A Jamaican country funeral is a joyous time, if you can bury the family animus deep enough— which is not as deep as you might expect considering the cavernous depths of childhood jealousies. There are tears, of course, free-flowing, from unexpected corners. Tears chase the liquor in the grave diggers’ cups, punctuate stagger-dancing that does not miss a beat or spill a single drop of spirit. There is also family that you might see only once or twice more after this, and you are exquisitely aware that this rare moment is a final gift from the deceased. Everyone watches and takes careful note of the names and faces that nevertheless become jumbled because grandma and grandpa really loved each other. We declare with pride that only love could have produced such a bounty of descendants. Old brooms know the corners where discord hides and sweeps them clean.

A Jamaican country funeral is a time of excess, whatever it means to your station. If there was some food, there is more. If there was no liquor, there is some. Imbibements, not the day's wages, propel the army that comes together to simultaneously act in and produce a grand exhibition in honour of a life well lived. The renk of roasting ram head in the morning, and bubbling cauldrons of mannish wata by afternoon, waft over rural foothills, an age-old summoning of the people. There are marching bands and silver chariots. The deceased arrives to their resting place in pomp and style, a final show of prosperity amassed over a hard life.

A Jamaican country funeral is a time of devotion. There is singing, a welcoming of the Christian god if he dares to dawdle in the midst of the Africans and their resilient rituals. There is speaking in tongues and singing of glorious hymns to worshipful tears. We tie the duppy before we church it just in case white Jesus is no match for the duppy dem. Then we declare that Jesus is king—God has conquered death—and we preach of the day, undefinably far from now, when the dead in Christ shall rise. White Jesus and his father will at an undisclosed time reunite us, should we be patient enough. But our duppy dem finally free of that man and his father, beyond the reach of their agents after a life of Christian constraint. At home, we dream fruitfully of our newly minted ancestor.

A Jamaican country funeral is a transcultural process. We relearn enduring customs and create new ones. It is a reflective time, albeit far from sober. These realities, of feverish emotion and solemn reflection on the family legacy, mesh as harmoniously as the African Ritual and Christian constraint that have clashed for generations—grief is a way maker. In the safety of the foothills, we lean into our shared emotion. Progeny weep in undignified despair for all to see the magnitude of our sorrow. Our grief was not colonized, and not for lack of trying. Our weeping and wailing and rending and railing is the bridge from this world's oppression to our path of ascendancy; our defiant immodesty, proof that we have absorbed what was saved of our legacy. It is not our way to “keep calm and carry on.” Our ancestors cross over to glory on the tips of our tongues unfurled—their portion confidently spoken by kin, with newfound appreciation for the knowledge passed down in secrets, bundled like hidden treasures in bible stories and folktales.

At the end of a Jamaican country funeral, we smile tiredly and hold each other as we have not in decades. And we take the warm touch back with us to cold corners of the world. Grief is a soothing salve. Fissures heal; new ones form; the cycle continues until the next time we gather at the dead yard—as we must again, inevitably—and teach to one another the intimacy between love and mourning.