Having grown up in England, I became accustomed to the somber, more subtle expressions of grief. The customs of my native land , South Croatia I sometimes find bizarre, and the best way I can understand them is by contextualizing them, processing them through the cultural narrative I do understand—that allows me to observe removed from emotional engagement.
The Croatian, Mediterranean culture I can better understand through the introduction of Western films about the Greeks and Italians. These were a part of my life as a teenager, a part of the lives of people I was growing up among, things I could discuss with my friends. Paradoxically, somehow I am a part of the mystical, melodramatic, God-fearing, God-cursing, post-communist atheist Balkan cocktail, and fruit of tradition, an old family, older than the olive trees, from a little town nestled both in the sea and the mountain.
The first funerals I went to were shocking to me—grandfather, then grandmother, then stepfather. Then Krivi, my friend fisherman, then someone's grandma, then eventually the funeral of someone far too young to die—a self-proclaimed guardian and the Godfather of my town—and my gangster friend Mario. Mario's was the most interesting, a funeral where so many people came: the police, the army, the secret police, the politicians, the celebrities, the neighbors, women and men and children, football supporters, and sailors. He was shot in the head in the town he guarded. Despite always being a controversial figure, he was loved.
I did not know if I would go to this funeral. My uncle had died, but my uncle had not been an uncle to me for the last 20 years, just as my aunt had not been my aunt or a sister to my mother, and the cousins were also not around for my wedding or the births of my children, nor do our children play together or actually know each other. When my grandmother died, my aunt and mother were no longer held together by their mother, and so naturally just stopped being sisters.
All their consequent encounters were violent, unpleasant, within a legal framework and connected to the bountiful inheritance of property they were left by their parents in this little idyllic town and have continued to fight over for the last two decades. Neither of them had done anything constructive with their inherited lands. They are still not in agreement and the land is still in dispute.
The death of my uncle stirred up anger in me, and confusion. But my mother went for the first time in years to the house of her sister, which made me and my brother skeptical because our aunt did not go to her husband's funeral or support my brother through his father's death. And these kinds of things you remember. It's not like a vendetta—but at the time of a funeral, when you are at the edge of life and death in a family, somehow you just remember the faces of people who came to support you—and are aware of those who decided not to. You just remember.
There I was in the car, driving to the funeral. I have always had my own language with the universe or the divine, there are certain signs which I understand, visual signs that appear—and I heed them as guidance, confirmation of doing something right, and as I drove out of the city, the signs were everywhere. A huge intensity of signs and all carrying the meaning—you are doing the right thing.
I have been reading Florence Scovel Shinn recently to get through my own hardships with faith. And Jose Silva. And Louise Hay. And a little Bible. Forgiveness is a big theme with all these teachers. Driving from Split, to Solin, Solin to Kaštela, I started to speak out loud, and clean up my relation to this family. It is a family I had loved and who were my family as a child, but in between them and me now stood disappointment, hurt, sadness, pain, anger, criticism, jealousy, superficiality, and lack of depth, warmth, care, or honesty.
"I cast all this to the divine, to let myself go free." I spent the whole journey shouting this stuff out, all the negative emontions and connotations I had with each member of this family. By the time I arrived at the cemetery, I arrived lighter, my own load of resentment discarded, to the divine to get rid of, and I was cleansed to react as I am, as who I am, free of negatives.
I stopped writing this chapter to take my children and the dog for a walk at the sea—and as I stopped, the title 'United in Funeral,' already established in the little box at the top of the screen—my mother called. I am always reluctant to take her calls because they always agitate me in a variety of ways—but I took this call. Vlado has died, she said, Blanka's Vlado. My godmother's, her first cousin's, my grandmother's niece's husband. Another funeral within a week. From my experience of the previous waves of deaths—it is always a season of funerals in a family, never a solitary goodbye.
To attend a funeral as a Dalmatian woman, the dress code consists of wearing all black, black sunglasses, strong perfume, high heels, a fur coat, and handkerchiefs. Makeup is also present, confusing due to the smearing risk, but the truth is that Dalmatian women at funerals, as at weddings, know they will be seen, studied, and can't afford to show up careless of what will be read out of their outfits.
So as I turned up in my white fake fur coat, high heels, perfume, and a black dress, I knew all I wore would be noted. I have no dark coat. I have a pink coat. But as white and absolutely inappropriate as this is—at least it’s elegant. My aunt and cousins wore black lace veils across their heads. Something so quaint, and unexpected, something I had not seen in Kastelan women before, but had seen in mafia films and Sicilian gangster funerals.
