BISCUIT AND COFFEE

Dec 23, 2008 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

---

Death seems irreconcilable with Christmas. This special time of the year which in religious terms celebrates the birth of Jesus is not something that we associate with death but rather with life.

Yet, throughout the length and breadth of Guyana at this time of the year there are families who have been plunged into mourning because of the passing of a loved one. It is quite a sad way to spend the holidays.

I often say a silent prayer that misfortune would not strike at my door for the holidays, and especially that no one that I know will die at this time. My prayers are not always answered.

Recently, someone that I knew passed away and I attended the wake. It was not a glum affair as I had expected. I tried initially to put the new spirit of the wake to the fact that it is Christmas and everyone is in an upbeat mood.

I found out after careful observation that Christmas had nothing to do with the cheer of the event. The wake was upbeat because this is how wakes are becoming these days.

It is becoming more a celebration of the life of the deceased, rather than a drawn-out mourning of the person that has passed to the Great Beyond.

All of these changes have seemingly taken place while I was asleep. It has crept up so fast on me that I was really taken aback at the differences between wakes of long ago and those held today.

These changes, instigated by the richer classes keen to use even a funeral to display their ostentation, have broken with centuries of tradition.

I pray that I will not live long enough to see these changes become fully institutionalized in Guyana because I would hate to think what it would cost my family when I pass, like I must eventually, to the Great Beyond.
There used to be a time when it was more costly to die than to live. The tab for funerals went through the roof. It is no longer so.

The emergence of Sandy’s Funeral Parlour changed all of this. The owner of Sandy’s Funeral Parlour deserves to be recognized as the entrepreneur of the decade.

He has done more to assist Guyanese than any other business person. His cheap funerals have forced the prices of funerals down and now made it affordable for Guyanese to bury their dead.

The wake is now more expensive than the funeral. No longer is it simply coffee and biscuit that are served. Today a wake house, especially if the person is rich, is like a party.

There is food, there are pastries, there are alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks. There are tents erected, not the makeshift ones that used to be hastily assembled by tying a piece of tarpaulin onto a few runners.

No, these are tents that are professionally made and rented at a fee. Then there are plastic tables and chairs to be set up so that those who come to offer their sympathies – and enjoy the treats – can have somewhere comfortable to sit.

I hate this affair. I find it crude and out of place. This is not what a wake was like. It is not also what a wake should be like.

It is also placing a great deal of pressure on the family of deceased persons. As if it were not enough that the family are in deep distress over the passing of a loved one, as if they were not in expense enough to have to find money to bury the dead, they now have to further dig deep into their pockets to keep up with the changing trends of costly wakes.

I think it is time that we reverse this nonsense which is being foisted by the rich upon our society. I love the traditional wake house where coffee is served with biscuit so that the mourners can subsist throughout the night.

Staying at a wake house all night has always been a tradition in the countryside. There were always practical reasons for this. Some mourners would have come from very far and there was no transportation to take them home. Thus there was little choice but to keep awake all night. This is also perhaps how the “wake” got its name.

Times have changed and transportation is now more readily available. But I am shocked at the sort of quickie wakes that we have. By ten o’clock everyone is home these days. I find people anxious to get home after they would have eaten their belly full.

This is eroding also an important purpose of wakes. Wakes always served as a kind of reunion for family. Persons you did not see for some time you would meet up. Their children would have grown and gotten children whom you would not know, and therefore the wake house offered the opportunity for you to get to know these persons.

Also you got to meet and know more about your relatives who came in from overseas. All of this is being lost because of the changes that are taking place with wakes these days. I hope that things can change back to what they used to be. I hope that we can halt the separation with tradition.

If anything Christmas in Guyana has taught us is the importance of preserving traditions. There can be no Guyanese Christmas without traditions, and therefore I plead for a return to the days of biscuit and coffee at wake houses.

---

---