If you get to hear someone keep a dead person in their home for a day you might be wondering what is going on with the person. Now hearing of a tribe that keeps the dead in their home not for days but for years is something weird.
More than a million people in the Toraja region of Sulawesi in eastern Indonesia don’t believe in burying the dead as soon as they die.
In fact, they don’t consider them dead. They refer to their dead as sick.
After someone dies, be it an infant or an elderly, it may be months, sometimes years, before a funeral takes place.
In the meantime, the families keep their bodies in the house and care for them as if they were sick.
They are brought food, drink, and cigarettes two to three times a day. They are washed and have their clothes changed regularly.
The dead even have a bowl in the corner of the room as their “toilet”.
Furthermore, the deceased are never left on their own and the lights are always left on for them when it gets dark.
The families worry that if they don’t take care of the corpses properly, the spirits of their departed loved ones will give them trouble.
Traditionally, special leaves and herbs were rubbed on the body to preserve it. But nowadays, a preserving chemical, formalin, is injected instead leaving a powerful chemical reek in the room.
In Torajan culture, a person’s funeral is the most important day of his or her life. Funerals can be so expensive that successive generations might be saddled with crippling debt. The events can last a week and involve the slaughter of hundreds of livestock.
Families in Toraja often save for years so they can afford the elaborate exchanges of gifts, money, and freshly slaughtered meat that take place during the funeral, which is seen as a key means of redistributing wealth in Torajan society.
