The recently-dead were treated with tenderness by the Wari', who never left a corpse to putrefy alone. The boy's brothers and uncles had removed the raised wooden floors from the hut so mourners could crowd under the roof, a simple but elegant thatched structure made from palm leaves. From the moment of death, through the night and into the next morning, spilling into the better part of the afternoon, the dead boy's wailing parents and siblings, grandparents and uncles and aunts and cousins constantly cradled his body, their naked torsoes tightly pressed against him and against each other. Wearing nothing but vegetable dyes on their faces, the weeping mourners then took turns “dying” with him.
The relatives formed a small stack with their bodies; three, sometimes four family members lying
