually lead to the cemetery a mile away.
[Traditional Vietnamese funeral in the countryside]
To the Vietnamese this deeply symbolic ritual not only signifies how they support one another in grief, but is also an extension of the community’s respect for life of the deceased and what they might have meant to both family and friends. Not only do the Vietnamese cherish family in life, but also in death. As a community they allow each other time off to mourn a family member’s passing no matter how distant a relative or friend without questions. They pay respect to the dead at funerals and like my wife’s family, they gather every year on the day of the deceased for “giỗ” (pronounced like "yo") or the death anniversary for a family reunion along with friends to pay respects at the altar, catch up with one another, and eat a meal together.
As an American who married into a Vietnamese family I find the death anniversary very meaningful. I lost my mom in 1995 and am both sad and ashamed to say that I haven’t visited her grave since it’s not our family tradition and I was just too sad to do it alone. My family has since moved far away to another state and while I occasionally commiserate with my sisters how we miss our mom in short Facebook messages given there’s just no healthy cultural way for dealing with death except rehashing nostalgic memories and trying to manage suppressed feelings.
I watch the news back home in the U.S. like many foreigners in disbelief as if witnessing a car crash in slow motion that nobody can stop. The United States is fighting turmoil on social, economic and health fronts. While black Americans have been suffering racial injustice for decades, the camera footage of George Floyd on May 25, 2020 for what should have been a routine police stop turned quickly into the all too familiar police brutality and consequential death that sparked national outrage from all corners of the country. Protests lasted days, weeks, and months spreading worldwide and created both a much needed Black Lives Matter movement and public discussion to change police practices and put a spotlight on the injustices that black people still face.
[From L to R: morgue_trucks -Philyvoice, mass-burial NYC- Businessinsider, and nurses-shoes-WH-lawn - KLKNTV]
The health pandemic caused by the spread of Covid-19 started to take America by storm in March causing war like conditions that I had not seen since what seems like a lifetime ago when I was in midtown Manhattan on September 11, 2001. Again, hospitals were filled beyond capacity with sirens of ambulances blaring non-stop meanwhile the virus started to spread like wild fire throughout the country. The white house took steps to close borders to Chinese nationals, but was slow to take aggressive measures to treat the virus and keep people home long enough to get the pandemic under control. The result has not only had serious health effects, but many unnecesary deaths. The global pandemic has also caused disaster to the economy. Simply put, a population that cannot overcome the pandemic will surely be doomed to recover financially. For many working class Americans who cannot work from home, their lives have been put in double-jeopardy by having to go out to the work and be exposed to the virus while the government still plans for disaster instead of making plans to stop the virus and create socioeconomic programs for low income families that are in the most desperate need.
Reading the NY Times listing of thousands of deceased (
Remembering the 100,000 Lives Lost as of 5/24/2020) from the pandemic, I thought to myself what is the value of a life? Many of these people were written off as elderly, some had pre-existing health conditions, but all were lives. There has notably been no honorable mention of thousands of lost lives by the White House and instead grim symbols of refrigerator trucks and mass burial grounds for overcrowded morgues to remind us of the numbers. President Trump instead of giving a speech posted a prepared note on Twitter and then went back to his usual tirade whining about everyone being unfair to him including Twitter itself. I hope one day that instead of just flying the flag at half-mast at the While House, that these people are memorialized in a way that I experienced at my wife’s countryside, that their lives are remembered in more than just a newspaper listing, that the public can share for even a moment, and recognize that these thousands of lives that were also meaningful. The value of a life isn't just a number, a statistic, but a person who meant something to someone.
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