Peripheral Visions

corpse and a grieving family.
    Because I had been briefed, I knew how to act, but my feelings were foreign. For an American with a Protestant and Anglo-Saxon background like mine, the handling of death implies silence and decorum, requires that the privacy of the bereaved be respected, and includes a certain reticence about the material facts of every day. Later I understood that my presence represented an extra honor for the old woman who had died. The games and gambling were explained as necessary to keep people awake, to ensure that there would be no solitude. In Pilipino, there is a word for “happy” which also means “crowded,” or “populous”; there is comfort in conviviality. Wakes are important to young people, the best available opportunity for courting.
    Some months after I ended my research, back on the other side of Manila, where Barkev and I were living, I became pregnant. After weeks on my back fruitlessly hoping to avert a premature delivery, I gave birth in a Manila hospital to the son we had planned to call Martin, who died a few hours later. For me, the death of my baby was something that should not have happened, unthinkable, unbearable. But for the gentle Filipina nurses, the loss was sad but part of life, bound to happen from time to time. Their sympathy was firmly mixed with a cheerful certainty that I would be back next year with another one—as so many women are in the Philippines, whether the infant lives or dies.
    It was our good fortune that my time in the village had allowed me to observe and compare responses to death. On the afternoon of Martin’s birth, I described to Barkev the way Filipinos would express their sympathy. Don’t expect to be left alone, I said, and don’t expect people tactfully to avoid the subject. Expect friends to seek us out and to show their concern by asking specific factual questions. Rather than a euphemistic handling of the event and a denial of the ordinary course of life, we should be ready for the opposite. An American colleague of my husband might shake hands, nod his head sadly, perhaps murmuring, “We were so sorry to hear,” and beat a swift retreat; a Filipino friend would say, “It was so sad that your baby died. Did you see him? Who did he look like? Was he baptized? How much did he weigh? How long were you in labor?”
    Stereotypes often conceal their opposites. In other contexts Filipinos describe Americans as “brutally frank,” while Americans find Filipinos frustratingly indirect and evasive. Yet in the handling of death, Filipinos behave in a manner which Americans might characterize as “brutally frank” and seem to go out of their way to evoke the expression of emotion, while Americans can only be called euphemistic and indirect, going to great lengths to avoid emotional outbreaks.
    Moments of deep loss or failure may feel as if they have no antecedent, as if nothing like this had ever happened before in human history. No one can know exactly how he or she will respond, what formulae will be seized, what words improvised. Yet individual responses follow cultural patterns, each experience offering analogies for others. Tradition even offered the materials for John Kennedy’s funeral, although Jacqueline Kennedy had to combine them in new ways, familiarity both deepening meaning and offering comfort. But I was an outsider and the analogies I brought with me were off-key.
    If I had not had the preparation of my time in the village, the most caring behavior on the part of Filipino friends, genuinely trying to express concern and affection, would have seemed like a violation. To avoid breaking down in the face of sudden reminders of grief, I might have imposed a rigid self-control, which would have reinforced the belief that many Filipinos hold, that Americans don’t really grieve; or I might have reacted with anger to the affront, losing valued friends. An Iranian who had studied in London once described to me the revulsion he felt when his landlady mentioned to him unemotionally that her father had just died. So cold, from his point of view. So inhuman. But inhuman is exactly the wrong word. The potential for deep and profound difference is as distinctively human as the commonality that can be discovered beneath it.
    Telling of a death, hearing of a death, expressing sympathy in the appropriate way, these are acts in which mutual recognitions of humanness are tested, but there is no single human way of responding. The