jamey clayberg

In high school (while living on the island of Papua New Guinea) I had the unusual privilege of seeing my schoolmate Bradley Daimoi’s body after he drowned. I say privilege because having been born in the United States to a supportive and loving family I would probably have lived my life seeing death as nothing but waxy faces in high-gloss boxes with dressy clothes on. In PNG (where my parents worked as missionaries) things were much simpler. My Dad told me Brad’s parents had the body at a house nearby and he wanted to visit, and wanted me to go along. I was nervous about it, Brad was a grade above me and although not in my circle of friends I knew him, and my high school brain struggled to process the notion that this human being I’d rubbed shoulders with a couple days before was no longer present in the shell of his body. I don’t know how or why we in the US developed the traditions we have about preparing and viewing dead bodies, but I have a feeling if you take the middle class dollar out of our culture we will eventually snap back to something akin to what I saw there in the basement in PNG. Shiny mahogany caskets are well beyond a luxury.

Brad had been a strong swimmer and loved the water, he was kayaking offshore in Madang when a swell tipped him over. He, being conscientious and an very standup guy tried for a long time to right the kayak, as it was rented and he wanted to bring it back in. He spent too much time trying and ultimately failing to right the kayak and exhausted himself so completely he drowned trying to make it back to shore. There in the basement he was prone in a kayak-sized hand-built wood box a little too small for him to lay flat, it pressed against his sides and gave his arms and neck awkward angles that would have been uncomfortable had he been alive. It did not look like he was uncomfortable now, merely gone. His normally mocha Melanesian skin tone had a whitish film on it, like the back of aged dark chocolate. He was wearing his regular clothes, maybe even a t-shirt and had two large wads of cotton stuffed in his nose (to keep water from getting out I found out later.) His Mom and Dad were there, I think, I know there was a crying woman and I think there was a crying man. She/they hugged my Dad and cried and also did that thing Christians do, which is approach death as passing on to a better place, a habit I sometimes loathe as it seems to be an effort to gloss over pain and loss, and is usually used as a knee-jerk thing to say when you interact with the recently bereaved. This was not knee-jerk, it was genuine to a depth I won’t ever forget, the truth of it amplified by the blank plainness of Brad laying there awkward in the box.

All the usual stuff drifted through my head, the fleeting nature and preciousness of life, the beauty of people comforting each other, the hopeful gaze upward with thoughts of life after death and Heaven and Christ, all brought in to sharp focus by the strangeness of Mason Daimoi’s dead brother laying there stuffed with cotton in a hastily made wooden box on the carpet in the basement of a missionary house on an island in the Pacific. I wanted to get out of there badly, but I am forever grateful to have been there, even just to pay respects to Brad’s beautiful life and the God he so faithfully and genuinely served.

Photo by Norma Desmond