4/8/19
CARACAS, Venezuela—“Manuel’s mother died last night.” This is what my friend texted me this morning, telling me about our colleague’s loss. I’m just about to text my condolences when the phone pings again, and I see something I’ll never be able to unsee. The body of a woman, covered by a thin white sheet, spread out on an old maroon couch. Next to her are plastic bottles that once contained some sort of off-brand soda, now filled with frozen water and used to keep the body of my friend’s mother from rotting in the heat. I have spent almost two months in Venezuela and seen more atrocities than I expected in a lifetime, but this, this complete loss of human dignity, may be the worst yet. Manuel can’t afford the cost of the cremation and funeral, a total of almost US$300, so his friends have pooled all their belongings to help him lay his last remaining relative to rest. In a country where 85 percent of the population lives beneath the poverty line of $6 a month, that amount of money is usually impossible to come by, and most end up burying their relatives where they can, as anonymously as most of them have lived. The woman beneath the sheet is tiny, more like a teenage girl than an old woman, the only giveaway being a strand of gray hair just at the edge of the cloth’s yellowing embroidery. She spent her last 20 years watching the country she loved decay and her life along with it, and now her son is cooling her dead body with ice-filled plastic bottles as he cries tears of anger, impotence and loss.
It has been said that a society is judged by how it cares for those who cannot care for themselves, and by this measure Venezuela is truly a failed state. During my weeks here I have seen how the oldest and the youngest die in the streets from starvation and treatable diseases and now I am witnessing the most vulnerable of all–the lifeless body of a mother–meeting her maker with neither mercy nor grace. It took two decades to get here: from the richest country in the region to a post-apocalyptic state. Two decades to get to a place where the living lack hope and the dead have no names. Before I get the chance to reach out to Manuel, the electricity goes out again, for the fifth time in as many days. This national blackout along with a chronic water shortage is bringing an already crippled country to its knees. For Manuel, it means he will sit with his mother through the night in darkness, until she is taken away to a burial that he cannot afford. The signal is out now, so I can’t reach my friend but even if I could I wouldn’t know how to console him. What are the words for what he is going through? What phrase can I utter to take away the pain of what is still to come? There is nothing to say and no way to say it, only silence and darkness as Manuel sits in wait by his mother’s side.