A Eulogy for Each and Every End

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The eyes of Pilar’s apprentice widen when she says he will be responsible for tending the body while she finishes embroidering the burial suit.

He’s not even 20, and it’s his first day as the assistant undertaker of Caiação. It looks like he’s struggling not to protest — to his credit, though, the boy takes a deep breath and follows her to the mortuary table.

Pilar is almost 60, and Cosmo is her first pupil.

He pulls on the gloves, paying attention while she instructs him on how to disinfect the body, then opens the bag to reveal the pallid face of an elderly man. It’s the retired baker, Seu Valentim — who discovered a Grade 4 brain tumor six months before, right after turning 118, but died because of a heart attack while cutting paper flags for the Limewashing Festival next month.

The lad isn’t shaken at all; just like any other member of the commune, he was taught since childhood that death is not to be feared. The void left by the departure of a beloved one hurts no matter what, but dying is nothing more than the natural outcome of any life — long or short, joyful or regretful, human or not. Treating it as an unspeakable subject is just one of the many bad habits the founders of Caiação agreed on leaving behind; learning from the Native Guarani council members, they committed to educating their young to respect life and death alike. They wanted to build not a place of mere survival, after all, but a home where the next generations could live and thrive.

Still, Cosmo looks bothered.

“It’s just. … When I spent a couple of months helping Dad in construction, I never did more than hammering posts into the ground and mixing earth, clay, and straw for the wattle and daub walls. So here, I thought I would start with a … less important task,” he murmurs at last, unfastening the final part of the bag’s zipper.

It took him two whole minutes to retort, Pilar thinks. Not bad.

“What?” He stops mid movement when he notices her grin. “I just said something incredibly stupid, didn’t I?”

Pilar shakes her head.

“You said exactly what I said on my first day here, 35 years ago.” She touches his arm for comfort, notices his shoulders relaxing. “And I’m glad you did, because I can keep following my original script and teach you your first lesson as an undertaker: Not a single of our tasks is more or less important than the others, but the secret of the sustainable, respectful destination of human remnants lies in the burial suits.”

Pilar brings her rocking chair closer to her assistant. She unfolds the almost finished suit on her lap, the white embroidered lines highlighted against the black organic cotton, grown and woven in a neighboring commune. Besides the branchlike pattern common to all suits, the baker’s already has many personal symbols — every time a resident registers for assisted suicide or is declared under palliative care by the Health Nodule staff, Pilar starts customizing a piece for them.

“You know how these work,” she says, threading the needle.

It’s not a question — every year, all first-graders visit the Funeral Nodule, where Pilar lectures them about death, grief, responsibility. Above all, she talks about legacy — things, good or bad, that each of us leaves behind. Memories, but also toxins and residues. At this point, she takes some time to explain in simple terms why they wear that specific type of burial suit.

“I do.” Cosmo is now washing Seu Valentim’s silvery hair. Pilar notices his hands are gentle, but firm. Tender, but not hesitant. A good trait for a mortician.

“So tell me,” Pilar asks, choosing what symbol to embroider next.

She checks the notes she took during the interview with Seu Valentim’s family and friends, and a tiny smile curves her lips when she decides on the crest of Cerrado Futebol Clube — the amateur football team in which he played as a goalkeeper for most of his life.

“The thread is seeded with a selection of specialized mushroom spores,” enunciates Cosmo. “They awake and germinate after the body is buried in one of our groves, and metabolize the toxins from the corpse before these substances can contaminate the soil. This is how we keep our dead close without compromising the land which feeds us.”

Pilar smiles again. There is something beautiful in the fact he answers the question the very same way she did more than three decades ago. So technical, so secure, so focused on the functionality of it — so naive, in a touching way. Hearing his words is like seeing the water running through a groove already drawn in the ground. She knows it’s just a matter of time before the strength of the flow starts eroding the banks, opening new paths that will lead to new reflections.

Indeed, there is something beautiful in seeing a cycle closing just to start anew.

“And how about the other part?” she asks. Eyes focused on the boy’s face, fingers working in the stitches by themselves — by now, she has learned to trust them.

