Our loving people need to live

I HAD the privilege of spending Christmas holidays with my family in Rusape, our rural home. As usual the time was priceless. We had an opportunity to visit the dam wall, work in the fields, cook and eat together. Being a COVID-19 survivor, I tried to observe physical distance in all my interactions.

I, however, not only found it difficult but observed that it did not seem very important to everyone around me. As is tradition in Zimbabwe, all roads led to rural areas for Christmas. What I found worrying was that people, who do not live in the same households, and had come from different towns, were interacting closely and not masking up.

One thing that became clear to me is that masks are very difficult to enforce at family level in our culture.

There was too much psychological pressure to fit in and not to appear like you are accusing your relatives of having COVID-19.

When people visit their rural areas for Christmas, they don’t stay within their homestead, but they move around the village as this is an opportunity to pay condolences for those who died during the period they were away.

Also, they move around to check on people and be good sons and daughters of the village. There are few people in African culture, who can insist that their relatives should wash their hands when they enter their homes, and that masks be worn in family spaces.

It still remains unacceptable that we can consider not to visit one another even during Christmas time. I understand this because it defines us as a people. We can’t distance ourselves from our loved ones. We are a loving people. My extrapolation is that, if this interaction represents what was happening in other parts of the country it’s very easy to see why there is a spike in COVID-19 cases at the moment.

More worrying is the surfacing of cases in rural areas which had appeared to have been spared in 2020. Which brings us to the part about the need to live. My heart bleeds at this poor health consciousness behaviour. The way we interact in private spaces still does not reflect a balance between our natural love for one another and our need to prevent the spread of COVID-19 so that we can live. It is my hope that the way our fallen relatives are being buried will jog us into prioritising our need to live.

Today, I attended a friend’s virtual burial on Facebook and the pain of not being able to bury her the African way cut deep into my heart. In Africa and in Zimbabwe in particular we bury own departed in style.

We sing, dance and testify. We spend the whole night saying goodbye to our beloved through song and dance. The remains have to lie in state overnight in their homes. When they travel to their final resting place, they are accompanied by their mother in the hearse so the departed maternal relatives accept them and take care of them in the afterlife.

Body viewing is essential so the inner-self sees and accepts the death.

This is all part of our grieving process, it’s part of saying goodbye and in the long run it facilitates closure and the ability to move on. It’s all part of our culture because we are a loving people and it resonates with findings by scholars who study end-of-life rituals worldwide that say grieving practices can be crucial for individuals’ mental and spiritual health.

It’s also part of our efforts to show our respect to the dead whom we believe assume a more powerful existence in the afterlife.

COVID-19-related changes

COVID-19 has changed all this and cut out all the revered processes of mourning. The World Health Organisation guidelines provide for burial within 48 hours of death, they demand that the corpse goes straight to the burial place without passing through their home.

There is no body viewing except by the one family representative who has to identify the person at the parlour after which it’s sealed in a body bag before being placed in a coffin.

Recently government announced restrictions on body movement unless they are in hermetically sealed coffins which makes moving bodies expensive which might be a deterrent to many. Yet we strongly believe in taking our fallen relatives to our rural homes so they sleep alongside our ancestors.

The number of people who can attend the burial has been reduced to 30. In our culture we measure our departed relative’s popularity and repute in the community by the number of mourners who attend their funeral. “Achemiwa! Vanhu kuita masvosve! (a lot of people mourned him/ her).” Sounds familiar? That is us and it’s all part of our grieving process, so a limit to 30 mourners is a slap in the face.

The above conditions are difficult for every family that has had to face a COVID-19 death. Yet it’s the price we must pay to live. Families are trying.

There is evidence of adaptation of end of life rituals, painful as it is.

Those who can afford it are livestreaming the burials on Zoom, Facebook and other platforms. There is a clear effort to make things work within the corner that COVID-19 has forced us into. My worry is the compromised psychosocial well-being that will result from these swift burial processes. The children, the parents, the relatives who are having to stand metres away from the graves of their loved ones, believing the coffin bears the correct corpse without the satisfaction of seeing the lifeless body, might struggle to find closure. Read full article on www.newsday.co.zw