How does it feel to have a dead man in your house?

December 17, 2008

There is a house that I pass by whenever I go in or out of our subdivision. It’s a medium-sized house, recently built and painted in warm beige and dirty white. Right now there’s a gazebo set up in the middle of the street in front of it,  squeezing the traffic in the morning and completely cutting it off at night, when people drop by to play cards or mahjong at the tables. It could be just another Pinoy wake, except that it has been going on for almost two months. There has been the same dead man in the same coffin in the same house for sixty whole days.

 

Now I’m not what you’d call squeamish. I mean, I’m not the person who has to deal with the dead man everyday right? I just pass by his house. Besides, I’m sure he’s saturated with all the wonderful chemicals he needs to keep from decaying into nice patchy clumps of flesh or stinking up the place. I just think that it’s a little too morbid to keep a dead man from being buried for that long and not even showing signs of changing your mind soon. You have to sleep with him being dead downstairs, you have to eat with him hanging out near the dining room as dead as a doornail—really. How does it feel to have a dead man in your house? I’ve never had one.

 

His relatives have a reason of course. They’re waiting for the dead man’s children to arrive this Christmas from the US. This is cool, I guess, the whole family thing. But if I were the dead guy, I want to be buried ASAP and one hundred children be damned. They can look at my pictures and read this blog if they miss me.