Giving Room to Death

Death.

So often, we give no room to death. Instead, we try and prolong life as long as possible sometimes at the expense of quality of life. We cling to stories of immortality – the holy grail, vampires, a fountain of eternal life, Botox. We devour stories of murdered people being avenged as if that creates legacy, as if that will, in a way, bring them back to life. In day-to-day life, in movies, in games, in conversations it’s evident that we’re both repelled and fascinated by death. Especially when it’s not our own. None of this is intrinsically wrong.

These things come to my mind, though, when Halloween and then Dia de Los Muertos roll around.

This year, at that time, I’m staying in central Mexico some miles north of Mexico City and the family I’m with is shivering with excitement for Halloween. Once, the youngest girl says, “If we give each other presents on Halloween we won’t even need to celebrate Christmas!”  

Knitted bats, spiders, ghosts, and Draculas, made by one of the teachers from the children’s school, hang from the birthday tree downstairs and keep me company upstairs in my study. Hand painted wine corks become spiders and toothy vampires under the children’s artistic fingers. Pumpkins, grouped together at the end of a side table, add their splash of autumnal coloring to the dining room.   

As the season ripens, the children plan out and refine their costume ideas. Material and masks are put together to create an astronaut, Willy Wonka, a werewolf, Sunny Baudelaire from A Series of Unfortunate Events, a zombie, and The Mad Hatter.

On the day of the first event for the ghoulish season, a school party, the children are in costume hours before the starting time. I don’t dress up, but I go along.

As the vendors are setting up food, drink, and handmade items such as knitted creatures and wooden cutting boards, as the tables begin to fill with people, as the Halloween playlist blasts music into the open air through a portable speaker, and as many of the partygoers show up dressed as the skeletal and recognizable Catrinas and Catrines with their fancy, formal dress and elaborate face paint, one of my friend’s friends (now my new friend), takes me in hand to tell me about the Day of the Dead.

The Day of the Dead is a two-day celebration that falls on November 1^st and 2^nd and which happens to coincide with All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day from the Catholic Calendar. This because of the strong Catholic influence on the Mexican culture pressed down upon it during the Spanish colonial era.

Halloween, coming just before these dates on October 31^st is actually a celebration on the Eve of All Hallow’s Day (also known as All Saints’ Day) and was once a time when people came together to pray for protection from evil (and probably to party a little bit too). Sometimes, maybe even often, these long-ago people would dress as evil spirits or saints to show the battle between the forces of heaven and of hell. Our modern Halloween evolved out of that tradition.

As alluded to above, when the Spanish galloped into Mexico with their religion in hand, the autumnal traditions of Europe and North America collided and melded together. However true that might be, Dia de Los Muertos is not a Mexican version of Halloween.

My new friend explains that Dia de Los Muertos is a tradition that dates back far into the culture of the pre-Hispanic people (such as the Aztecs or Mayans) who celebrated the dead rather than mourning them. For them, the Day of the Dead was a time for welcoming spirits back to the land of the living—even if only for one night. It was a way to keep the dead a part of the community even after they’d left their physical forms behind. Maybe it was also a way to share any excess of perishable food from the last of the harvests.

After laying down the holiday basics, my friend takes me to the other end of the school campus and inside a building to where the school’s Day of the Dead ofrenda (altar) sits in marigold glory. Marigolds guide the dead back to the land of the living with their bright color and wafting scent.

She explains that the food and drinks left on the ofrendas are usually the favorite food and drinks of the people whose pictures sit at the top of the altar.

She points out the decorations, including the cut-out, intricate designs on tissue paper (similar to my mind to the paper snowflakes I made as a child) with images of skulls and Catrinas and angels and crosses and hummingbirds that are hung together to create a colorful banner.

She explains that many altars are seven levels high. “Seven had special significance for the pre-Hispanic cultures but the Catholic Church tied it in to the seven deadly sins.”

We’re speaking in Spanish, at least I’m listening in Spanish and doing my best to ask my questions in Spanish, so I wonder, maybe aloud, if the seven levels also have anything to do with levels like purgatory. Is there more to the afterlife than heaven, hell, and purgatory? Does Abraham’s Bosom count as a fourth level? What are the remaining three then?

No matter what their origin was, the Catholic influence is evident in both Halloween and Day of the Dead.

What strikes me as different between Halloween and Dia de Los Muertos is that for me Halloween has always symbolized the frightening, the terrifying, the disgusting, and the RIP end in a cemetery whereas Dia de Los Muertos, as I see it here with my own eyes, is full of color, the sharing of life with those who have passed, and an emphasis on getting together with family to celebrate life even if the celebration is held inside the walls of a cemetery. Death is not to be feared then, but to be celebrated. 

At the school party it’s almost as if two ancient cultures have collided to form this new hybrid Halloween-Day of the Dead holiday. In this blending, the Celtic tradition to ward off ghosts is joined by the pre-Hispanic tradition of welcoming the spirits home again. What exactly this collision creates, I don’t know. What exactly it means to welcome and repel, I don’t know. But I’m glad the children enjoy the magic of both holidays and the immortality of being any creature they can imagine and costume themselves as.

Maybe, too, in the end, Dia de Los Muertos is still, is also the human attempt to touch immortality, to bring the dead back for one day more. To bring memory back to life. To ensure that those who have gone on are dead but not forgotten.

There’s nothing wrong with that either.