Three Deaths and a Funeral

It's been a morbid week in the Consular section. A single death of an American citizen overseas is difficult enough. This week we dealt with three American deaths, each one wrenching in its own way.

Swift burial is the custom here. A typical Jordanian opens his newspaper to the obituaries each morning, because the death announcements include same-day funeral details. Unless you are in the immediate family, you may not even learn someone has died until you read his death announcement in the newspaper. Then you cancel your appointments and go to the funeral (if you are male). Every day here, people are attending funerals for folks who died mere hours ago.

My first case involved a burial that was too swift. The widow called me from the US to inquire about her husband who had died last week here. Her husband's family had just informed her that a) her husband had died; b) the death occured a few days prior; and c) he was already buried near the family's home in Jordan. She is the next of kin and not Jordanian, yet no one inquired about her wishes. She wants him buried in the US. We are now looking into disinterment options...

In another case, a woman had died in a horrific car accident. Her husband was driving and survived miraculously. The family of the deceased wanted her to be buried in the US, while the husband and his Jordanian family preferred to bury her in Jordan. After a day of heated words and little sleep, the families agreed to have the burial here. But in a very bizarre twist, the morgue decided to hold the body until the Embassy gave its blessing to bury her. Members of both families were calling me just 2 hours before the scheduled burial (announced in that morning's paper), imploring me to "release" the body. Perhaps setting an unwanted precedent, but desperately wanting to avoid derailing a funeral, I wrote an improvised "Letter of Release", signed it, and faxed it to the morgue. The family wished me well and set off for the funeral.

The family of the third American agreed to send her body back to the US for burial. She was an older woman - widowed - visiting nieces and nephews in Jordan when she fell suddenly gravely ill. The Embassy plays a bigger role in these cases. When arrangements were finalized regarding casket and flights, I was called to the morgue to certify that a) this is the same person whose photo appears in this passport, and b) this casket contains nothing but her remains. After everything is in place, we actually affix an official seal in wax. The morgue was not nearly as bad as I feared. Some of the woman's family were there too. As we passed the time watching the workers seal the liner, the family inquired about what a grim job I have. Thinking fast, I responded, "but I am helping reunite your aunt with her family in the US". This was not the time to compare cases, I felt.

On top of all this, my office was visited by sudden grave news, in true Jordanian style. As my colleagues were reading the local newspaper and drinking their morning coffee, just casually browsing the obituaries, we learned that one of our colleagues died. The Jordanian man who sat at the desk next to mine, just barely thirty years old, not yet married, had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and we will never really know if it was accidental or not. Just moments after learning of his death, there I found myself - on the chartered embassy bus, bound for the males-only funeral.