Saying goodbye to a loved one might be one of the most difficult moments in someone´s life, and it´s because of that, many relatives want to offer their honors to the deceased.
Such is the case of the 23-year-old, Jomar Aguayo, who was shot to death and his mother decided to veil him in a very special and unusual way.
This happened in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico. The footage shows the deceased leaning on a table next to a jukebox, seeming to enjoy his last game, surrounded by dominoes, with a beer and cigarettes, while friends and relatives take turns to sit with him.
The body was exposed in San Juan´s bar, which belongs to the deceased´s mother, wearing a very attractive sport wear, a light blue cap and sunglasses with the same color. A local mortuary from the Puerto Rican capital was in charge with the embalming. The mortuary´s manager says this type of wakes respond to a trend change in customs. “I don’t really find it distasteful, because every person has the right to be veiled in the way they want it. It can be considered an art work”, he recognized his mortuary has been specialized in preparing this type of waking that are a bit unusual.
The “Domino´s deceased” is part of a really curious list of waking registered in the last years in Puerto Rico, since 2008, when the mortuary worked with the famous “Muerto Parao” or “Standing Dead”, name that was given popularly to Angel Pantoja Medina´s corpse, who was stood, leaning against a wall, wearing teen clothing, sunglasses and a cap.
This case has been imitated for several years and they are becoming more popular in some places in Puerto Rico, with at least four other corpses that have been exposed in the last eight years, according to the Washington Post newspaper, which caused controversy between people who find this distasteful and think it may violate today´s regulations.
Other cases that attracted the attention were Carlos Cabrera, performing Ernesto “Ché” Guevara; Christopher Rivera, dressed up like a boxer and in the middle of a ring. Another shocking case was David Morales´s, who died in 2010, whose waking was in a huge motorcycle, this way of waking a corpse was imitated by Julio Lopez family in July of that same year.
Despite the controversy among population, there is no law in Puerto Rico´s health department that prohibits these curious waking. The Health department hasn’t been able to ban them because they couldn’t find a legal way to demand the corpse of a deceased to be placed in a horizontal way inside a coffin.
ALFA