REUSABLE COFFIN

According to an American visitor to Guam in 1902, the church in Hagåtña had reusable coffins. A small room to the side of the main body of the church served as a store room for one common coffin, available for reuse by each new funeral.

If you wanted one, and could afford one, you could also be buried in your own coffin. We have documented evidence at the time that shows that individual coffins were also made to order.

Otherwise, the dead were wrapped only in cloth; white for infants and black for adults. Then the cadaver was placed in the common casket only as a means of carrying the body to Pigo' cemetery for burial just in the sheet, usually in the same grave as another family member.

WHITE AND BLACK

White was the color of baptized infants who had died because they died sinless. Being baptized, they were washed clean of Original Sin. Being infants (or less than 7 years of age) they were incapable of committing mortal sin. Thus they died sinless and destined for heaven. According to another source, musical bands would play joyful music while accompanying the caskets of dead infants to the cemetery; joyful because these dead children were destined for heaven.

People who died older than seven years of age could very well have died in the state of Sanctifying Grace. But chances were that they would spend some time in Purgatory. The sorrows of Purgatory, and man's uncertainty where the soul of the older person is at this moment, made black a suitable color for mourning the deaths of people older than infants.