“What other part? I don’t —” Cosmo is rinsing Seu Valentim’s long beard. He doesn’t stop, but his expression lights up when he understands. “Oh. The drawings, right? Yes, I know about them too.”

She nods. The spores could be embedded in the suit using any design, but is there anything more poetic than triggering the irrevocable decay of a deceased one with a pattern that evokes their ephemeral memories? Anything more respectful than taking time to learn about each citizen, then planning the best way to convey — in a simple piece of cloth — the most important elements of a whole life?

“It’s not a rule, you know.” Pilar makes sure to keep her voice neutral. There are some things you cannot force a person to do, or they become stripped of all significance. “When it’s your time, you can do as you prefer.”

Cosmo doesn’t say a word. It’s like he’s weighing what she just said — when it’s your time. Like he’s trying to wrap his head around the fact he will have a time to call his own. Then he shrugs and turns back to his work. Apparently, the boy is not eager to answer anything only to please her, and Pilar likes it.

She is done with the burial suit right after Cosmo finishes the cleaning. Pilar approaches, gloves on, and shows him how to break the rigor mortis at the correct places to put Seu Valentim’s body in the fetal position before proceeding with the final treatment of the corpse.

They still spend a couple of hours lost amid small tasks interleaved with lengthy explanations and philosophical discussions. When Pilar thinks it’s time to call it a day, she reaches into her pocket.

“Here.” The undertaker detaches a couple of keys from her keychain. “I made a copy of these for you.”

Cosmo accepts them absentmindedly, his eyes locked on her fob.

“A whale?” he asks, pointing to the small piece of carved wood.

“Yeah.” For a heartbeat, Pilar considers leaving the explanation at that, but the words escape her lips as if she were an overflowing dam. “Dad made it for me many years ago when I told him I dreamed of seeing one of these.” She snorts. “Silly girl. … Can you imagine? They are so few, so rare … so precious. When in the world would I happen to be in the same place, at the same time as a mighty whale? Me, who left the commune just a couple of times on school excursions to the beach?”

“I read researchers are observing an increase in whale populations after all the measures to control underwater noise pollution implemented over the last decade. Every year, there are more sightings of mothers with calves on our coast.” Cosmo smiles a soft smile. “Maybe you still can see one, Pilar.”

“I don’t think so, but it’s fine. I already made peace with the idea I will never see a whale. And you know what?” She removes her own keys from the ring. “Keep it too.”

“Oh, no, no, no.” Cosmo shakes his head, backing off, but Pilar presses on.

“Please. I’ve seen you working. I know how careful you are.” She gently pulls his apprentice’s hands, placing the keychain in them. “You’ll take good care of it.”

The assistant undertaker runs his thumb across the wooden whale.

“I promise I will.”

“Great. Now …” Pilar stretches her fingers, sore from so much embroidering. “What about we have some black coffee before we go home?”

The recently limewashed houses glinting under the vibrant red sunset, the smell of freshly roasted corncobs wafting through the chilly air of June, the cries of joy from kids and adults enjoying the last night of celebration with some offline playtime — it all adds to a romantic atmosphere Pilar is eager to enjoy with Órion.

So they dance, they chat around the bonfires, they walk hand in hand admiring the pristine white walls. They’re not like this for beauty, Pilar knows — all constructions are limewashed, because light surfaces help decrease the surrounding temperature by a precious couple of degrees. But it’s pretty nonetheless, and the Limewashing Festival itself is far from just a matter of maintenance. It’s a yearly ceremony to repaint buildings, but also to celebrate renovation — a way to remember that no offense is unforgivable, no mistake is irreversible, and everything inevitably goes back to its starting point. Walls will get dusty, painted, dusty again. People will err, repent, improve, err again. Crops will be sowed, cultivated, harvested, sowed again. Cycles and more cycles, Pilar thinks, human and natural alike. The festival is also an opportunity to gather with other citizens, welcome refugees who recently arrived from flooded areas or declining urban agglomerations, exchange stories with members of other sibling communes without the intermediation of artificial intelligence and gadgets.

