Mario had taken Maria down to La Ceiba on his motorbike on Thursday. The doctor told him to go to work. To miss a days pay would be unthinkable right now. He went to work that morning smiling and excited. Maria gave birth to a baby boy later that morning and all seemed well but as her blood pressure dropped and her face got greyer it started to become clear that she was sick. She told Sylvia, a friend and midwife, that she felt like she was going to die and she was worried for her children. Three times that day she saturated the bed sheets with blood and not one of the three doctors who came to see her would make the call. She needed an operation, but she was poor. She needed blood, but she was O-. It doesn’t do at this point to criticize the largely insufficient health system they have here in Honduras but everything they did came far too late. By the time the head doctor arrived to make the call to take her into surgery Maria had lost too much blood for the operation to be a success. She had torn her uterus during the birth and they had not stitched her up well enough. She bled to death. Mario arrived a little later from work, reportedly smiling and excited about his first child in 9 years. It was Sylvia who had to tell him that his much loved wife and mother of his children was dead.
We made our way down the somber street to their house and arrived just as Karina had been told. We passed an excruciating hour holding a crying Karina and listening to Mario, whose shock was stopping him from forming coherent sentences. As is the custom she would be buried within 24 hours. Within an hour the village school bus started on its decent down the hill, taking what felt like everyone in the village to pay their respects. We hitchhiked straight down to the Catholic Cathedral the next day. It looked disproportionately grandiose next to Maria’s plain wooden coffin and the congregation of poor villagers in jeans and t shirts.
Maria’s family had driven through the night from El Salvador to get here and were gazing disbelieving at the wooden box that contained their daughter, sister, cousin. A woman they hadn’t seen in years for the miles and borders that separated them.
The service was short and perfunctory and provided absolutely no comfort to anybody. They carried her out and into the back of an SUV and we all piled into the back of pick up trucks, standing all the way to the cemetery. We all crowded round the unsightly hole in the ground, standing on the freshly dug graves of others. When they opened up the coffin and her family fell over her, crying and screaming. It was the worst thing I have ever witnessed.
Every culture deals with death in a different way. But this was awful. Seeing Maria, grey bloated and dead was terrible. This was not how I would remember her I told myself. I tired hard to hide my disapproval as people took photos of her with their mobile phones, wondering if this was more a result of shock than some strange unfamiliar custom. We held each other tight and watched until the last the earth was plied on by sweating relatives with shovels. Then we watched as Mario went to find two wooden slats, a hammer and a nail. There in the dirt he made an ugly wooden headstone for his wife, our friend, Maria.