The aunt of my wife died last week. She was 82. As the English are wont to say on these occasions, she had a good innings; glibly equating one person’s life with a creditable batting performance in a cricket match.
Silvana was a woman I met on only a handful of occasions so, while her passing is sad, I can’t pretend it left me distraught. I therefore attended her funeral feeling more like an observer than one of the bona fide mourners.
The experience left me reflecting on some of the contrasts between the way the Italians and the English process their dead.
One of the striking differences is the custom of having the body available for a public ‘viewing’ immediately prior to burial. Unlike in Ireland, this does not usually take place in the home of the deceased but at a morgue and there is never anything remotely resembling a party atmosphere.
The location in the case of Silvana was the main hospital of her home town of Cesena in Emilia Romagna. There, the morgue consists of half a dozen rooms each with space for two bodies. Outside each room, the name of the temporary occupants are displayed and the bodies lie in open coffins. The rooms had no doors so it was possible to see other bodies laid out for visitors to pay their last respects.
It occurred to me that anyone could come here and mingle with the bereaved pretending to be a long lost friend or relative. If you were ever in need of a sobering reminder of your own mortality, there can be few better places.
Most of the other bodies were of elderly people but in the end room, the photograph outside showed a busty woman in her thirties looking tanned and full of life, a picture that looked incongruous and somehow in bad taste. Her mourners too were dressed in designer leisure wear as though to deliberately offset the greyness of the setting and looking as if this woman’s early death hadn’t yet sunk in.
All the bodies are covered by a thin white gauze like a lace curtain. In this way, you can make a farewell kiss without actually making direct contact with the face. The body is carefully prepared by embalmers to look presentable – eyes glued shut, mouth stitched up and make up applied. Silvana had no children and her husband was not in a coherent state so her sister (my wife’s mother) chose what she should wear – a long plain dress, tights and black shoes. Bizarrely, these were purchased especially for the occasion from a shop specialising in clothes for this one-off occasion.
Embalmers do a thorough job of cleaning and polishing the corpse but the end result is that of a wax figure rather than a once living being. In this particular morgue, the hands of the corpses are placed together on their chests as if they are making a final prayer.
Prior to this, the only other dead body I had seen was that of my father. As I wasn’t present when he died, I asked to see him and went with my elder brother. He was laid in a single room behind a curtain with a reproduction of William Holman Hunt’s allegorical painting of Christ, The Light Of The World hung behind the coffin. The stillness was the thing I remember most and it was not like I was seeing my real father, more like a symbolic representation of him to prove that he was no more.
In England, it is not the custom for friends and relatives to view the body but presumably embalmers and undertakers get to work just the same in the event of special requests like mine.
The way a death is publicised is also different. In Italy black edged posters are placed on street level advertising hoardings. These announce recent deaths, but are also commissioned to mark the anniversary of someone’s passing. In one tragic case in a nearby town, a girl aged 10 was run down on a pedestrian crossing near her home and each year the parents pay to display a colour photograph around the town with just her name, Alice, and the date written above. This is unusual as, although the photograph may be in colour, the rest contains black text stating name, dates and a short message, usually chosen from stock phrases in the undertakers’ files.
In England, the most public announcement is usually via a small ad in the local newspaper. This will contain a few well chosen lines of deep regret and gives details of when and where the funeral will take place. My grandmother used to take delivery of the free paper and turn directly to these obituaries saying “Let’s see who’s died”. I think she took some satisfaction from knowing how many she had outlived.
The Italian way with death is solemn, brisk and very efficient. When the viewing is over, the coffin is swiftly sealed. A metal cover is soldered into place and then the lid is screwed down with a electric screwdriver. This is followed by a mass at a nearby church and then the coffin is transported to the cemetery for burial or cremation. The priest will sprinkle water and waft some incense over the coffin and intone a prayer hoping for eternal repose.
Plots are in short supply where Silvana was laid to rest. Her coffin was slotted into a free space created by removing old bones of some poor soul whose life is now long forgotten. Her brother watched the process then turned to me and said “Do you see how we all end up?” He wasn’t smiling.
