ABSTRACT
Tomas, a 5-year-old Ifaluk boy, contracted meningitis and was comatose within 24 hours.
Relatives and friends began to gather at his parents’ home. Female relatives washed the
feverish body until the efforts seemed futile; then male relatives took turns holding the
semirigid form, weeping as they cradled it. “At the moment of death, a great wailing went
up. The dead boy’s biological mother, seated on the floor mats near him, rose to her knees
as if she had been stabbed and pounded her fist violently against her chest. The adoptive
mother…began to scream and throw herself about on the ground.” The whole house was
filled with crying, “from low moaning to loud, wrenching and mucus-filled screaming to
wailingly sung poem-laments, and continued without pause through the night. Both men
and women spent tears in what seemed…equal measure.” (The Ifaluk believe that those
who do not “cry big” at a death will become sick afterwards.) Anthropologist Cathy Lutz
(1988) found the proceedings “shocking”: like many young Americans, her only contact
with death had been “the subdued ritual of one funeral” (pp. 125-127).
