The Burial

My youngest cousin wipes tears away while my grandfather is lowered into the ground. Note the blue flower on her head. She's the daughter of my uncle Eddie. Also notice the red flowers people are holding. They signify my grandfather lived a long, rich life.

The burial started by going to the funeral home at noon. We sat there for about an hour. People did the incense bowing thing and eventually at 1pm the monk showed up. There was more incense burning and following the monk who walked in a big circle around the funeral parlor. We walked around three times carrying burning incense sticks. I was told it symbolizes going to hell then rising up to heaven. I wasn't clued into the reasoning of doing it three times. Three pops up quite a bit I've noticed. After a bit more bowing and sharing tea with my grandfather, the casket was closed and put into a Hurst.

There was a bit of confusion as to what car to take. After a lot of waiting outside, it was decided by the funeral director that I would take the first car with the monk and driver up to the burial site. I was waiting in the car with my uncle Jack and a big stick of incense with was still burning and had been transplanted to my uncle from the pot o burning incense. Originally he was to take the same car as the body but because the limo was a lot of money compared to the car we were sitting in and it was a rental, they didn't want ashes (from the burning sticks) to be all over the car. The discount version. After a few minutes of waiting in the car I noticed the monk wandering around outside. He looked like David Carradine from the kung fu TV series. He even had the little shoulder pouch. Eventually we left with him taking a lift in the flower truck.

When we arrived at the burial site, the casket was moved from the car to the lowering mechanism by the six pallbearers wearing white gloves. My uncle Herrick was in charge of making sure the casket was properly closed and that the casket was level once in the ground. If the casket was shifted in meant that my grandfather wouldn't "rest" properly. That would mean that all the living ancestors would be cursed or jinxed until death or until his resting site was corrected. There are a lot of chinese movies, mostly comedies I’ve noticed, where the descendants have really bad luck because of a relative not being buried properly or in a place with bad feng shui. The most recent movie I’ve seen is called “The Conman 2002”. The main character has really bad luck and finds out that the government bought the property where his ancestors were buried and built a couple of public restrooms over the graves. Like most chinese movies the humor is pretty zany. On a scale from 1 to 10, 10 being good, I’d rate this movie a 3 maybe 4.

Once the casket was given the thumbs up by my uncle we would then place flowers over the coffin along with our designation ribbons and floral pins. The flowers were red. The color symbolizes that the person who died had a full and rich life. If the person did not have a full life the color with go more to pink or even white. Because my grandfather was over the age of 90 he was considered to have a full life. Considering he had 10 offspring left to help bury him I’d say that was true. Another thing that was interesting was he died of natural causes. He didn’t have cancer or weird bone problems before he died and he was mentally sound. He had just recently started using a walker due to being out of breath. It didn't stop him from wandering around to price things and buy food. I would wish everyone could die this way.

After the burial we all went back to my grandmother's apartment where we ate some sugary candy and drank water. I'm not sure how that was significant. There was some kind of thing about that though. After the quick visit, we left the picture of my grandfather in the apartment and went to meet up with all the other people form the funeral at a local chinese restaurant where we all stuffed ourselves and traded stories.

My aunt Mayrose told us about a time where my grandfather spoke english. Before she finished the sentence a bunch of my cousins along with me said "He spoke English!?". It was obvious that none of us knew he could. He would always speak to us in chinese. We found out it was to get us to learn the language. That didn't work very well.

I remember once, as a kid, when we went to visit him he would say in chinese (my mom would translate) that I could have any food I wanted as long as I could ask for it in chinese. My answer was a can of coke-a-cola. Since the name of the cola was known in China as the same (or cocaine translated from chinese) I was allowed that item because of the loop hole. But that's all I had while I was there. I wonder if he'd be proud that I've learnt the names of most dim sum dishes?