Pilar and Órion stop by a table full of food. Cosmo is there with one of his boyfriends, Raoni, and the group falls into easy conversation while serving themselves. Pilar bites into a piece of cornmeal cake — it’s good, although not as good as Seu Valentim’s. One month after his passing, people still talk about how he is missed — either by his tasty baked goods, his jokes, or his gentle demeanor. Pilar hopes to be remembered with similar fondness after she’s gone.

“Liked it?”

She is awakened from her reverie by Aruã, one of the commune’s bioengineers. He’s just a couple of years older than Pilar and Órion, and is pointing to the tray full of pieces of cornmeal cake.

“It’s delicious.” It’s Cosmo who answers. “Hey, Pilar, what do you think about asking Aruã to pack some cake for us? For our coffee break tomorrow?”

“My dear, you know my blood sugar levels are all over the place.” She tsks theatrically. “But please, Aruã, do as the boy says.”

“Just for one person, then?” the bioengineer asks, smiling.

“No, make it for two.” Pilar turns back to her apprentice. “You’ll take care of my share, right?”

“Always,” he answers after a heartbeat.

“Now, this is a nice tutor …” Raoni says, winking at Pilar.

While Aruã packs four pieces of cornmeal cake in beeswax wrap, Cosmo hugs Raoni sideways, placing his head on his partner’s shoulder. Pilar watches, taken by an easy contentment. Seeing young love flourishing before your eyes is pleasant, like wearing warm clothes right after collecting them from a clothesline where they dried under the wintry sun. It’s rewarding, like spending a whole afternoon reading a good book in a hammock, like coming home and smelling freshly brewed coffee.

“I know it’s not like Seu Valentim’s, but …” Aruã shrugs. “They’re made with the first cobs from the new variety we’re testing in Agronodule 5 using a selection of Guarani Mbya cultivation techniques. Also, its genome is edited to fix carbon 3.5 times faster than ancient corn crops from the 2000s, and … well, I don’t want to bore you with technicalities. It’s good, healthy food, and this is what matters.”

“No, I would hear about it for hours,” says Pilar. “It’s a blessing to have you folks working relentlessly in the Taproot to ensure our descendants will live in an even healthier, more abundant place.”

They all thank the bioengineer before leaving the table with bellies and hearts equally full. Órion touches his forehead while saying goodbye to the bioengineer — the gesture started with the founders, an acknowledgment of how important are those dedicated to engineering stronger, specialized crops that produce more food and sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at a faster rate. Even though it originally had no spiritual factor, now there are people like Órion who believe bioengineers like Aruã are imbued with a stronger connection to the land — divine or otherwise, it doesn’t matter.

For them, it’s not a coincidence that the Taproot is at the very center of the commune, the point from where the various nodules spread: Residential, Basic Education, Higher Education, Culture, Health, Communication, Construction, Maintenance, Entertainment, Funeral, all the Agronodules. … The commune’s everyday life revolves around the laboratories where new varieties of vegetables and fungi are researched and developed for the greater good, mixing cutting-edge technology with ancient techniques proposed by Indigenous committees dedicated to recovering, adapting, and applying their ancestors’ knowledge. Once again, Pilar can only think about how the founders had a pragmatic view of things, but generations of descendants gradually assigned a deeper meaning to most things.

Later that night, after they are back home from the festival, Órion proposes they watch the stars. He brings a soft blanket from inside and they lay in the grass. It’s winter, so the constellation after which Pilar’s lifetime partner is named appears only for a short time every night. Now, for instance, it’s nowhere to be seen.

“Thank you for being a constellation to me,” Pilar says, snuggling closer to Órion. “Even when you’re far from my eyes, I know you’re here. It means a lot.”

“And you, Pilar, are one of the pillars of my life.” It’s an old inside joke, but she always feels good when Órion says these words. “I love you.” He leans on his elbow to kiss her forehead, then her mouth.

His lips kiss softly against hers. Familiar but exciting, like a vast mapped territory she never bores to explore.

