Siya Chii Wit--Broken Life

Death has been the theme of the last few weeks for me. Not in a creepy way, I’d like to think. Death is all around us, whether we choose to admit it or not, and I’d also like to think I’ve accepted this truth willfully, emphatically even. It makes Death seem a little less daunting, a little more like the ominous but altogether kind God I believe in.

I’ve been brooding—my thoughts like eggs incubating under a warm mother hen of Earth and Life and Experience. There’s been books recently read, contributing to this rumination, including The Agony and the Ecstasy where our hero, Michelangelo, along with countless others, die in the end; The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, where again, the hero dies, along with the craven antagonist; A Natural Curiosity, a book which has death peppered throughout; and finally, Different Seasons, which contains four novellas, all of which feature death as a significant (often gruesome) theme.

Beyond that, there’s been the metaphorical and impending death of my time here in Chiang Mai, which I anticipate with feelings much like a child who wades in the shallows of a great ocean watching for the big wave, high with mingled dread and thrill; hair, skin, and fingers dancing and twitching as if electrified.

And finally, and perhaps most peculiar, is the funeral that has been going on for the past three days in a house I can watch from my window on the fifth floor of Doi Ping Mansion Apartments. This house, infamous in Brittany and my conversations, sentiments, complaints, and lives as the one with the dog that never stops barking. Though, in all honesty, it hasn’t been baying much lately. This could be the result of two instances: one) the dog is broken-hearted by its owner’s death and can’t even muster a low, mournful howl, so it lies on the cold cement porch, crestfallen; or two) it was this selfsame dog who met its Maker and whose funeral has been celebrated these past few days. Though the latter of the two options would appease many of my complaints, bring peace my late night vigils listening to its songs, and turn anonymous neighbors into much more interesting characters for all my imaginings, I suspect the former of the two options to be the most likely. Which makes me wonder who it was who died, and how, and if it was some night where I slept peacefully just a few houses, a streets, and a wall or two away.

I noticed on Saturday, I think it was, that the house, typically quiet save for its vocal canine indweller, had more going on than usual. In fact, I think the sound of pipes being clanked together at this very house, woke me Saturday morning. My neighbors made themselves busy using the pipes to make the frame of a tent, striped yellow and red, making what is usually a sad and melancholy affair, a little more festival, circus-like, cheerful. It jutted out into the road and housed about twenty to thirty plastic chairs, also festively colored like the tent itself. Initially, I wasn’t aware that it was a funeral taking place, as I heard no wailing and the house seemed decidedly absent of people clothed entirely in black. That is, until yesterday: the culmination of the events. When I noticed a trailer hooked to the end of a truck (a Toyota Hilux, or maybe an Isuzu) with an extra platform set carefully atop, accompanied by an awfully large number of people meticulously dressed in entirely black ensembles, I drew my conclusions and gazed for quite some time at the people below, existing unaware of my scrutiny.

The previous days, for the visitors, dwellers, and friends of the deceased, had been full of funeral proceedings. In the evenings, a monotonous, buzzing, chanting would ensue and last for a few hours. At intervals when I would gaze down at the tent, captivated by this weird event. The guests would break up, and reconvene at odd hours for the chanting, all the in-between filled my ears never-ending music played not unpleasantly loud, but voluminous to fill the undercurrents of my thoughts with a stringed, fluted melody accompanied by a woman with a high and querulous voice. The music both soothed and unsettled me, I’m not sure why though.

And so today, noticing the silence which pervaded our apartment and the evidence of emptiness of our neighbors’ house, symbolized by the unusual hush of the broken-hearted dog, I brought my thoughts forward to my Thai teacher, justifying my curiosity by telling myself I would learn about Thai culture today, rather than language. It quelled the mounting disapproval and objections of the ever-the-student parts of my brain and fed the theme of the weeks previous. In my broken Thai, I told Khruu Namrin about the unusual events that had unfolded in the house below. She was unsurprised by the happenings, as it often goes, and proceeded to fill my head with information, musings, and situations which I find most interesting, and hope you will too.

I mentioned that I thought it odd the funeral would last so long and she, bemused, informed me that in times past, funerals lasted seven days or more. In fact, she said, the funeral King of Thailand’s sister, who died in the latter months of 2007, is still going on. True, there aren’t hundreds of guests mourning by her coffin (Thais prefer burning, actually), but every evening, monks in a temple in Bangkok can be found incanting the same intonations I heard through the apartment’s west-facing windows. Khruu conveyed that a longer funeral is held, with the body present, to help mourners face that their loved one is truly deceased. Also, neighbors, friends, relatives, gather together in the house of the departed, and help one another make preparations for the funeral proceedings. If it last days, tents are set up, extra beds made, plates and plates of food prepared, rooms cleaned and re-cleaned.

All the way through, the corpse rests among the activity, injected with an agent, keeping him from smelling and allowing him time to rest up for the long and arduous task of decomposition. The funeral proceedings conclude with a parade to a nearby temple to cremate the body. I have never seen a cremation take place here, but just after the body was packed onto the trailer and turned right out of the neighborhood, it began to thunder and pour veritable buckets and I wondered benignly if that complicated the cremation process.

