Te pō

Hine-nui-te-pō receives people. But the work of getting them to her is done by the living, and it is done on the marae over three days, and it is one of the most sophisticated grief processes anywhere in the world.

Here is roughly how a tangihanga (funeral rites) goes.

The tūpāpaku (the body of the deceased) — the body — comes home to the marae, or to the whānau home. Not to a funeral parlour, and not out of sight. The person lies in the wharenui (meeting house), in an open casket, surrounded by photographs of the tūpuna (ancestors) who came before them, and they are not left alone for a moment. Someone stays with them all night, every night. Often it is the kuia (elder woman). There is a bed made up beside them.

Manuhiri (visitor) come in groups, all day, for days. Every group is called on with a karanga (ceremonial call of welcome), and every group brings its own dead with it, and both the living and the dead are welcomed. And people cry. Loudly. Openly. Kuia keen at the front and nobody hushes them, nobody hands them a tissue and asks them to be strong. Grief is meant to be audible.

And then people talk to the body. This is the thing that most surprises those who have not been. You address the person directly, by name. You tell them off, you thank them, you tell them what they meant, you say the thing you never said. Speakers do it in whaikōrero (formal speech) and whānau do it quietly at two in the morning. The one who has died is at their own funeral as a participant, not as a subject.

Then there is food, constantly. The wharekai (dining hall) works for three days and the ringawera (kitchen workers) never sit down. And there is laughter — actual laughter, storytelling, teasing, old grudges softening. Grief and hilarity in the same room is not disrespect. It is what a whole person's life actually deserves.

On the last day, the burial. And straight after, the hākari — the feast that lifts the tapu of death off everyone, so the living can go back into ordinary life. Then, later, the unveiling, the hura kōhatu, a year or so on, when everyone comes back and does it again more gently.

Why three days? Because grief does not arrive on schedule, and if you give it thirty minutes in a chapel it goes underground and stays for years. Three days is enough for the shock to break, for the crying to exhaust itself, for the stories to come out, and for the whānau to be surrounded the entire time by people who feed them and sit with them and do not leave.

Every part of that is Hine-nui-te-pō's tikanga. She is at the end of it, waiting. Everything the living do is about getting someone to her well.

And her domain is not only death. It is the night itself, and sleep, and the hour before dawn, and everything unclear that has to be passed through. Te Pō (the long night) in the creation whakapapa is not an evil; it is the long generative darkness the world came out of, night after night after night, before there was ever light. Darkness is where things form.

So if you are in a dark stretch of your own, this whakapapa does not tell you to hurry out of it.

One thing to do. Go to an urupā (burial ground) or a place that holds someone you have lost, and talk to them out loud — not in your head. Say the ordinary things. What you have been doing. What you are worried about.

She is looking after them. It is entirely appropriate to keep talking.