When he lays back, Pilar can tell he has more to say — but Órion only sighs and holds her hand tighter, humming and caressing her head until she falls asleep under the starry sky.

Six months after the Limewashing Festival, the Maintenance team is called to fix a leakage in the ceiling of the main Entertainment Nodule’s great hall. It’s summer in Caiação, which means it’s raining buckets, so they want to solve the problem as soon as possible. As fast as possible.

But as fast as possible ends up being too fast, and the commune is shocked by the first fatal working accident in years.

It’s almost midnight when Pilar is called by the Health Nodule staff to be informed that Olívio couldn’t be saved. She isn’t surprised when she finds Cosmo already in the mortuary — after months of observing him, Pilar didn’t expect anything different. Her assistant has puffy eyes, and just nods by way of greeting her, but he seems focused. Pilar considers offering to be in charge of everything this time, so the boy can go home and mourn the tragic passing of his dad in the company of his family, but she knows better. When her own father died, more than 10 years before, she made sure she was the one responsible for tending his body and embroidering his suit.

“Have you eaten something?” Pilar asks before they start, and Cosmo shakes his head. “OK, so let’s go to the kitchen. Would you help me, please?” She is aching everywhere, and not even the cane has been of much help lately.

He looks hesitant but offers her his arm. Once in the kitchen, the lad watches as Pilar brews a pot of coffee, toasts thick slices of sourdough bread in a pan, and scrambles a mix of mushrooms. 

It isn’t the first time Cosmo worked with Pilar in cases of sudden and unexpected deaths, those in which there was no reason to have burial suits prepared in advance, so he knows the drill already. He’s aware it’s important to eat because they will probably burn the midnight oil to finish his dad’s burial suit in time — it still needs to be embroidered from scratch.

They’re almost finishing the meal when the assistant undertaker finally talks. Pilar knew it would happen, knew she just needed to wait.

“We argued last night.” A single tear rolls down the boy’s cheek. “I was angry at him. He said and did things that pissed me off.” He breathes in … and out. When he seems calmer, he adds, “Sometimes, he was too hotheaded. Cruel, even. I hated when that happened.”

Pilar just nods. Cosmo stands up, takes the dishes to the sink, helps her return to the mortuary table.

He doesn’t say anything else until he opens the body bag. Olívio’s brown skin is ashen, and he has a nasty injury on the back of his head. Otherwise, the man in his 40s seems to be sleeping.

“But most of the time, Dad was loving. He used to make kites for me. He would prepare sandwiches, take me to the hills, and we would fly my kite until I was so exhausted I couldn’t walk. Then he would hold 9-year-old me in his strong, builder arms and bring me back while I dozed. Waking up in my bed after sleeping in his lap, up in the hills, looked like magic. I … loved him,” Cosmo finally adds, as if he hadn’t stopped talking in the kitchen. “I love him.”

Pilar understands. She has been in his shoes before.

He stares at Olívio’s body for a good five minutes.

“I learned it helps to think they were just a person like any other.” Pilar touches her apprentice’s shoulder. She hopes he understands she isn’t talking about the dead man laid before them, about the possibility of him being shaken by seeing his own dad’s corpse. “Olívio was a regular person just like you and me or anyone whose body we have tended or will tend someday.” He got things right and he got things wrong, she wants to add, but Cosmo won’t listen to it right now. Let the boy figure it out alone, at his own pace, just like her.

During the seven months of tutoring, they have stuck to the same pattern: Pilar takes care of the burial suit, Cosmo takes care of the body. This time, though, she threads the needle and hands it to her assistant, who sits in the rocking chair without complaining.

Cosmo doesn’t need notes or interviews with family — he is family. He knows how to better depict his father’s life in a dozen embroidered symbols.

They finish working right before dawn. When the first rays of the sun start peeking above the horizon, Olívio is already tucked inside his mushroom-seeded burial suit, ready to be reintegrated with the Earth.

“Coffee?” Pilar moans, stretching after standing for so long.

“Sure.” Cosmo offers his arm, and they hobble toward the kitchen.

