Just Your Typical Christmas Day Funeral

           “Ay, Dios Mio!” The woman at the front cried out. It was moments like this that made me really wish I spoke Spanish.

            It was Christmas Day, and my family was in Costa Rica. We had come there with our friends to escape the cold and experience all that Latin America had to offer. For a few days we had been staying in a condo, in the city of San Jose. Despite the exotic location, in all reality, inside the neighborhood it looked like any other boring, dusty suburban dystopia where every house looked the same, and every thought might just be the same. The whole street was within a compound, with high walls and armed men keeping guard. But outside the neighborhood was a different story. Outside was where the locals lived. There the streets were dusty and the homes rusted; brightly colored paint weathered on houses that lined the streets. The people walked up and down the side of the road, talking and laughing with one another.

            That morning was unlike any other I had experienced. The sun shone bright, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. In maintaining some sense that this was Christmas, and not just another tropical day, we decided to go to mass in one of the communities. We all piled into the rental car and drove to a beautiful white church. Lush flowers in every color surrounded the building, and invigorated the area.

            As we walked through the large, heavy wooden doors, my eyes were assailed by the color. Every person in the church was wearing bright patterns and dresses: fuchsia, turquoise, and yellow. We all sat down in a worn wooden pew. Feeling apart from everyone else at the mass, and certainly a lot paler, we were noticeably different from the rest of the gathering. As we waited for the service to begin a dog casually meandered through the doors.

            “Hey! Look at that dog!” I stage-whispered to my sister. I was astounded by how different this was from home. Apparently, it was normal here for dogs to roam around in and out of churches and buildings. And I seemed to be the only one noticed.

            Soon it looked like the service was about to begin. But instead of a priest, a woman in her fifties climbed to the altar. She took to the podium and began speaking in rapid Spanish, firing off words that I, with my one-year of the language, couldn’t comprehend. But quickly we all noticed that something seemed wrong. The woman was not just speaking, she was weeping… passionately. As we looked around we saw the faces of our fellow churchgoers also crying. The only word out of this woman’s mouth I could catch was muerto -- and that I did understand. Looking from my dad to my sister, I saw that their faces echoed mine in the deep confusion of an American abroad.  

            Finally the grand opening of the double doors at the back of the church interrupted our bewilderment. As they swept open, I saw two lines of men coming in. Two lines of men carrying something. Something heavy. Something wooden. Something that was definitely a coffin. To my deepening horror I realized that we were not at a Christmas Day mass, we were at a funeral.

            Panicked, I turned to look at my family, but there was no leaving. We were trapped, seated in the middle of the church, in a foreign country, at the funeral of a stranger.

            But as I sat there and listened, the words began to make sense. Unfortunately, I did not suddenly learn how to speak Spanish; instead, I became able to understand the sentiment behind the words. The meaning of the people and the love they had for the man were clear. In any language, the emotion in the church was evident. They had come together, families, neighbors, and kin to honor the life of a man they had lost. As an outsider looking in, at a ritual I never thought I would experience in another country, I could see what it meant for these people to be members of a community. How they supported each other and loved one another. Though just earlier that day I had looked on at the locals from behind the high walls of the compound and the windows of the car, and was shocked at the poverty that many of these people lived in, I now saw something else. I witnessed the love that they had for each other, a love that I don’t think is within the sterilized suburban neighborhoods of America. The walls are built so high that they often keep out people, and we never get to feel that sense of community that the people in the church that day had. The kind of community that comes together to love, to cry, and to pack a church on Christmas morning.