The first time Ottoniel was hospitalized overnight in late July, everyone got pretty scared. As an integral community leader, he could tell stories spanning the entire process leading up to and including the creation of the Peace Community. As the single community carpenter he could look back and see that it was he who literally set foundations and built what is today the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado. It seemed his hospitalization came out of the blue. He was back the next day, though, and the “lung infection” seemed to be subsiding. I brought him marigolds from our garden and told them that they had committed to making him feel better. Later in the week his second wife came to ask us for remedies from our garden to make him a tea. And Emily and I brought him chamomile from town. He quit smoking, and I tried to as well in solidarity.
When we accompanied him to the hospital in August and saw the radiographs of his lungs, Emily and my suspicions were confirmed that this man did not have a minor “lung infection” as the local medics had been claiming for nearly a year. I also did not believe he had pneumonia. Or bronchitis. Or even some sort of tropical lung disease that I’d never heard of. I was pretty sure that this man had cancer. But Ottoniel was jovial and kind. He joked with us and thanked us for our visit.
The next day while I was accompanying his son in the jungle, he turned and asked me how I thought his father was. “He’s fighting,” I said. “He’s really strong,” his son said. “He’s really sick,” I said. But his son just kept saying, “He’s really strong.”
Once he was so weak he couldn’t climb the hill even on a horse, he stayed in LH. I saw him often, stopped to talk to him every time I went through. I asked him if there was anything from town that could make him happy. He said he really liked green apples. And I brought him one. Every time I went down.
At the end of October his granddaughter turned five years old. Emily and I were accompanying his son through the jungle again and asked him what he was going to do to celebrate the event. He turned to us and said, “the greatest gift my daughter has is that her parents are alive.”
Before he was so sick that he couldn’t talk I was lamenting to him how I hadn’t been out to see several of the peace community villages. He said to stop that because FOR was supposed to be in LU. That’s why we were asked to accompany. You are accompanying all the time, he said. La Union needs you, he told me.
Once he was hospitalized permanently I went to see him everytime I was in Apartadó. And he just got sicker and sicker and smaller and smaller and before long he couldn’t talk at all.
It had been five years since his son had been to town and his oldest daughter was nearly nine months pregnant, but all four of his kids put on their nicest clothes and paid the money to go down to town and see him in the hospital.
When he asked to see his mom in the first week of November, I started to cry. His siblings and his in-laws brought her down. They carried her across rivers and carried her across plains so that she could go and see her first born son die. She would see him die now as a full-grown man as she had seen multiple of her other full-grown sons die, shot in a massacre right in front of her, and how she had seen other of her children die, before they even had the chance to grow. The day she went to see him, she had to make the decision as whether or not to put him on life support.
The community work day took us high into the hills the day after the family decided not to put Ottoniel on life-support. I was removing cacao seeds with his sister when she suddenly sat down under a cacao tree with her machete at her side, set her head in her hands, looked out over the jungle landscape with La Union tucked away in a distant valley, and began to silently cry.
Ottoniel died at two in the morning and by six funeral arrangements were being made. The plan to bring up the body was being set. People were donating horses and mules to bring up the materials for the burial and people were volunteering to dig the grave and help haul up the body. In the United States, when someone dies, there are so many different people involved. There are so many processes and laws and rules and regulations. Accompanying through this death was very different. Emily and I went about trying to do what you do when people die- giving our condolences to the family, helping in whatever way we could to make the preparations for the funeral easier, agreeing to accompany the funeral procession up from San José.
The morning he died, the flowers his daughter planted in our garden the week Emily and I first arrived in La Union started to bloom.
The walk down to retrieve Ottoniel was so sunny- there was not a cloud in the sky- but there was a constant rain. It was one of the most beautiful walks I have experienced since being in the Peace Community. I kept thinking to myself, “it is so beautiful today.”We passed hordes of people walking up for the funeral and vigil. When we arrived and met the hearse in San Jose, the men attached his casket to a long log. They hung it from this log and two at a time took turns balancing the log on their shoulders and carrying him up the hill. And we walked in procession as his family and friends carried him up the hill. We walked behind them across the river and through the forests and across the fields and up the vertical hill, all the way home to the kiosk where the vigil was planned.
Because the body can’t be alone, the entire community stayed up all night for the vigil. They killed a cow and cooked it. The burned candles and talked. Some told jokes and some cried. And the night was clear, the first without rain in at least a month. There were candles in the kiosk. And a light fog. His daughter sat on a rock next to me, doubled over and cried on my lap. I rubbed her back and felt her tears falling down my legs.
