Waiyautitsa will give birth to three or four children, probably not more, and then, as she approaches middle age, we may suppose that she falls sick, and after being doctored unsuccessfully first by her old father who happens to be a well known medicine man of the Great Fire-brand society, and then by a medicine man from the ne’wekwe society whose practice is just the opposite, Waiyautitsa dies. Within a few hours elderly kinswomen of her father’s will come in and wash her hair and body, and at dawn sprinkle her face, first with water and then with meal. The deceased will be well dressed, and in a blanket donated by her father’s people she will be carried to the cemetery lying in front of the old church, a ruin from the days of the Catholic establishment in Zuñi. There to the north of the central wooden cross, i. e., on the north side of the cemetery, Waiyautitsa will be buried. Women are buried on the north side and men on the south.
Waiyautitsa will be carried out and buried by her father and other men in the household. No women will go to the burial, nor will the widower. The widower, as soon as the corpse is taken outdoors, will be fetched by his women relatives to live at their house. There they straightway wash his hair—a performance inseparable in Zuñi, as at other pueblos, from every time of crisis or ceremony. The hair of all the other members of Waiyautitsa’s household will be washed at the end of four days by women relatives of her father. During this time, since the spirit of Waiyautitsa is thought to linger about the home, the house door will be left open for her at night. The bowl used in washing her hair, and the implements used in digging her grave will also be left outdoors. Her smaller and peculiarly personal possessions have been buried with her, and bulky things like bedding have been burned or taken to a special place down the river to be buried. The river flows to the lake sixty miles or so west of Zuñi, where Waiyautitsa’s spirit is also supposed to take its journey. There under the lake it abides, except when with other spirits it returns in the clouds to pour down upon Zuñi fields the beneficent rain. People will say to a child, when they see a heavy cloud, “There goes your grandmother”; or they will quite seriously say to one another, “Our grandfathers are coming.”