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Buddhist customs & sister.
My sister's birthday was on Wednesday. She should've been/is 19 years old, two years younger than me.
The priest told my parents not to be said because according to our branch of Buddhism, the third day is when my sister's soul starts floating around and looking for a new body, and it's very rare that the third day after someone's death is also the same day that they're reborn into a new body.
My sister's room currently looks like a shrine. They have a CD of Pirith (prayers) blasting at full volume, have two candles lit on a table, photos of her everywhere, and the windows and door open so that her soul won't come back to the room where she lived and be trapped there. We've also been told not to be sad or make a big fuss of being sad because otherwise, her soul will be drawn to the room and she won't reincarnate properly.
Also, there's a rule that no meat can be brought into the house for seven days after the death, and no cooking can be done. That probably came from ancient times when having a dead body in the house might lead to infected cooking from bacteria or rot or whatever, but it means right now that everyone's eating cold, vegetarian food since even using the microwave is morally risky territory.
The funeral is going to be in Sri Lanka. We're shipping the body over there, and paying for the plane ticket of the priest from Vienna who always looked after my sister so that he can do the ceremony for her. My parents have agreed that I can go straight home after the funeral, and don't have to talk to people if I don't want to. I definitely don't; I haven't even been fielding any of the calls of condolences to the house, and there have been a LOT. Enough that I can't even call my friends because the phone starts to ring when I pick it up to dial in the numbers.
My father's stopped screaming in his sleep; he was holding my sister when she went into cardiac arrest and died for the first time, and that hit him pretty hard. The ambulance people managed to shock her back into breathing, and she ended up dying in hospital of a second cardiac arrest, but still, having her stop breathing while he was holding her...
I held my sister occasionally. I have no idea how much of my sanity would've been left if I'd been one holding her when it happened.
I don't know exactly when the funeral is happening, but I'll try to keep updating. Thank you all for your well-wishes in my earlier post; I appreciate the sentiment.
Also, I realized that I skipped over some key stuff in this post, so basically:
I'm in Austria. I flew down on Wednesday. I'm flying to Sri Lanka next Tuesday, coming back to Vienna on Saturday/Sunday, and my sister is going to be cremated and have her ashes scattered in the ocean. She died of cardiac arrest brought on by pneumonia. That's the same thing that Sandy, a handicapped girl in a class I worked with in the summer of 2005, died of.
My sister was severely disabled. I keep getting told she's better off like this because she's no longer suffering. I have a hard time being consoled by something that boils down to "she's better off dead", even though I know that's not what they mean.
I miss my friends.
The priest told my parents not to be said because according to our branch of Buddhism, the third day is when my sister's soul starts floating around and looking for a new body, and it's very rare that the third day after someone's death is also the same day that they're reborn into a new body.
My sister's room currently looks like a shrine. They have a CD of Pirith (prayers) blasting at full volume, have two candles lit on a table, photos of her everywhere, and the windows and door open so that her soul won't come back to the room where she lived and be trapped there. We've also been told not to be sad or make a big fuss of being sad because otherwise, her soul will be drawn to the room and she won't reincarnate properly.
Also, there's a rule that no meat can be brought into the house for seven days after the death, and no cooking can be done. That probably came from ancient times when having a dead body in the house might lead to infected cooking from bacteria or rot or whatever, but it means right now that everyone's eating cold, vegetarian food since even using the microwave is morally risky territory.
The funeral is going to be in Sri Lanka. We're shipping the body over there, and paying for the plane ticket of the priest from Vienna who always looked after my sister so that he can do the ceremony for her. My parents have agreed that I can go straight home after the funeral, and don't have to talk to people if I don't want to. I definitely don't; I haven't even been fielding any of the calls of condolences to the house, and there have been a LOT. Enough that I can't even call my friends because the phone starts to ring when I pick it up to dial in the numbers.
My father's stopped screaming in his sleep; he was holding my sister when she went into cardiac arrest and died for the first time, and that hit him pretty hard. The ambulance people managed to shock her back into breathing, and she ended up dying in hospital of a second cardiac arrest, but still, having her stop breathing while he was holding her...
I held my sister occasionally. I have no idea how much of my sanity would've been left if I'd been one holding her when it happened.
I don't know exactly when the funeral is happening, but I'll try to keep updating. Thank you all for your well-wishes in my earlier post; I appreciate the sentiment.
Also, I realized that I skipped over some key stuff in this post, so basically:
I'm in Austria. I flew down on Wednesday. I'm flying to Sri Lanka next Tuesday, coming back to Vienna on Saturday/Sunday, and my sister is going to be cremated and have her ashes scattered in the ocean. She died of cardiac arrest brought on by pneumonia. That's the same thing that Sandy, a handicapped girl in a class I worked with in the summer of 2005, died of.
My sister was severely disabled. I keep getting told she's better off like this because she's no longer suffering. I have a hard time being consoled by something that boils down to "she's better off dead", even though I know that's not what they mean.
I miss my friends.