Pouring the recently brewed coffee into two mugs, Pilar says, “I feel you, and I’m so sorry.” She can see Cosmo’s eyes brimming with tears. “Dad and I also had our disagreements. He could act like a dick when he wanted to, but at the same time was the most affectionate person in the world. And I loved him so, so very much. I still do.”

“But did he ever say something he knew would hurt you?” Cosmo asks in a wisp of voice.

Only a few times, Pilar thinks. But each time he did, the strong bond they shared when she was a girl became more and more frayed. It never broke, but it certainly wore out a great deal.

“Let’s see. … Once Dad told me I would never find lifelong partners because I was too unmanageable. And once I was so headstrong and wouldn’t listen to him, who only wanted what was best for me, maybe I deserved loneliness. I would never bend enough to live with other people, after all, so it was better not to even try.”

“Ouch, I’m so sorry. That’s awful.” Cosmo grimaces. “But he was wrong, after all.”

“No.” Pilar sips her coffee. “He was right.”

“But Órion. … He loves you,” her apprentice points out, squinting because of the morning light seeping through the curtains. “You’ve been together for a long time, and —”

“For one thing, Órion is the most patient person in the world. I was lucky to find him, like a thunder which strikes only once in life.” Pilar smiles, even though the smile doesn’t reach her eyes. “But more importantly, the shock of hearing those words coming out of my own father’s lips — one of the people I looked up to — made me wake up. It took me a long time, to be honest, but I understood him. And maybe because of that horrible argument, I committed to grow and change. To work on myself so I wouldn’t keep pushing people away from me.” She pauses. “It had happened many times, in fact.”

Cosmo stands up and collects the mugs. He has dark circles under his puffy eyes, faint tear tracks smudging his face.

“Still, it was pretty screwed up of him to say this to his own daughter.”

Given the way the words leave his mouth full of hurt — spite, even — Pilar understands he isn’t talking about her father anymore.

“It was, indeed.” She also stands up. The undertaker likes to stay longer in the mortuary to prepare things for the next day, but maybe today she can ask Cosmo to walk her home. It will make things less painful for her, and the boy will benefit from slowly strolling along the patches that connect the Funeral Nodule to the Residential Nodule where they both live, breathing fresh air after a long night holed up in the mortuary. “But now I see he was trying to warn me. I suspect he was trying to warn me that I could end up exactly like him, and he didn’t want that for his daughter. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the means to do so in a gentler manner. He was never taught to.”

Cosmo opens his mouth, then closes it again.

Right before they leave, Pilar takes a look at the burial suit that contains Olívio’s body, waiting for the Interment team to pick it up in a couple of hours. In a corner, she glimpses a small, timid embroidering of a kite flying in the sky.

With each passing week, even embroidering becomes harder for Pilar. It hurts to be sitting, it hurts to be up for long periods. Gladly, after almost one year of tutoring, Cosmo is already capable of doing everything alone. Just like she used to do before his arrival.

He is tending the body of an unknown teenage girl — 15, 16 years at most. A security patrol found her already dead, bit by a snake, close to one of the farther corn fields of Agronodule 13. She had frayed clothes, no documents or gadgets, and little food and water in her bag — it contained a rag doll, though. During the necropsy, the Health Nodule staff discovered she was 25 weeks pregnant, the bump barely noticeable due to her acute malnutrition.

If only she had been found earlier, Pilar thinks, the commune could have given her shelter. A proper home, to her and to her baby if she wished to carry her pregnancy to term.

“Do you understand now?” The undertaker asks Cosmo, trying to push away the frustration of not being able to help everybody out there.

The boy nods.

“I do.” He points to a dozen burial suits hanging in a garment rack. “These labeled ones are for people who have either elected assisted suicide or were declared under palliative care. We work on them when we have free time, so they’re almost done when their owners die. Now, these …” Cosmo points to another rack. “I had no idea why they existed. You had never talked about them before.”

“Well, you never asked.” Pilar smiles, then points at the girl on the mortuary table. “I sincerely hoped you didn’t need to know, but here is your answer: I always have a couple of suits finished in advance so we’re prepared for cases like this. We can’t do much in terms of customization when we don’t know the deceased and there’s no family or friends to interview.”

