Let My Picture Wander with Your Hat: A Bitter Tale of Settlement

INTRODUCTION Upon the shocking death of my beloved brother and in the months following the loss, my family and I confronted extra dimensions involved in coping with death in a host country. Consumed by the grief and captured in the web of bureaucratic frustrations, legal confusions, and socio-cultural unfamiliarity, I found my experience of dealing with the aftermath of death to be a bitter reflection of living in a country where I had not grow up. Some people say that burying a family member in the host country is the last stage of settlement. Being a romantic at heart, I used to think the saying referred to the concept of cultivating yet another root in the host country: entrusting the land with a non-removable piece of your life, thus growing even more attached to it. The experience of the recent passing and burial of my beloved brother proved my previous assumption quite wrong. The ordeal had far more practical aspects than I had ever imagined. In other words, when you lose and bury a family member, there are some facts of life--or rather of death--that you learn for the first time, irrespective of how long you have lived in the host country. And you learn these facts in the most bitter of ways, when you are the least prepared to want to learn, let alone grapple with and find solutions. For example, you learn about mundane matters like the fact that a grave cannot be dug and prepared at short notice because the land is frozen in February when you happen to have lost your brother. Or lessons with legal consequences, like the fact that when you lose somebody, you automatically become a successor; and unless you renounce the succession in a timely manner by going through certain procedures, you will become the legal heir and thereby liable for the deceased's debts, or not liable for his debts, depending on the information source you consult! When losing someone to death, you are also reminded of some aspects of the society and the culture that you hoped would have not applied to death and burial, aspects such as salesmanship, relentless bureaucracy, contradictory information, and the deliberately ambiguous cultural language you seem never to master. From the moment we were hit by the shock of losing my brother all the way through believing in and grieving his absence, coming to terms with the loss, and then starting to miss him, there were some indescribable moments of uncertainty and, at the same time, a dependency on the unfamiliarity of the processes and the authorities that rendered us powerless beyond what the death itself does. The experience was similar to the situation when you are a newly arrived person in the host country and have a seriously ill child who is hospitalized. You are dependent on the unfamiliar institution to the last shred of your being, even though you do not quite understand what the doctors and staff mean when they use obscure words and double entendres. You get frustrated and annoyed, yet you feel too vulnerable and too dependent on their service to demand what you need to know about what has to be done. This happens only in a host country, I suppose, or perhaps in your native country only when you are treated as an unwanted citizen by the uninvited intruders. Here is my dark tale, brightened only by instances of respect and abundant love ... My brother took his own life at a fairly young age (mid 40s) but based on his long-held philosophical belief and with much contemplation and serenity--or so I wish to believe. This, I admit, upset the balance fight from the outset: first with the intervention of paramedics, police, and the coroner physician in his apartment, and later on with handling the lingering taboo associated with suicide. Often throughout the ceremonies and conversations, I caught myself explaining, albeit reluctantly, that he did not do this out of desperation, weakness, or even depression. …

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