Dispatch Number 10 -Death in Mexico

Sunday Mass near 8 pm the church sings in beautiful tones with guitar accompaniment to a near empty chamber while the town squares are at capacity. Life lived out in the open is the Mexico I see and experience. The parks are full, the streets are full, street vendors are everywhere, restaurants dot every street. All of it with open doors. Jewelry stores, butcher shops, Internet cafes, auto parts stores and the most difficult for this traveller to get over, the funeral parlors -yes, they too are out in the open. Caskets on display like the VW dealer displays cars up the street.

I squirm each time I pass one and this confounds me since I am relatively OK with death, but seeing caskets just inside an open door under bright lights is beyond me. Don't even believe in caskets, cannot understand why someone would put another in one. Fancy shinny caskets the blind worms cannot see. A puzzling ceremony, yet I turn light in the stomach and head when I pass an open door or big window with them on display.

What is the peoples relationship with death when life is lived out in the open, like it is here in Mexico? Death seems to be very much a part of life as much as shopping for food is. Here funeral parlors are not a private affair. Open to the street. I walk by look in and see a group of six women talking to the coffin seller as he holds something silky over a sparkling open casket. From the street I see the women's backs and the attentive face of the coffin seller under bright fluorescent lights. Flushed with guilt I feel like I am spying.

Life unvarnished. Real, accepted and authentic. There is a practicality to it all, a matter-of-factness to what life perhaps really is, a life lived without masks, curtains or closed doors. Lovers meet in the park to share new found excitement, new babies are held high, whole families run busy restaurants. The funeral parlor shines as brightly as the restaurant I just ate at and lets a passerby like me voyeur upon anothers loss.

I am an American and have been taught that death is a shameful thing, something to be hidden from view and hidden from my own feelings -to treat it and interact with it as if it had not happened. And all of it takes place behind closed doors for no one else to see. Picking out the fancy casket that the blind worms can't even see.

Dog in the street around 8am in final death tremors, it is a German Sheppard in its final life passage, its fur twitches and limbs shake non-stop, laying on its side on a narrow cobblestone street while people continue their day for fresh bread or a job. The dog is noticed and quickly accepted without much sentiment. The street is narrow, only wide enough for two cars to pass each other -to the pedestrian the dog cannot be ignored.

Death and life are different here.