Cosmo picks up one of the three burial suits with no label, although fully embroidered. Instead of more specific drawings, the stitches form stars, flowers, shells, insects, animals. A collection of simple, random beautiful things.

After he finishes putting the unknown girl inside it, Cosmo looks Pilar in the eyes.

“I understand burying outsiders like they’re one of us. Everyone deserves respect and decency, dead or alive,” he says. “But why care to embroider any symbol in their suits? We know nothing about who they were.”

Pilar gets the question. She had thought about the same thing many times in the past, so much so that she had time to find her answer.

“I know one thing about them: They were someone’s beloved.” She rests her hand on the burial suit where the unknown girl now lays in the fetal position. “It’s enough for me.”

Cosmo nods, resting his hand over Pilar’s.

All by himself, he cleans the mortuary and arranges things for the next day without saying a word.

“Was it your idea?” he finally asks while he brews coffee for them.

“No, it was Dad’s.” Pilar closes her eyes. She’s so, so tired, so exhausted from being in pain. She doesn’t even realize she never told that to anybody before adding, “He started to do it when he was the undertaker, and I was his only apprentice.”

Caiação is bustling with movement: The Limewashing Festival is tomorrow, and everybody in the commune has their plates full. The morning is chilly, although sunny — it’s a beautiful day, but Cosmo feels a buzz in the air that makes his hair stand on end. It’s not bad, just ominous.

When the assistant undertaker looks at the clock in the mortuary’s kitchen and sees Pilar is one hour late, he knows she’s not coming at all.

So he leaves a note stuck to the door, closes the place, and takes the path he has walked arm in arm with her every afternoon for the last two months.

Órion is outside, as if he were waiting for Cosmo.

“I sent someone to call you, but it seems you were faster.” His face is puffy and smudged by tears, but he smiles a resigned smile.

“Is she …?” Cosmo nods toward the door.

“She’s sleeping now, but she would like to have you there.”

Two hours later, Pilar passes away surrounded by all the dearest people to her. Despite the pain of an untreatable bone metastasis, she had decided to wait until nature claimed her body back.

The Health Nodule staff ensures Cosmo they’ll be delivering the corpse to the mortuary in a couple of hours.

Since his first day as Pilar’s apprentice, he knew this moment would arrive, and soon — the undertaker was given no more than one year after the metastasis was found, and she made sure Cosmo knew about her diagnosis before accepting him as a pupil.

But it’s still strange to think he’s on his own now.

“Thank you for taking care of her,” Órion says, his voice small. “Not only now, I mean.”

Cosmo sniffles, taking the whale fob from his pocket.

“Maybe you want to keep this. Pilar said her dad carved it for her, and —”

“No, she gave it to you.” Pilar’s partner shakes his head. “You keep it. I think … I think she liked the idea that this keychain would keep holding the keys that close the mortuary’s door even after her death.”

With a lump in his throat, Cosmo nods and pockets the fob before hugging Órion goodbye.

It sounds like Pilar.

The last thing Cosmo embroiders in Pilar’s burial suit is a whole pod of whales. He needs to search the internet for detailed old images, but he makes sure to include mothers, calves, young males, everything Pilar deserves. He’s not as skilled an embroiderer as she was, but he knows she would be proud of his work.

When he finishes, he brews a pot of strong coffee and pours it into two mugs. He drinks one and lets the other one cool down in the wintry breeze blowing through the windows. The beverage is icy cold when Cosmo goes to the garden and pours it into a flower bed.

Then he waits until the Interment team comes to pick up Pilar’s burial suit. The undertaker of Caiação whispers his goodbye, turns off all the lights, and locks the mortuary door with the keys attached to his whale fob.

One day, it will belong to the next undertaker, his future apprentice. Cosmo doesn’t know how long it will take, or if he’ll be able to see real whales before it happens. What he does know is that this is the beginning of a new cycle, which will inevitably come to an end — and it brings him so much peace.

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