Of a death foretold

The family has a really old abuelita (the mother of the tío) who has had Alzheimer’s for donkey’s years and is in a generally vegetative state, much like my own grandmother. Even though the abuelita “almost doesn’t exist,” the tíos are very religious about going to visit her every week, sometimes staying there until 5 in the morning.
Last night, onces was just me and the brothers and the newly arrived cousin, Jorge. When the brothers get antsy for onces and the tía isn’t home, a lot of the times they will prepare it themselves and we will eat alone. Last night was one of those nights. We covered the usual topics of what he had done all day (namely, attend overly boring classes) and what we were doing class (namely, nothing) and it was totally normal. There was also excessive mention of the abuela and her state of health, and I was really tempted to ask if she was in a bad way, but I a) didn’t want to seem to be meddling, b) seem overly stupid by asking an apparently redundant question, and c) completely botch the question. Then, at some point, the conversation turned away from topics I could relate too—as in talking about people I don’t know. Because Jorge has an unfamiliar accent and, like most Chileans, mumbles and swallows half his words, I was having trouble understanding him and I wasn’t really following the conversation between him and the brothers. I was happily shoveling away my onces, meanwhile the phone was ringing off the hook for the tía and one or the other brothers kept getting up to answer the phone. What little I was understanding of the conversation consisted of a discussion on how long a doctor would hold on to the body of a dead person. One of the brothers said it was 4-5 days, but Jorge was maintaining that it was 2-3 days if the person died of natural causes. It felt like something was up, but I couldn’t really figure out what was going on.
Then, someone madly rings and bangs at the front door and a brother bolts up, proclaiming that it is the tía, while the phone rings again. The tía rushes in, dumps a bag of bread on the counter, has a rushed conversation with the boys, in which I understand the following: abuelita, died, Jorge, have you told your parents, Carlos, let’s go, Hernan (the tío), Los Lagos (where he works), call the family, sister, aunt. She then tears Carlos away from his onces, leaving a half eaten bread and butter sandwich and a full mug of coffee and they run out of the house, followed shortly by Hugo, meanwhile Jorge rushes upstairs, grabs his cell phone, rushes out into the backyard, leaving me sitting alone at the table calmly downing bread and manjar. I had a pretty good idea that something was amiss, but I had no idea what was going on and I didn’t want to ask (who was I going to ask, the tea kettle?). I just blissfully drank my tea, which tastes more or less like lake water with milk and sugar, wondering if I should be alarmed. After a few minutes, Hugo and Jorge straggle back and, and as calmly and unemotionally as ever discuss how long it will take the tío to get home from Los Lagos if he gets the 7.45 bus. By this time I DEFINITELY had the intimation that some family crisis or other was brewing, but the boys were totally stoic and happily downing cups of Nescafe, black with 2 heaped teaspoons of sugar. I was just kind of minding my own business, absolutely feeling like the ignorant gringa who is totally unaware that anything is going on, twiddling my thumbs while the word is about to end.
Onces ended, once we had eaten and drunk enough, discussed the weather for the 10th time that night and I had twisted my napkin to bits. Now, normally, in times of death, you might expect some sort of remorse or sadness, or in the case of some other family emergency, you might expect there to be family members madly scrambling about, making phone calls and acting like all hell was breaking loose. Well, such was not the case, Jorge went back to listening to his music and copying someone’s work from the 2 weeks of class he missed, Hugo cranked up the Chrsitian rock on the 1st floor and went back to watching TV. Now, maybe they figured that the tía and Carlos had everything perfectly under control and that their scurrying around would just make things worse, but they certainly didn’t seem too alarmed.
I figured I had just majorly misinterpreted what I saw/heard and went to bed, after watching a solid of 3 hours of TV with Jorge, chatting away about normal, banal topics. The next morning, the tía was up at 7, stoking the stove for a hot shower, which I KNEW wasn’t for me and vacuuming the kitchen and tidying up; I ran into the tío downstairs (apparently he made it home in OK time). Still pretty confused and totally unaware, I settled down for a bowl of yoghurt before my intolerably early class and the tía came in and told me that the abuela had died last night. I just sat there. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t have the vocabulary to say “I’m sorry,” or “you have my condolences.” When I was in middle school and Spanish books were broken into sections like “in the classroom,” or “in the train station, “ or on vacation,” where was the section on “at the funeral, “ or the one entitled “death of the matriarch”? I literally didn’t say anything, I just didn’t have the words, I just hope that I made some sufficiently sympathetic noise which bridged the language barrier. My tía told me that there wouldn’t be any lunch because there wouldn’t be time to cook and that they had to get ready because “people” would start arriving at 9.
“People.” I was picturing choirs of wailing family members and morose disheveled men dressed in old suits, dug out of ancient country cupboards. This, in addition to the idea of no lunch—the only half-way decent meal in this country—was not an attractive afternoon activity. I conned my way into eating lunch with Jay and his family, terrified to go home for fear that I would just be a nuisance, the blissfully unaware gringa who just gets in the way, petrified that I just wouldn’t know what to do (Ok, not petrified I wouldn’t know, I DIDN’T know) or act or react. I finally managed to get the courage to go home and see what kind of carnage a natural death in the family left at San Martín 597.
I’m home, there’s no one here. But I still don’t know: what do I do?