'MY TASK IS TO BE ALIVE'
McCarthy, Abigail
MY TASK IS TO BE AUVE Abigail McCarthy I know that our American funeral customs and the industry they support are to be deplored. Yet, like most people I have had reason to be grateful for them....
...In this time of changing mores this is no longer thought necessary...
...That, too, could be possible...
...That seemed especially important that Saturday, a means of witness, perhaps even of defiance...
...We knelt and prayed beside the body of a man, a man his friends called "warm," "urbane," "civilized"-a man alive with purpose and plans only 48 hours before...
...Some years ago the receptionist used to be clad in black, sometimes relieved with a short string of pearls...
...Is there any hope that enough of us can be alive to the cancer of injustice in the world, the hatred of life, which made his death, and that of others seem logical and mandatory to someone-someone safe among us...
...I thought the latter strangely appropriate...
...Those who worked with him, including the husband of Ronni Moffit murdered with him, think it must have been a DINA agent, one of the junta's secret police...
...It is a large brick pseudo-Colonial building on a corner with semicircular drives and entrances on each street-clearly a busy place...
...Since there are two floors of such suites, one is met by a receptionist, who greets visitors in a pleasant, quiet tone, and directs them to the correct one...
...That night she wore a print silk and a long red stole...
...There was only one date . . . September 21, 1976...
...Later anyone may look and see that signature-so much your own that it can be picked out from millions and millions of others-and know that you were there, that you came...
...MY TASK IS TO BE AUVE Abigail McCarthy I know that our American funeral customs and the industry they support are to be deplored...
...We all know the importance of "the book...
...It is not only the forced work we had to do on the island . . . where the winds blow more than 90 miles an hour-with no proper food or clothing...
...The official theory of the junta is that the bomb was placed by hardline international Communists who thought Orlando Letelier too centrist, too committed to the constitution of Chile which had originally made the Allende election possible...
...And when we come face to face with horror and the inadmissible, they give us the refuge of the expected and the usual...
...My daughter and I, having learned from experience that the evening hours are the more traditional, arrived at 7. Suites of viewing rooms and parlors are appointed to each person being mourned...
...On many occasions we were taken out to be executed, and there was a simulation of an execution...
...When there is a death, notices of the "hours of visitation" are placed in the obituary columns of the local dailies, as is the custom...
...On the last Friday and Saturday in September they were, we read, to be from 2 to 8 p.m...
...Who killed him...
...So you sign the book...
...I spoke to a friend of the family who went to tell the newly-made widow that we were there...
...She came in...
...I had not seen him since his release from the Chilean concentration camp maintained on a sub-arctic island by the present junta...
...And that a young woman who worked in the institute where my daughter spent a college summer had died beside him...
...We cannot continue to live with the feeling that our powers that be are indifferent to assassins crossing our borders, hunting down their prey with impunity...
...Now he is not alive...
...Beside the book were the remembrance cards...
...What concerns us most is what our government does to find out...
...And it is a government which has caused people to disappear, which did not hesitate to imprison Orlando Letelier, a cabinet minister who had been constitutionally appointed, a man only recently an accredited ambassador to our United States...
...Then she took us to the coffin adorned with only one or two blood-red roses...
...One may miss seeing the family and thus the opportunity to convey the consolation so important in village or city- one's witness to the fact that a person has lived, has been held in respect, and that his or her leaving does not go unremarked...
...But (it is also) the acts done in order to intimidate you, to destroy you not only physically but from the psychological point of view...
...Because I was expected to, I looked at the composed face of the man lying there...
...Only his notes survive...
...Too many Americans accept, quite calmly, the possibility of connivance on the part of people in our own agencies...
...If it was such an an agent the intent would be to conAbigaill McCarthy (Cont...
...Certainly he was the leader and the most important of the Chilean political exiles, always excepting Mrs...
...Your presence says that it is important that this one person has lived and died...
...I wondered what some of the visitors from other cultures now filtering in, looking ill at ease, made of it...
...His hair did turn grey in that place...
...There is a kind of total irra- . tionality in what's taking place in those places," he said in an interview...
...I could only look quickly and turn away thinking, "It is true then...
...We entered the softly-lighted room where the casket was placed and signed the book open on a desk just inside the entrance...
...Washington has many funeral "homes...
...They are what we have...
...Our world rocked as the terror-makers intended it to do...
...They were traditional, too,-almost anachronistic-colored pictures of the Sacred Heart of Jesus with his hand raised in blessing...
...But a human being is a very extraordinary thing, sometimes you are able to face things that perhaps, if you were asked about those things before, you would say, 'No, I'm not prepared for those things.' But the feeling of being convinced that your most important task is to be alive, gives you a lot of courage . . . to say every day, 'My task is to be alive...
...Allende, widow of the former president...
...On the back, comforting phrases, "Blessed are they that mourn . . •" and a prayer, "O Gentlest Heart of Jesus . . . have mercy on the soul of Thy departed servant...
...It is a government which uses torture Orlando Letelier had made notes about his "interrogation...
...And I still could not believe that Orlando Letelier, a man I knew, had been murdered by a bomb-a very sophisticated bomb, the experts had said...
...That is a monstrous fact...
...vince exiles of the total absence of asylum-that they were safe nowhere...
...We embraced and murmured the words, the time-worn words, the only words there are in the face of sudden death for one too young...
...One of these-much advertised and smoothly run-is more frequently used than any other by the bereaved families of our transient officialdom...
...Only a few blocks from our house...
...I am not going to allow the fascists to destroy me.' And that helps...
...It is quite true, as Senator Kennedy said on the floor of the Senate, that the present administration embraced the junta, that the President said that the forcible change in Chile's governent was in the best interest of the people, that American business and our busy purveyors of arms like dealing with the junta...
...He had meant to write about that...
...In the normal going-to-work traffic of early morning Washington...
...Some of them are established family businesses which have served certain groups and neighborhoods for several generations...
Vol. 103 • November 1976 • No. 23
