A few weeks after the vote, on December 6, Win Maw Oo’s parents finally performed the merit-sharing rites for their daughter, setting her spirit free. For the people of Burma, who have suffered the abuses of military rule for decades, the NLD victory was a matter of life and death. This wasn’t exactly your average election.
Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), won 79 percent of the contested seats, giving it a sufficient majority in the national assembly to enable it to form the next government. On November 8, 2015, Burma’s pro-democracy opposition, led by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, won a landslide victory in the country’s first national election in recent memory. When I attended the six-month commemoration of her death in early 1989, I saw how her parents fulfilled their daughter’s wish by refusing to carry out the traditional merit-sharing ritual. But Win Maw Oo insisted that she wanted to see the victory of democracy before she moved on to her next life, so she asked her family to make sure that her soul would remain bound to this plane of existence until that happened. Usually, the relatives of the deceased perform a “merit-sharing ceremony,” which aims to liberate the dead person’s soul and guarantee a better life in the cycle of rebirth. Back in 1988, when high school student Win Maw Oo was shot by security forces during the popular protests against Burma’s military dictatorship, she lived just long enough to make a final wish: She asked her parents to skip part of the traditional Buddhist rites at her funeral.
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