Day of the Dead
Last Thursday was the Day of the Dead. It is an official holiday in Mexico. The evening before, the streets were even busier and more festive than usual. Vendors sold miniature doll-sized hard sugared bananas, tangerines, papayas, pineapple, watermelon, carrots, onions, corn and other fruits and vegetables, chickens, and more foods. These are made with a special sugar and glued together with lemon. People buy the foods that their loved one ate and place them on the altar (known as the “ofrenda”—or offering). Along with food, you include photos, the hot orange flowers called cempasuchiles that are the distinctive flower of the Dead, masks, candles, and other objects that say something about that person. I’ve seen tiny bottles of tequila, cups of coffee, cigarettes. The idea is that the dead are coming back to visit, so, of course, you want to provide their favorite foods.
In town, altars are all over the place, in public buildings, offices, libraries, restaurants, museums, private homes, and even on the university steps.
I didn't think about the Day of the Dead when I flew down to Mexico, so I was not equipped with photos of my mother and my brother Jay, who are my honored dead. But I created my own altar on our kitchen window sill anyway, with a veladora (candle in a glass), a bunch of cempasuchiles, and some of the sugared fruits and vegetables. Tiny replicas of canned vegetables would have more appropriate. My mother, like most people in the Fifties and Sixties, didn’t eat that well by today’s Whole Foods standards, but she wanted to eat healthy, and I figured, good enough!
On the Day itself, I took a local bus to the Pantheon (cemetery)—along with most of the Guanajuato population, it seemed, the bus crowded with people of all ages carrying flowers and picnic baskets and foods. We got off and walked up the hill to the Pantheon, the street packed and noisy with vendors on both sides selling fast food and trinkets. Inside the arched gate of the Pantheon, the atmosphere was different—still cheerful, but quieter, more respectful. Clumps of families gathered at gravesites, some praying, others singing, others quiet. Children, who are normally very rowdy in Mexico, were noticeable by their quiet and calm. I sat on the grass under the shade of a tree, near a few others doing the same. Watching, listening, remembering. Their deaths, my deaths.
Walking slowly back home, I pondered the approach to death here. It is not that Mexicans don’t experience grief when a loved one dies. My teachers and others have made a point of saying this. Grief seems to be a human universal. But I wonder how much the existence of an anointed day when everyone in the community together celebrates and remembers their loved ones tempers that grief, and allows the bereavers to accept it. It is the difference between grief expressed in the public arena, as it is here, and grief expressed very privately, as it usually is in the U.S.
I love the idea that the dead are coming back on a visit. How I have cherished the occasional dream I have had over the years of Mother or Jay, when I felt visited by them, my whole day afterwards tinged with a lingering sweetness from the dream-contact. How lovely it would be to visit with them ritually every year, not just on my own initiative, but welcomed and nurtured by the community. Now, of course, I can.
In town, altars are all over the place, in public buildings, offices, libraries, restaurants, museums, private homes, and even on the university steps.
I didn't think about the Day of the Dead when I flew down to Mexico, so I was not equipped with photos of my mother and my brother Jay, who are my honored dead. But I created my own altar on our kitchen window sill anyway, with a veladora (candle in a glass), a bunch of cempasuchiles, and some of the sugared fruits and vegetables. Tiny replicas of canned vegetables would have more appropriate. My mother, like most people in the Fifties and Sixties, didn’t eat that well by today’s Whole Foods standards, but she wanted to eat healthy, and I figured, good enough!
On the Day itself, I took a local bus to the Pantheon (cemetery)—along with most of the Guanajuato population, it seemed, the bus crowded with people of all ages carrying flowers and picnic baskets and foods. We got off and walked up the hill to the Pantheon, the street packed and noisy with vendors on both sides selling fast food and trinkets. Inside the arched gate of the Pantheon, the atmosphere was different—still cheerful, but quieter, more respectful. Clumps of families gathered at gravesites, some praying, others singing, others quiet. Children, who are normally very rowdy in Mexico, were noticeable by their quiet and calm. I sat on the grass under the shade of a tree, near a few others doing the same. Watching, listening, remembering. Their deaths, my deaths.
Walking slowly back home, I pondered the approach to death here. It is not that Mexicans don’t experience grief when a loved one dies. My teachers and others have made a point of saying this. Grief seems to be a human universal. But I wonder how much the existence of an anointed day when everyone in the community together celebrates and remembers their loved ones tempers that grief, and allows the bereavers to accept it. It is the difference between grief expressed in the public arena, as it is here, and grief expressed very privately, as it usually is in the U.S.
I love the idea that the dead are coming back on a visit. How I have cherished the occasional dream I have had over the years of Mother or Jay, when I felt visited by them, my whole day afterwards tinged with a lingering sweetness from the dream-contact. How lovely it would be to visit with them ritually every year, not just on my own initiative, but welcomed and nurtured by the community. Now, of course, I can.
posted by Louisa at 1:59 PM
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