Tantie Pearlie's Funeral, Revised Edition: Ole Time Caribbean Funeral

By Eugenia A. Franklin-Springer

THEY WILL NOT KNOW OF OUR PAST AS WE NOW REMEMBER IT, UNLESS WE TELL THEM
A semi-fictional depiction of a Caribbean village family in the nineteen fifties, in tug of war with death over a beloved terminally ill daughter and sister; the rituals and customs followed as the community celebrates her life and mourns her passing; The wake, funeral procession, and pouring out of grief at the cemetery; the nine nights and forty days' prayers, and the annual All Souls or All Saints night of remembrance. Plus, brief anecdotes of the soul making contact after transitioning.

. . ."We eventually left, saying our last farewell from a distance, leaving her alone in that sanitized looking, well-manicured, aloof cemetery. And the thought ripped through my heart that such a cold sendoff was not befitting a strength of culture represented by this barely forty, lovely Caribbean woman.

And my mind went back to how the entire community in my Caribbean homeland would come together to pay tribute to our sick and dying, or to our suddenly deceased, and I remembered all those wonderful people in my old neighborhood, whose simple, routine lifestyles during my childhood, shaped in my mind a firm image of a culture I have discovered to be uniquely Trinidadian, and at the same time, distinctly Caribbean. I knew then that somebody must tell the children our story,
For,
They will not know
Of our past
As we now remember it
Unless
We tell them.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1482062291
• ISBN13: 9781482062298
• Release Date: January 2013
• Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.67 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"