All About Latvia

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RIGA – “Did you hear, Solzhenitsin became a great Russian writer yesterday,” I told Peteris.

“No. Why?”

“He died.”

It takes crossing into another life for a writer to be elevated into a position of a great writer in Russia as great writers have served as prophets for the nation and its people. And no one likes prophets.

“We ridiculed you, Aleksandr Isayevich,” said a man in the crowd of mourners walking by the body of a dead writer laying in state.

“We ridiculed you. You are the best writer in the world,” he said.

Reading this well-written account of the funeral in Kommersant, I thought of two things: the way different nations handle death and what happened since my grandfather died.

I wrote back in January:

I’ve been to many funerals in the West. I attended a funeral once when a coffin stood right outside the doorway of a south Michigan church. Every time someone walked in, the door would hit the coffin making a noise. I attended a funeral which ended in cremation, when a coffin moves on the belt into a firy furnace to be buried. Another graveside service ended with people leaving the coffin above the ground – some in the West apparently believe that seeing the body of a loved one lowered into the 6-foot deep hole is too distressing, so they avoid it all together not realizing that this constitutes a normal grieving process.

Westerners think it’s too traumatic of an experience seeing your loved one lowed into the ground and covered in dirt. They seem to shun death, hoping to avoid the unavoidable. They want to look young, feel healthy. Elderly are shipped into nursing homes away from people’s eyes. Then, they gradually make a transition into death and even then family and friends aren’t confronted with the Eternal Question.

I remember when the former US president Ronald Regan became great. His body had laid in state at the U.S. Capitol, a coffin covered in an American flag standing into the middle of the rotunda. People passing by where saying goodbye to an expensive wooden box rather than their former president.

Russian – and Latvian – funerals take place with an open coffin. I attended a funeral of one of my friend’s mom in Latvia last January, which was a simple protestant funeral, but it had an open coffin standing in a chapel where people who knew her could gather to give her the last respect. “She lost so much weight,” I remember a woman saying.

Then, a processional marched through the cemetery into the graveside before men shut the coffin with a lid.

In January, my grandfather died. We buried him using all traditional Old Believer rites, including an open casket. My grandmother regretted not taking any pictures of the funeral. Since then, my grandmother has been faithfully visiting his grave. For Russians, a grave isn’t simply a place of burial, it’s a place of communion between the living and the dead.

“How are you, Grisha,” my grandmother would say, calling on my grandfather’s name. “Have you missed me? How is it for you here in the rain?”

The response is always the same: silence.

My grandmother has been going to his grave every Saturday: to clean up, plant flowers– and more importantly to talk. The grave site now has transformed from a flowerbed grave into a stone monument to my grandfather.

When I was gone on a three-week trip recently, she went to the cemetery to cry, to complain about life, and find some kind of communion with her deceased husband. From time to time, we take a picnic and go to the grave to give remembrance to the dead. And almost every time, my grandmother leaves sweets, meat cakes, and a shot of vodka for my grandfather.