Blue Monday

For those of you who don't recognize it, "Blue Monday" is from a Vonnegut novel. Kurt Vonnegut has always been one of my favorite writers, AND we share a birthday.
As for why it was Blue Monday yesterday......Here at CPMS (Chief Paul Memorial School), we have what is called a "blue" schedule. Basically, that is the schedule we use when there is a funeral in the village and school gets out early--don't ask me why they chose blue.
Now, you may be thinking to yourself, "Self, why would school get out early just because there is a funeral in the village?" Well, the answer is simple. The school gets out early for funerals because, if we didn't, there would be no students in the school anyway. When there is a funeral, it is a village event. The WHOLE village turns out when there is a funeral. When you have a community of less than 700 people that is as isolated as this one is, everyone is related.
Yesterday was a Blue Monday because there was a funeral in the village. They let school out so that everyone could go to the funeral.
A little background on the young man who passed away. His name was Lewis Paul, and he was killed in a snowmachine accident late Thursday night/early Friday morning. He had a wife and five young children--one was a newborn and one recently adopted. They would have had the funeral sooner, but they had to wait for a coffin to come from Anchorage for the burial and his family to come in from another village where they were visiting relatives. We had no planes coming in to the village for the majority of last week, so the coffin didn't come in until late Sunday. They had the funeral on Monday, the earliest possible day. The reason that they have to have the funeral as soon as possible is simple; there is NO embalming practiced here in the village. That means, they basically keep the body COLD until the funeral can happen. The put the body on ice in the summer; and in the winter, they put it in the person's house or in the Sunday School building. When you go to the funeral, there is no heat on in the building....heat would be a bad idea for a room where there is a body that has been dead several days, if you see what I mean.
For the funeral, the have readings from the Bible and songs. (Most of the service is in Yupik.) Anyone who wants to can come up and sing, and whole families (extended) go up to the front to sing. I saw one funeral where one of the groups had about thirty people in it. Then, the mourners file past the body. Eventually, the service moves out to the cemetery. During this time of year, they can't BURY the coffin because the ground is frozen solid. So, basically, they take the coffin out to the graveyard and put it on the ground. They put a sort of chicken wire around the coffin to keep animals from getting to it. Then, as it warms up, the coffin slowly sinks into the ground over time. You can go out to the cemetery and tell how long various graves have been there because of the amount of "sinking" the coffin has done.
The picture in this post is one I took back in the summer. You can see the different "levels" of the coffins in the cemetery.
Debbie