I didn’t look at the body. Neither did his pregnant daughter or his distraught mother. In fact, none of the pregnant women were allowed to look at his body and neither were any of the individuals who suffer from “nightmares or nervousness,” but the great majority of the community did look. And several of them confirmed that when his family was hysterically crying at the casket his corpse also produced tears. His corpse was crying because they were so sad.
The sun came up to us playing cards and drinking coffee around his body. Planning for the burial, at first light the volunteers to dig his grave headed to the cemetery. I watched as his apprentice measured out and constructed the space for his casket to be put to rest. I watched the men rotate through, shoveling dirt in the hot sun. I watched his son, after a night of no sleep, dig his father’s grave.
By mid-afternoon it was confirmed that family travelling from Medellin would not make it up in time for the funeral, and thus the vigil was extended for another night to wait for them. The second night the group was considerably smaller. We sat in hammocks hung around the kiosk and listened to music quietly. At 3 AM I made potatoes. There was a thick fog and a biting wind, but it did not rain. Everyone was bundled in sweatshirts drinking coffee and trying to see eachother through the god. We shivered a lot. And stared at candles flickering in the kiosk. Walking back and forth from the kiosk to the house through the fog, it was hard not to think about the haunting.
My neighbors have walked all of the paths in this village a million times. They walk them a handful of times a day. Somehow seeing the funeral procession take off from the kiosk, I got the feeling that everything was happening in slow motion. That walk down and across the canyon on the day of the funeral seemed endless… down and up the ravine to the plot in the cementary. His children all made eye contact with me as they walked by and I couldn’t help but start to cry.
As the final preparations were being made, people wailed over his casket and cried silently in the distance. A letter was read. A song was sung. His son just kept doing things, fixing a shovel, re-running the hose for water. Three of his four kids were there, two girls and a boy. When they were going to close off the casket his older daughter fell wailing on her brother and sister. His son collapsed to one knee and all three of them buckled down on top of eachother and cried silently. I think this image will be in my mind forever. This image of pure grief. It seemed to go on and on and then she yelled out through the tears- “Daddy! Why WHY did you have to leave us!?” And their grief became my grief and it was like I just didn’t even know what to do.
Walking back from the cemetery alone, Emily and I both start to cry. Sleep-deprived and hungry and tired and emotionally exhausted we hugged in front of the library and tried to come up with an action plan. What are we supposed to do? Feeling so cracked out and lost and grief ridden as though all of the grief of the community was ours. All of the pain was ours. We decide to make some breakfast, sweep the floor of the kitchen and then go to bed. And that is exactly what we do. Because sometimes you just have to follow an action plan.
After a nap I go to visit his mother. She just stares straight ahead. She walks in circles around the kitchen looking for an egg she is holding in her hand. Nobody tells her, whether because they don’t notice or don’t want to break her thought pattern I’m unsure. I told her. I said, “the egg you are looking for is in your hand.” And she said, “you’re right.” She cracked it, put it in a bowl, and walked out of the kitchen to sit in a chair and stare straight ahead.
For the week and a half following Ottoniel’s burial, we prayed a novena in the kiosk each night. On the ninth night, on the last amen of the last prayer, without any wind blowing whatsoever, the candle went out on its own. His wife turned to me and said, “You see, he is telling us he doesn’t want us to mourn anymore.”
Since he died two weeks ago, nearly all of my conversations in the community have been centered around death. While sitting in her kitchen surrounded by geese, we came to the conclusion that neither of us knew if it was life or death that was strongest, but that as humans we need to be brave when facing both. The community is still in mourning, of course. I have been looking for strength in the cacaotera, looking out over a breezy point and reminding myself that it’s all gonna be ok. That it’s all going to be fine.
And then this weekend, two weeks to the day after his death, his daughter gave birth to a baby girl.
November has had me reflecting a lot on accompaniment. There is accompaniment in a professional sense. There is non-interference and observing from afar. So much of our work is based on analyzing this and making sure we are not crossing lines, that we are remaining distinct and distant. There is, as PBI puts in their slogan, the idea that we are only “creating the space for peace.” But what happens when professional becomes personal. When a friend’s father dies, son dies, brother dies. When your observation becomes your participation. When empathy makes the pain of those around you become your pain as well. When you realize that your relationships with the community are not only based in the professional, but rather in the very personal… they are based in love.