In the mortuary, there is a hierarchical line of people around the casket. My aunt, the widow, stood first, and all the others—daughters, grandsons. To me unexpectedly and also somewhat embarrassingly, I discovered my mother, in the line despite her not having much to do with the deceased at all or her sister for decades. The sisters of the deceased and their families.
Coming to give one's condolences requires shaking the hand of each bereaved individual and depending on how close you are to them, kissing them on the cheeks. I had no idea if my arrival would be accepted or publicly rejected.
But my aunt accepted my condolences and called me "my beauty", after which my cousins accepted my condolences. This may seem like an unnoticeable action, a formality, but actually this was a significant shift in the relations to date.
"Funerals are opportunities to solve the family business," said my friend the next day when at the horse ranch.
Although due to such prolonged removal from contact, I had no deep grief connected to this, the funeral brought up my childhood memories when I was close to these cousins and aunt and uncle and spent a lot of time at their house, and as a teenager, summers away from my own mother staying at this house with the cousins and grandparents was the peak of my year.
I watched the grief and was stirred when the casket was placed into the tomb of my family, alongside all the dead related to us. I observed how beautiful my aunt is, and remembered how powerful she is and can be, despite the recent years which have distanced us and lessened her impact in the community.
My mother was holding on to the aunt, like a shadow, a black shadow stuck to her body the whole time. I suppose she saw herself as considerate and a martyr holding her sister from falling, but I found her sudden, intense intervention, lack of boundaries in every way disturbing.
She would go back with her sister and the cousins to their house afterwards. I was not invited. And I was not going to throw myself uninvited anywhere because, unlike my mother whose life role is Victim, I am just not. I do not need acceptance at any price.
But, the truth is something happened in all this, a spiritual alchemy, and I felt happy I had come, and I felt sort of glad of the closeness, and I felt a desire to go to this house that I loved to go to in my childhood when I felt I had a large family. I told my mother I will come if I am invited with my daughter, and left the funeral for Split, awaited my child from the school bus, and we ate the prawn risotto I had made for her earlier. The cousin invited me and the children. So I got a bag of sweets and headed for an official visit post-funeral to the aunt's house. There was a lot of energetic buildup and adrenaline in this act, the unpredictable in the air.
What greeted me in the aunt's kitchen I knew so well, like a place in my subconscious, was warmth. She was keen to get to know my Daughter for her grandchildren were all boys and she had got used to girls having had two. My mother, flying in this new role of support for her sister, I found washing the dishes as if she had always been there, and there was aunt, cousin, nephew, there was a lot of laughter that came out, unexpected, unpredicted, a kind of sharing—perhaps a glitch in the wars of the sisters, perhaps a lasting new era of acceptance and peace.
I am unsure. They are probably suspicious of me, of my mother, of us two appearing together in the first place—they have always been suspicious of the subliminal meaning of my every word—and yet—I don’t lie. I just say what I think a lot of the time, even if it shocks everyone. It disarms people too, my friends tell me, and helps others open up themselves. I told the aunt she is beautiful because she really is, and that I still remember her being powerful. I wanted to lift her spirits up. And also I remembered our history that day. She and I got talking about new projects , artschool and travels—and her spirits lifted. I don’t know if she was serious, but I always speak serious business with a smile on the face, and do all the things I say I will—even when I am laughing.
Death. So unpleasant. So terrible to deal with. And yet tomorrow I must go visit the cousin, godmother whose husband has died. In death, an opportunity to reconnect, recontextualize—life is short—is it best to be right or best to cry together at funerals, laugh together, and have the great big family as fucked up as we all actually are, or to be by oneself, doing it all alone, fighting the annoying interventions of family with a turned back.
I have been doing it all alone. I have felt disappointed by a great many of my family. I have felt unsupported often and the support I have got often cost me more than if I had been solving things alone. Not everyone is always healthy in their head. There is a mix of mental health issues, and lives we don't know anything about, or states we don't understand that splat all over us in encounters.And we all deal with our own pressures in different ways. It's definitely easier not to be involved. Less hassle. But I used to love to come back from England on holiday, and go visit an enormous amount of aunts and cousins, and know they are there. Laugh with them. The big Greek wedding. The entire Kaštel Kambelovac town of cousins. And it seems to me like this funeral season, of loss, is also an invitation to a new era of support and reconnection. Forgiveness and valuing those who are still here , valuing the family we can chose to have if we want to. I may be wrong, of course. It may all go splat.
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