One form of the Thai word for dead is siya, which means broken. The full term when one chooses to speak formally and fully is siya chii wit—literally, broken life. When I heard this, (but let me remind you this coming from a foreigner who unabashedly admits to her overarching ignorance of the Thai language), I liked the sound of it very much and I rolled it around in my head for awhile as I might allow my hand to linger on a particularly smooth and colorful fabric. In the minutes following the learning of another use of this word, siya, I attempted to use it as many times as possible. Siya seemed a much more gentle and kind way of putting death. Words like death and die, lost, perished, expired, names we so often use in conversations about people who’ve gone away, just seem too final. And a person becomes a corpse or a cadaver and it suddenly becomes distant, sterile, the end. I find that fact distinctly unsettling, especially knowing that one day I’ll die, as will everyone I know, and don’t know.

As I said before, the body in the Thai funeral proceedings stays in the home for the entire time. When I told Khruu that we leave bodies in a morgue, a hospital, a funeral home, back in the States, she was decidedly amused… Lo?, she said, which roughly translates to, really? And I said, yes, people see dead people (khon siya) as dirty, unsanitary. I said, I think it might be illegal to keep a dead person in a private residence, and thought to myself about the agents we inject into our dead, and the PermaSeal coffins, which disallow a body to return to its natural form—dust. It seems almost silly, as I write it, the measures we take to distance ourselves, and our dead, from actually being dead.

Is it young, arrogant, ignorant, brash to write all this? Perhaps. I am one of the youth who is assumed to revel in my supposed immortality, so it could be construed as insensitive that I speak so freely about so serious and sensitive a theme. But the apparent avoidance of such an inevitable end seems to me to be a subject worth mentioning, and yes, even blogging about.

The Death of things, both metaphorical and literal, is unavoidable, but not final, which in my mind, makes the inevitable seem less frightening. If I am only siya, broken, then I will be fixed some day. To the Thai people, this means I will be reincarnated—higher or lower on the chedi. To speak more on this would be a beautiful exploration, I think. But that ought to be left to someone else who knows more about it than I do, in some other blog, on some other day. I think there is some literal truth to being reincarnated—though not the kind where I might have the chance of getting put back here as a mosquito, or a toad, or something with more than four legs—no, I think the reincarnation process happens in the natural process of our bodies being turned to dust and being part of the larger circle of life (a wonderful phrase immortalized by Sir Elton John; thanks, big guy). I really like the idea that this bag of bones might one day get to be a patch of grass, or a gnarled branch on a very tall tree, or a daffodil. Perhaps some of me might become something with more than six legs, but luckily my mental capacity and the awareness of my soul will no longer be intact, and so I won’t care and will blissfully bug about. And in regard to metaphorical death—like my time ending here in Chiang Mai—does that not give birth to new ideas and experiences—ones which will bring meaning to an uncountable number of more ideas and experiences?

The idea of getting stuck in a box pumped full of preservatives brings visions of convenient store snacks into my mind, and an oppressive feeling of loneliness and fear of being isolated from everything real around me weighs on this still very much alive body. These thoughts stamp that sense of finality about death and I don’t like that. Which is why I do like the word siya. Because instead of a final chapter or verse, I’d be temporarily broken (or broken down) until I certainly join and blend into the never-ending cycle of Birth, Life, Experience, and Death.

Ha. All this from a few dead people—fictitious, strangers, infamous. Then again, maybe that just adds to my précis in defense of a theme so often avoided. Do my ramblings lend some kind of meaning, or new life, to these deaths? And now that you are reading them, ingesting them, as it were, do you join into this cycle of life too?

And in my most romantic, idealized way, I say dreamily and decidedly, that death is as much a part of life as birth is. As the feelings of sorrow are so integral in experiencing joy. I do not doubt that death is tragic oftentimes. I feel certain that if I looked in on the survivor in my neighbor’s house, someone would probably be in there crying, and rightfully so. But to make death final, ever-ugly, or terrifying, would be unfair. Modes of death, maybe…probably. But not Death itself. Death is natural, normal…necessary. Death might be unfair to us, and we might be unfair to one another, but we shouldn’t be unfair to Death. We have not experienced for our own selves, so how can we judge it rightly?

And as is my habit in all of my blogging, I must include a quote from the brilliant and beautiful, Kahlil Gibran, otherwise I fear my blog will be too weak to stand on its own two feet (or six): “For what is to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and seek God unencumbered? Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.”

If you keep track of calendars, you might have noted how timely my blog is. Yes, it conveniently has been put into words just days before All Hallows Eve, All Hallows Day, and Dia De Los Muertos, where we honor departed—both saintly and profane—for their lives, for their sacrifices, for their bravery in the face of passage into a place we’ve never been, for their bodies which will nurture and feed the earth so that it may continue on in its life cycles. I hope then, if this entry is seen as morbid that it will be excused on the account that I am being festive.

All my love,
Kelly

PS: After reading this blog, should it surprise anyone that one of my most favorite movies is Harold and Maude?