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CURING At first, the mourners prostrate themselves on the body of the dead one. They wail, they eat the dust on the floor, they cannot bear to look at the face that wears the mask of one who spoke and laughed and shared good food with them. But soon it is only the pungent smoke that makes them weep. Suspended over fire, the body's sinews shrink, the muscles tighten to stiff cords, each joint flexes, and the limbs assume the posture of one who—crawling— is about to pounce, to spring out of the thicket where the heavy spirit has crouched in ambush, to take off, eager and filled with great appetite, for heaven. It is thus the emptied dead one shrinks to an easily-lifted thirty pounds of sapless bone bound in book leather—a pod of shriveled eye and tongue and bowel. The face, parchment stretched over teeth and cheekbone, is not that of lover, mother, sister, son. It is death's face, death who has no other name but Death, a name that signifies the same in every language. And she or he whose own name fits no other is not this emptied thing hung from a nail behind the bedroom door.
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