Dead Dust Drifting

The concept of community mourners is a bit eerie to me. The idea of dedicating your life to mourning people’s deaths, regardless of whether or not you knew them, is a bit unnerving. What would make someone become this? What is their purpose? If the mourners did not know the deceased but are making a fuss over his death, it seems overly contrived and fake. It makes the funeral a spectacle. I do not like this idea.

I found it interesting that Noria chose to say goodbye to her father with an evergreen tea plant. Evergreens represent vitality and life – Noria is saying goodbye to her father with something vivacious and beautiful. I liked that she honored their connection to tea by using a tea plant.

Noria’s entire life has been uprooted. Her father has just died and her mother is far away. However, she is clinging to some sort of continuity, some kind of routine. I found this both sad and admirable. I would not be able to handle myself as gracefully if something like that happened to me.

“Their dried bodies would crunch under my feet in unlit rooms, and I would find their lightweight debris slowly accumulating in places I had no time or energy to sweep open: twig-fragile legs, scale-glittery wings, torn off hollow bodies, black-eyed heads with broken antennae twisted towards silence forever.” This is so beautiful. I stopped and reread it over and over again, letting the words wash over me. It is so haunting – the bugs reflect death, Noria’s father’s death. Continuity chases away the image of death; but lack of it fosters the concept in Noria’s mind.

The idea of disease in the water scared me. Here these people are, rationing water, and they have to worry about disease in it? I couldn’t even imagine that.

“It was also the silence of everything they had left untold and unsaid, everything that it was now up to me to learn and find out without them.” Not only does this tell us Noria will explore until she finds her answers but also that exploring will fill the absence left by her parents. She is so unbelievably courageous.

“Weightless speckles of dead dust drifted in the shaft of sunlight filtering through the window.” This is so hauntingly beautiful and the imagery is superb. You see the window and the brilliant sunshine you see the dancing dust in the air. Again, the theme of death – Noria is still focused on it.

“The bones of this man and the water in his blood had returned to earth and sky long ago, but his words and stories were alive and breathing.” This man has long been dead and yet his legacy lives on. Every time someone reads his words, his thoughts and emotions, who he was, is alive again. This is what we all want. When we have become the dead dust drifting in the shaft of sunlight, we want people to remember that we lived, that we accomplished something. I also like that she brings the connection of water back to this.

Noria’s mother can’t get through. Is something happening politically? What? I wish we weren’t kept completely in the dark, guessing.

The government executes water thieves publically. You only do that to high criminals so stealing water is a high crime in society. That’s interesting. Is that plausible in the future? I don’t know. Reading this at present time, I find it difficult to wrap my head around it. This is really frightening though: Anyone can be executed in their own front yard or captured inside their home at any time. The people hardly have any rights. The government has a frightening amount of power – this is very likely as it has happened in the past before.