9/05/11 – Bring Your Dead Home; It Costs Less

Interspersed among the recollections of the people and places from mom and Paolo’s past were stories of life in Locri.  Both of them remembered the story of their uncle who had died after a brief illness while staying in the hospital.  Dying at the hospital in those times was an expensive affair.  After all, the person had died while technically in the custody of the state; therefore all kinds of paperwork had to be prepared and signed and stamped and registered.  Italians love bureaucracy (it keeps a large number of the population employed), and bureaucracy is expensive.  Fortunately, their uncle had once worked in the hospital and someone pulled the family aside and essentially said “take him before anybody notices.”  So the family propped him up in a wheelchair; put him in a waiting car and brought him home.  I presume they put him in the back seat and not in the trunk where most southern Italians prefer to stick the dead while in transport.

The official death certificate isted the cause of death as “died in his sleep.”  At the time this was an accepted as an actual medical cause of death and not just a description of when someone died.  However, while the medical community may have dismissed the legitimacy of “died in his sleep” as a cause of death in favour of slightly more accurate descriptions, the idea still persists in Italian culture.  The expression is still used by families who want to avoid disclosing causes of death that would bring shame on a family.  When a young person “dies in their sleep” with no previous medical problems or accidents, it’s almost certainly related to drugs or suicide.

Whatever the new reality, sneaking your dead out of the hospital is a thing of the past; unless, of course, you happen to know someone on the inside.