We dropped a man off to die yesterday. Lucas has had throat cancer for the past seven months and the tumor on his neck has grown larger than a ping-pong ball. He has no money for treatment, so we put him on a bus yesterday so that he could spend however long he has left with his family, who live just north of Durban. He was a patient of Hester’s, so she was going to come with us to get him from his house. On the short drive to get him, I was envisioning a large group of people there to see him, most with moist eyes and lumps in their throats. What I experienced, however, was not quite that. It was actually pretty anticlimactic. The people that were there, whom I could probably count on one hand, seemed to already be there for no real purpose whatsoever. They very casually put his suitcases in the trunk of our car, and then said goodbye.
Contrast this with what happened at my old church in PA on Saturday. One of my old students was killed in a car accident that night. Within 24 hours I had received three emails, IM’ed with two people, and even Skyped with two others. It was in the paper in Doylestown, which reported that his family’s house has been flooded with sympathy cards and flowers. There will be a memorial service on Saturday, which I’m sure will be attended a ton of people. It’s really shaken my old church, as well as the entire community.
What’s the explanation for the polar opposite ways in which the surrounding has seemed to respond to their respective deaths? Is it because Ben was a better person than Lucas? I would say that they were both phenomenal people. Maybe it was Ben was only 19, and Lucas must have been in his 60s, and death always elicits a much stronger response when the victim is younger. I might lean toward that one, except that I’ve heard of young people in these townships dying, and it didn’t seem to bring about a much larger reaction than Lucas. Maybe the plethora of sympathy for Ben’s family is because they’re more connected, because technology allows the relationships to stay intact. That one doesn’t hold much water for me either, as news travels incredibly fast around those townships, and families and friends tend to stay in one general vicinity their whole lives, so it should be even easier for Lucas to have a large going away party.
I believe that what I witnessed over the past few days is the starkly different way my American culture and Lucas’ culture views death. It seems that whenever someone passes away in my culture, whether they’re young or old, we cry out and see it as a major wrong that has been done. Whereas what I’ve experienced as life in the townships is a view of death that is much more…it seems like indifferent, but I don’t know if it is actually that. I think that it’s just that they see it as part of life. Will Lucas’ friends miss him? I’m sure they will. I haven’t quite figured out their paradigm yet, but it definitely is different from what I grew up with.
I hope you don’t hear me prioritizing one over the other. Right now I’m just noting differences, mostly because it’s almost impossible not to do so. I hope this post makes sense. I might just wake up in the morning and completely redo this. Who knows. But it’s worth wrestling with, and I try to see God in both approaches, and I appreciate Him bringing this up for me now.
