Death Without Weeping

The cardboard coffin symbolizes the powerlessness of the community to affect infant mortality, and the indignity to which the community is subjected. The coffins are mass-produced and shoddy; this symbolizes how little the dead matter, either in life or in death. The infants are not buried deeply enough, and often exhumed to be buried en masse; this re-internment illustrates the disregard and indifference given to infants in death, and the powerlessness of families to take care of their own in both life and death.

Instead, mothers and families are encouraged to think of children as "angels" in order to mitigate not only the pain of their death, but the senselessness: throughout the book infant death is sacralized as the choice of God, rather than the indirect effect of a failed social system. This sacralization reflects residents' replacement of social and economic causes with religiously-inspired mystification and rationalizations, which is a function of their socioeconomic circumstance as much as their religious belief. The episode of the middle-class man who seeks the priest after losing his child presents an alternative to this narrative. Yet the narrative persists, insofar as it fosters meaning and comprehensibility among members of a community amidst an