A Baby Grave in the Living Tree

Deep in the jungles of Tana Toraja, Indonesia, a Banyan tree serves as a grave for babies who died before they reached six months of age.  The passieeiran, literally “baby grave in the living tree” was part of a circle starting with a comfort for grieving parents and ending with a transition from death into new life. This is a fictionalized account of the first baby to become one with the living tree.


When Daud was born, his mother knew that this life was not to be his.  He fought against her, against the world, for hours in that first, dark night.  In the daylight, Daud’s family came to his mother’s side, worried branches spreading wide across their foreheads: this baby would take his mother’s life.  But Daud’s mother knew this, her fifth son, was not going to break her; he merely wanted to stay inside where it was safe, protected, warm. 
Daud’s father and brothers begged him, “Come out little one.  The sun is up. It is time to wake.”
His mother whispered inside her head—inside her womb—“Come when you are ready son.  The world will wait.”
           
And Daud did come, eventually, when the sun went down and the nighttime wrapped itself around them again, entombing them.  Daud came out screaming, fighting the world and fighting life.
His father and brothers held him in their arms saying, “He is strong.  He will live long.”  His mother whispered, “He is strong.  He will fly long and far.”
           
The sun came up on the second day.  It reached out, slim branches of golden sunlight, for Doud’s tiny, outstretched hand.  The baby followed. So quiet now.  His mother held him up to the sky and the sun over the mountaintops, and prepared to take him home.  She wrapped him with care in funeral cloth, soft and smooth as baby silkworm thread.  His father and brothers yelled and cursed the sky, turned their faces--branched with fear and anger--toward the sun, begging, “Why?” 
His mother whispered an answer, “He was not meant for this earth, this womb.  He belongs in the womb of a living tree.”
The men were angered by her words.  They were angry with the tree. Their fury burned hot and hard and big as the sun. They took stones and knives and fingernails to the bark trying to kill the Banyan—the grandest, largest tree in the jungle.  But they didn’t kill it. The tree was strong. Daud’s mother touched the Banyan, put her lotus flower fingertips to the hole the men had carved out in their anger.  She called it passieeiran— baby grave in the living tree.  Then his mother placed Daud in his grave in the womb of the tree, with his baby face turned upwards to the sky, the sun, the stars and the top-most branches.  Here, the baby took nourishment from the sap of the tree. The tree took nourishment from the body and soul of the baby.
Hundreds of years passed, and the Banyan became mother to other babies.  The tree thrived, healing over their tiny bodies, healing over the doors of the baby graves, until only the small scar—the slightest suggestion of birth or death—remained.  And when it was time for the mother tree to let her children go, the babies flew up to papua—heaven.  If you look closely, you can still see the youngest, tiniest babies up in the eves of the Banyan tree as it rocks them gently to sleep, comforting them, holding them close before they descent into the sky to be with the sun and the stars.