The Thousandth Day

Last night I was invited, along with Fr. Joseph, the director of the St. Joseph Retreat House, to attend what is considered the three-year of thousand day anniversary of the death of a spouse.  Some say this is old Javanese custom, commemorating first the fortieth day, then the hundredth, the one year, and finally the thousandth day since the death of the loved one.  As we arrived in the large music studio where Mrs. Cecelia Tolus and her husband have conducted their teaching in all kinds of musical instruments, we were led into a room where an altar was decked in flowers, and where somehow it smelled funereal.  There was no body, however, only a picture of the husband, and three pictures beside his, one of his mother, one of his brother and one of his sister, all of whom had also passed away.  Our only ritual act at this point was to take flowers from trays arranged in front of the photo, and put them in a box to be taken to the graveside this morning.  After a time of chatting among the guests, some two hundred of them, a group of us remained for a memorial Mass.  All these people were there to support Cecilia, who told us that she was both happy and sad that night, and her face really showed it.  Cecilia, now one of my good friends here in Bali, had already shared with me at her house some thoughts she had written, in which she put into writing much of what she has been learning from the words of Neale Donald Walsch, that death is not the end, and that with every loss there is something of a gift to be discovered.  The priest who offered the Mass told an interesting story (translated for me by Fr. Joseph) that when he left the seminary in Malaysia he was told he would be working among the Bataks (I think that’s the right ethnic group but there are so many!) who are people of the “long house.”  They have always made their houses one long house, where people can come and go and be connected.  Now, they are making separations, putting up walls, changing the character of their life together.  All this relates to the point made so well in a book I have been reading about Java that I will quote it here.  The book is A Shadow Falls in the Heart of Java by Andrew Beatty, an English anthropologist who lived over several years in a small village in east Java with his family.  Here are his words about leaving the village life and returning to what was once “normal” :

"In the village, daily life was shared.  You grew up with people, attended their weddings and prayer-meals, shared their misfortunes, helped dig their graves.  And at every waking moment they were around: tending the next field, sweeping the yard, sitting on your doorstep in the evenings.  As you fell asleep you could hear their coughs and murmurs through the wall.  Their presence was the inescapable condition of your existence.  I was always we. In death or life, nobody was every really alone.  If you moved to a different part of the village, our old ties fell away but there would be others just as strong.  It wasn't depth or continuity that counted but the sustaining presence of others, like Frost's silken tent.  One could drift between families and neighbourhoods, marry and remarry, but the gentle embrace of the community was constant.

In the West,--or perhaps simply out of the village--you pursued your 'own life.'  Of course, you had friends and relatives and at regular moments your lives overlapped with theirs, but your path was separate.  An individual destiny, with goals and obstacles, life was 'what you made of it.'

We knew what it would be like to return to the isolation and boundedness of the nuclear family:  an adjustment of shape; a shock for the children; separate lives.  . . .  We had nothing to go back to, no jobs or settled life, nothing planned: it was too soon."

Those are Andrew Beatty's words, but as I end my Indonesian journey, I can relate to them in my own life, and, to my surprise, even as I look toward leaving here, I also contemplate returning, and making a place for myself that is not separate.