Death in the Family
Funeral of My Aunt and Uncle
By Daniel Muniz

My aunt had recently passed away, which was a bit of a shock to me. My parents have gracefully grown old and both of them are still quite healthy and have active lifestyles in their retirement. And many of my aunts and uncles have also enjoyed the fruits of the population living longer and healthier.

But I suppose that the reason for the shock is because the people I know and love are getting older.

Unfortunately, I really do not know many of my relatives so if I saw some of them walking on the street, I probably would not be able to recognize most of them. And that is a loss on my part that perhaps some day I can fix. It is entirely different for my wife since most of her extended family members still live inside the same city and suburbs. And her parents frequently host large family gatherings in which quite a few people show up to. And unlike me, my wife can also easily recognize almost all of her first and even second cousins on sight.

As a result, it was a bit awkward to visit so many of my relatives in this tragic time.

It was the same for my sister. She and I, along with her husband, made the short trip to a small town to attend the Rosary (a Catholic thing before the day of the funeral). Both of my parents were actually in Mexico at the time and they were really torn about not altering their plans. Instead, my sister and I would be at the Rosary and then she and I along with my brother would attend the funeral in their place.

The aunt was the wife of my father’s brother. After the Rosary, my uncle recounted to my sister and me how she passed away, which was of natural causes. It was a peaceful passing in bed after briefly waking up in the morning. Much like my own father, he was stoic but still deeply touched by the loss.
 

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And then for the first time in a very long time, I also got to meet my cousins and a number of second and third cousins.

The small town that my aunt and uncle lived in was about an hour and a half’s drive from the small town I grew up in and it was similar to the many South Texas farming communities that are predominantly Hispanic. When I was growing up, none of my relatives from my dad’s side of the family lived in my hometown. As a little kid, I remember many times of my dad spending an entire Saturday afternoon driving across the countryside to the little townships of where his brothers and sisters lived. Visiting that small town again brought back a bit of my childhood memories.

The service for the funeral was very moving. The priest vividly recounted how just a year before that my uncle and my aunt stood right in front of him in the very same church to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Although the death was tragic, I left the building with an enormous sense of accomplishment that my uncle had achieved.

The Catholic Church that the Mass was held in wasn’t much different than the church I went to as a kid in my own hometown. It also had the same oddities that I remembered from my youth, which was totally different than today as an adult living in the city.

At the funeral, just about everyone there was Hispanic like me (my son was barely a year old at the time so my wife stayed home for the Rosary and for the funeral) except for the priest; he was white. If my blonde wife had gone with me, she and the priest would have been the only white people there. But that was something that I had always been accustomed to in that I never went to church alongside with white people until I moved to the city in my teenage years.

Growing up, I had never personally known “white” Catholics except for the clergy and the nuns of my hometown. I knew of “white” members of my faith but I had never really seen them at the Masses I attended as a kid. Moving to the suburbs changed all of that but being at my aunt’s funeral reminded me of the past.

And not only was the officiating priest white but he was very young. And he was also held in great respect by all generations of people attending. Unlike the affluent suburban churches of the city to where I was a parishioner at as a teenager and as an adult, the people of farming communities work very hard to eke out a living, thus the clergy has to be authentic and that pastor vividly encapsulated that aspect. And also, half the service was in English and the other half was in a fluent Spanish.

After the graveside service, my brother and I found the tombstone of my cousin who was only a couple of years older than me. He passed away in a car accident when I was a teenager and I hauntingly remember this same uncle calling the house (I was the one who answered the phone) to tell us of that tragedy.

Regrettably, the very next month, another uncle passed away. Not the same one married to my aunt but a different brother of my father. Incidentally, he had also lived in the same small town of my uncle and aunt.

Sadly, much of his life was unfortunate. He was born with a severe speech impediment and if you can imagine living 70 years ago in a small town and being poor, there wasn’t much that could be done for him. If he was born today, perhaps the outcome for his disability could have been a lot different and maybe even a chance to integrate him into modern society. Sadly, that wasn’t the case although my uncle was cared for by my grandmother until she passed away. And then that very same uncle helped care for him until he became an invalid (and diabetic along with other serious ailments).

Several months before his death, my parents had asked me to visit him in a hospital in San Antonio. He was deathly pale and very thin. He had caught pneumonia and was not expected to live. However, he responded to the treatment and lived on for several more months.

Living in the same town, it was the same priest to say the Mass for his funeral. Consequently, the Gospel and the homily were about Christ healing the man with the speech impediment. Again, the priest was vivid and moving. And I left with a sense of hope that my uncle did not endure his entire life in vain but experienced a stepping stone to somewhere else.

This time, my parents were at this uncle’s funeral. And so was my uncle from Ireland. He brought his blonde wife with him and at the service, the priest and this other aunt were now the only white people there since my wife had stayed home with the baby. And it was also the first time that I had ever been a pallbearer.

The internment was at another small town a short distance away. After the graveside service, one of my cousins took me around the cemetery. His father (another of my father’s brothers) had passed away a couple of years before. This cousin showed me the plots of many of my older relatives. He and my brother were much older than me so they recounted a bit of the grandfather I never knew. I also remembered a great uncle and I saw his tombstone (and I got to learn what his real name was).

The cousin also pointed out how the cemetery here, as was the one in his hometown, was segregated.

A quick inspection verified that assertion but it is all ancient history because that was a different time and a different culture. People change and times change. Myself, my brother and sister, and my uncle as well as lots of other cousins married white people and integrated fairly well. Consequently, seeing how this cemetery was once segregated was really more of a historical footnote to me.

With two funerals about 30 days apart, I got to learn quite about some of my relatives from my dad’s side of the family. And I got to learn a bit about my past. And I also got to appreciate what I have in the present and what I can enjoy for the future.

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