Category Archives: Old age

Retirement, seniority, death, funerals, remembrances

Death & Ash Rituals

Age: 56

Context:

My informant has dealt with the death of both of her parents. Each funeral procession took around a week including preparation of the body. This ritual has distinctive religious and cultural meaning for her. She told me that when she passes away, she will also participate in this ritual as an active bearer of tradition.

Text:

In Hindu tradition, deceased family members are often cremated. When gathering the ashes, ashes cannot be brought into the house. Instead, ashes are wrapped in pots made from natural ingredients and these pots are kept in nature. Specifically, the information recalls her father’s ashes being placed into a carved out tree. Then, the ashes are carried to a sacred river, Talakaveri. At Talakaveri, the ashes must be placed into flowing water rather than still water.

Analysis:

This funeral practice reveals the importance of the connection between the departed soul and the living. Ashes are not brought into the house to preserve the soul of the person and their transition to reincarnation. According to Van Gennep’s rites of passage, the process of cremation, placement in nature, and later integration into sacred water, helps both the deceased and living navigate death as a transition. The specific emphasis on Talakaveri, a river that all Hindus believe they originated from, and flowing water conveys the symbolic nature of customs and the inseperable bond between a body and its environment. From an emic perspective, the informants intention to continue this ritual shows how folklore is actively performed to maintain tradition through communal lived experiences.

Hotel Ghost

Age: 51

Context:

This story was told to me by my father, whom I’ll refer to as SS. He had arrived in Dhaka, Bangladesh, ahead of my mother and me, relocating for a new job posting. During those first weeks alone in the city, he stayed at the Westin Hotel, a polished 5-star hotel, definitely not where things go wrong. He told me and my mom this story when we arrived in Dhaka, and I was quite young when I first heard it so I was super scared, but now I think about it as a strange incidence that happened to my dad.

The Story:

My father is a still sleeper. He doesn’t toss and turn, and has never once sleepwalked in his life. So on the first morning in his hotel room at the Westin, when he woke up on the floor, at the foot of the bed, not in it, he assumed some mundane explanation, that he must have been more exhausted than he thought. He climbed back into bed and didn’t mention it to anyone.

The second morning, it happened again. He was on the floor, same position, and same spot: at the foot of the bed, as if he had chosen to sleep there himself. By the third morning, when he opened his eyes and found himself looking up at the ceiling from the floor once more, the mundane explanations had run out. He went down to the front desk and asked to speak with the manager. He explained, carefully and plainly, what had been happening: that he woke each morning not in his bed but on the floor, in the same spot, with no memory of moving. 

SS told me the manager’s face changed the moment he finished speaking, the color drained from it. The man looked down at the desk between them, and there was a long pause, the kind that is not about finding the right words, but about deciding how many of them to share. He did not ask clarifying questions, or suggest a medical explanation or a mattress issue. He simply said that he was very sorry, and that he would arrange another room immediately.

The new room was not just different, it was significantly larger: a suite, upgraded well beyond what my father had booked, at no additional charge. The manager was apologetic, overly warm, eager to move past the conversation. He said something vague about wanting to ensure a comfortable stay, and then he closed the matter entirely.

My father said the man looked like he clearly knew something, and had decided, perhaps out of professionalism or policy or something harder to name, not to say what it was. Thankfully, SS never woke up on the floor again.

Informant’s Thoughts (SS):

My father says he isn’t certain there’s a definitive answer to how he ended up on the floor, or at least not one he could say out loud without feeling foolish. What he keeps returning to is the manager’s face. 

He says a person can dismiss their own experience, rationalize it, file it away. But you cannot rationalize someone else’s recognition. That man knew. Whatever was in that room, whatever had been happening there, the manager already knew, and chose to move him without a word.

His own theory is that someone had died in that room. And that whoever it was had never quite left. That the bed, in some sense, still belonged to them. That each night, my father was simply being removed from a space that was no longer his to occupy, displaced, without violence or malice, the way you might move something that has been left in your chair. Not haunted in the dramatic sense, just claimed perhaps by someone who didn’t know, or accept, that they were gone.

My Thoughts:

To me, what makes my father’s story haunting isn’t the strangeness of waking up on the floor, it’s the repetition. Three nights, the same spot, the same position. Whatever was happening, it had a pattern. 

I’m struck by how ordinary the setting is. Not a crumbling old house or a jungle road at night, a five-star hotel room, somewhere my father was supposed to feel safe and far from home at the same time.

What convinces me this may be more than a strange coincidence is the manager’s reaction. It suggests a history, a pattern beyond just my father’s three nights, perhaps other guests, other mornings, other quiet upgrades that were never explained. In South Asian cultures, there is a long tradition of spirits tied to specific places, not wandering, but rooted, attached to a room or a threshold or a particular patch of ground. The fact that whatever happened stopped the moment my father changed rooms feels consistent with that. It wasn’t following him, but belonged there.

