‘I’m dying,’ he said.
So his wife leaned forward to offer him her back and she carried him on it, despite her frailty. With considerable trouble, they made it back to the house and laid him down on the communal bed. He started to get cold sweats and suffered wave after wave of cramps, cramps connected to a constant need to relieve his belly. But he could no longer get outside to satisfy the need and so he had to do it right there, in the confined space of the sleeping room. With all the noise, the neighbours realised something was going on and they came round to find out what the problem was. The man was periodically forced to make use of a chamber pot, which his wife took outside at daybreak. Personal business, very personal business, is best dealt with before anyone is out on the streets. So the woman went out of the house carrying the chamber pot, covering it partially, or hiding it under a length of cloth she usually wrapped around her head and back. She emptied the chamber pot wherever she could and went down the path to the shore to clean up the physiological remains her husband had left behind the previous night, and as she bent over she felt a slight cramp, but soon recovered. When she got home, she found her husband with white, sunken eyes, dry lips and only the thinnest thread of breath. And not a single part of the bed was dry, because her husband had suffered multiple attacks of diarrhoea while she’d been away. The woman called the neighbours because, being an adult, she knew what those white eyes might mean. The man no longer had anything to say for himself, or if he did he was no longer able to say it. He no longer knew where he was. His wife sensed his condition deteriorating and she called out to tell him to hang on in there. But the man made only the slightest of gestures, just enough to show he’d heard his dear wife, that he wanted to remain in this world. Remain with her. It was his final gesture. A few minutes later he was still lying on the bed, but nobody in the house could say for sure whether he was still in this world or whether he’d gone over to the other. His wife had already peered into the gloom and allowed a few furtive tears to escape. The neighbours told her not to despair, that there was still hope. And some of them went out to call for the doctor. They called for the doctor because they thought he’d be able to tell them what was happening, not because they thought he’d have anything at the hospital he could treat the man with. For if the island’s hospital had any medicine at all, it was unlikely to be of any use for this case. They called him, he came, he saw the state of the bed, looked at the sick man, felt him, opened his eyes, opened his mouth and said nothing. Or rather he said that the man should be taken to the hospital. Perhaps the doctor had something there to be used in emergencies. The question was how to get the man to the hospital, because on our island the seriously ill are usually taken to hospital first by canoe, then on someone’s back, but that man had one foot in the other world and was in no state to be put in a canoe or carried on anyone’s back. And besides, he was not a young man. But everyone could see life escaping from him, so they summoned four men and those four men took hold of the four sides of the sheet he lay on and they carried him all the way through the village to the hospital. During the journey, the first rays of the sun that would shine that day beamed down on the man’s face and he made an attempt to open his eyes. The four men carrying him, on a sheet where he’d done his business, saw this and had a vague sense of hope that their efforts would not be in vain. And they reached the hospital. They passed the Padre en route, who had already been informed of the man’s spiritual needs and told that he looked set to leave this life for the next unless Dios intervened, and if Dios didn’t intervene, it would be better if he was received by Providencia with his last rights administered. The Padre followed the procession to the hospital and there he made the sign of the cross on the soles of the man’s feet and rubbed Santo Óleo into their skin. The man’s wife and the people who’d accompanied her saw this. And they saw that the soles of the feet receiving the holy unction were very pale. But had they really seen enough soles of feet to know that these ones were especially pale?
A few minutes later, there was not much left to be said about that man’s life. He didn’t expire the way many people expire, the soul ripping out of the body in a transcendental moment everyone present is very much aware of. Those present simply realised he was no longer with them, he was no longer alive. So they called the doctor and he certified the death, the end of the man’s life on the island. Then they closed his eyes and arranged his hands to show he was no longer going to use them. He would be taken home and preparations would be made for his funeral. The hospital lent its only stretcher and he was carried back to the house he’d lived in and put in the only place there was room for him, the bed. The same bed where he’d had painful cramps, succumbed to his needs and begun to die. Now it was time to prepare his coffin. On our island, coffins are made out of old canoes. And if there isn’t an old one available, though there usually is, a canoe is sacrificed, even if it’s still fit for the purpose it was built for, in order to provide a last resting place for the deceased. And if the canoe that’s sacrificed to make the coffin is the canoe that used to belong to the dead man, all the better. I guess the custom of making the coffin out of the dead man’s canoe comes from the idea that once a man is dead, he no longer has use for the canoe that survived him. It was unusual for someone to inherit someone else’s canoe. Our village’s custom was that when a man died, his canoe died with him, that it felt the weight of earth thrown down on its back at its owner’s burial. Besides, our village wasn’t so full of trees that one could be chopped down every time someone died. There weren’t enough trees for such a ritual.
I’ve been talking about canoes being turned into coffins to bury their dead owners, but what about the women, who on our island never owned canoes? Well, their coffins were made from the leftovers of other people’s canoes. Luckily, there were plenty of big canoes on the island, made from three indigenous trees, or tree trunks from elsewhere that washed up on our beaches, brought by the sea from foreign oceans and shores. And when the canoes got old and had so many holes in them they could no longer be used for paddling, they were abandoned upturned on the shore, and we children always asked what they were for and whom they belonged to. Because we knew nothing about what happened to the dead. But we soon began to learn.