This story stayed with me because when I first heard the story I was really scared especially cause this was a new country, and we were going to move there soon. Also, the slience around it makes it more spooky as my father never got an explanation.

Irish Funerary Traditions in an American Family

Age: 19

Text:

Hello A, do you have any end-of-life celebrations or just traditions that your family does? I understand you have something for your mom’s side.

Hi, yes.  Good afternoon. So on my mom’s side, for a traditional ceremony, we call it celebrations of life, a tradition for us to be cremated and then, after the play, the bagpipes at the funeral, followed by family-given obituaries and the like. You know the normal stuff. Then your ashes are usually scattered around a place that you are quite fond of, usually, for my family, it’s somewhere around the water. But yes, Ben, thank you for your interview time. 

Would you like this to happen to you at the end of your life, or is it significant to you? I mean, have you seen multiple funerals where this happens?

Yes, it’s quite typical for where I’m from, and especially within my family. I want this when I pass: to be cremated and have the bagpipes played and have my ashes scattered in the ocean.  So, of course.

Do you know where this tradition allegedly came from or when it started in your family?

My greatest hunch is that it came from when my family was residing in Galeium, Ireland. It goes along with the bagpipes and also close connections to the sea. They are very much a seafaring people from that part of the Western coast of Ireland. Thank you.

Context:

End of life celebrations involving the scattering of ones ashes are a traditional form of cremation/celebration from Norse and Gaelic cultures. The practices following Americans who immigrated to the US over 150 years ago (in the case of A’s family) show just how enduring many of these practices are. A also discusses the strong connection to the sea that many families who leave proximally to it in the northeast have. These enduring connections are reminiscent of the traditions of their Irish forefathers, who also felt a spiritual connection to the sea, the same reason that their end-of-life celebrations occurred there.

My interpretation:

These are traditions that are passed down from person to person in these families. It is in major life events that we return most to our traditions and the perceived heritage that we link ownership to, and so it makes sense that these traditions have passed from person to person in these settings. The connection that Alex made to his Irish ancestry is interesting, as it also displays that he is aware of where his family is allegedly from inside of Ireland. Americans, especially those of European ancestry, often seem to wish to find some understanding of which part of that continent their family’s blood originates from, mostly because Americans of European descent in the US have little to no ethnic identity.

Celebrate 9’s but don’t celebrate 10’s

Text: “Many Chinese people, especially the older generations, won’t celebrate 10, 20, 30, etc because of the way the numbers are pronounced. [Ten] also sounds like the word ‘dead” and, in Chinese, twenty is ‘two-ten,’’ thirty is “three-ten,” and so on”

Context: My informant is Chinese and has grown up close to her relatives, especially as they aged. These are traditions that she remembered seeing in her childhood.

Analysis: This practice seems to be an age-related birthday ritual. As my informant described, “ten” in Chinese sounds like their word for “death.” Thus, it seems that to celebrate a “ten” birthday would be like inviting death. Chinese culture as a whole has many superstitions related to longevity. There seems to be a cultural fixation on living a long life, much more so than in American culture. I believe this is because, in Chinese culture, elders matter much more. For instance, in China, it is legally and culturally required for children to care for their aging parents to show respect and make up for the time their parents spent raising them. In America, it is much more common to see seniors taken care of by paid professionals in care facilities or living on their own. America, conversely, seems to place much more emphasis on youth. Proverbs like “Live fast, die young” and the idea of “peaking” early in life make old age not something to be revered, but tolerated in hopes of living vicariously through your kin. So, while the Chinese have many superstitions about avoiding death in old age, as is evidenced by my informant’s declaration that mostly old people subscribe to this superstition, Americans do not. 

Traditional Guatemalan Funeral

Nationality: United States
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Language: English

Text: “When my grandmother passed away, we held a traditional Guatemalan funeral. The night she died, we stood over her body and prayed the rosary from 5pm to 8am. The next day, we walked her to the cemetery, stopping to pray at four different places: the house doorway, the yard, the entrance to the street, and the first street corner. On the third day, we celebrated her life with a big gathering. All of her neighbors came, bringing food and support. We served Guatemalan hot chocolate, tamales, and tostadas.”

Context: The informant, N, shared this ritual during a conversation surrounding the passing of her grandmother and the traditional Guatemalan funeral that followed. N grew up in a Guatemalan household and explained how these practices have been followed by her family for generations. N described the multi-day ritual, which included an all-night rosary and a massive celebration. To N, these rituals don’t help her just honor her grandma but also help her stay connected to her cultural and spiritual roots.

Analysis: This is an example of a traditional death ritual that reflects deeper cultural beliefs surrounding death and spiritual transition. The rosary allows N’s family to show love for her grandma as each bead represents a prayer for her soul. The four stops along the funeral procession symbolize spiritual check points that allow for her soul to be gradually released from the physical world. The massive gathering on the final day brought the entire community together, turning grief into a beautiful moment of collective remembrance. This ritual shows how Guatemalan funerals combine Indigenous and Catholic practices to create a meaningful service that brings people together in support and remembrance.