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.

Toxic Positivity and a Recovering Positiver

One afternoon on my way to look up something online, I stumble across an article about Toxic Positivity. Everything’s toxic these days. I mean, we’ve got toxic relationships, toxic negativity, toxic masculinity, toxic toxins. The toxic is everywhere. To drive the point home, another article addresses this very trend and notes that Toxic was the number one word of 2018. It’s the Baader-Meimhof Phenomenon (also called the “frequency illusion”) where once a thing is noticed, however obscure, it’s suddenly seen everywhere, all the time. And it’s bad. After all, not everyone touches a toxin and comes out a Mutant Ninja Turtle. That’s the exception to the rule.

Now sure, it’s easy to label and it’s easy to push down something like Toxic Negativity. That seems like an obvious thing to not want. It’s easy to tell someone to cut their toxic relationships, but this is the first time I’ve seen positivity come under attacking scrutiny.

Holding my breath, afraid of what I’ll discover – that I’ll fall under the Toxic Positiver Category (god save me from imperfection) – I start to read.

The basic message is that Toxic Positivity sugarcoats a situation with phrases such as “Just hang in there” or “It could be worse” or “Look on the bright side” rather than letting a person’s actual feelings of sadness, distress, anger, etc., out where they can be resolved, worked through, or simply felt. The Toxic Positivers usually mean well. They also, most likely, don’t quite know how to handle their own sadness (or the unexpected gift of someone else’s sadness) which is why a veneer of positivity seems essential. Otherwise emotions would be too heavy to hold.

The basic message is that these sugarcoating phrases often do more harm than good because they can quickly, easily, and effectively invalidate a person’s feelings and then, as the article states, even go so far as to make “them feel bad for feeling bad.”

Of course, it could always be worse.

But, of course, it could also always be a little bit better. Right?

It’s all about perspective.

 

Several years ago, I learned that my way of interacting with some friends had gone awry. They had labelled me as a bringer of, “Stupid positivity crap” and might have even gone on to state, “which doesn’t work.”

I was deeply hurt. Of course, this often happens when receiving an indictment second hand. It can be taken all sorts of wrong ways. For all I actually know, the sentence had been said in jest. But the way it had been relayed it didn’t seem so. I took it personally.

What hurt is that a part of me – my positive outlook on life and what I also term as opto-realism – had been misunderstood. What hurt is that my own positive outlook was as much for me as for them. For the world is heavy to hold. Bad things can easily seem to outweigh the good. What hurt is that at that time, the health issues I was dealing with on a daily basis were bearable when I saw them as a blessing rather than a curse. A mixed blessing, but a blessing nonetheless. What hurt is that at that time of physical pain, I could have used a little bit of encouragement myself. A little bit of positivity. Not false positivity, I’d already poked at every bright side I could think up on my own, but rather an acknowledgement of how hard I went around making my life work the way I wanted it to work. How hard I tried to give good to others – a smile, a hug, a conversation, a word of encouragement, a gentle kick in the pants. Instead, to have my method smashed down as if it were an animal foaming at the mouth with rabies felt like a tearing down of my house. Of course, that’s a lot of sequential metaphors.  

Now I can see that the kind of encouragement I was wanting, that acknowledgement of where I was and what I was going through was all they had wanted for themselves as well. Ah, hindsight, how clever a teacher you are.

But hindsight can be a little slow in arriving. At that time, I wasn’t in a place to understand.

For so long, I’d lived my life by my strict optimism, had blasted it at others (to their apparent disgust), and then with my world-view shaken, when it came to turning it on myself, I failed.

Physically and emotionally damaged, I became very depressed. I threw my rose-colored glasses in the trash and I was left with a world that was monochromatic and dull. The message I’d taken to heart from my friends’ comment was that if my words hadn’t worked for them then they certainly couldn’t work for me either. They must have never worked. In fact, I must have been living an awful existence and not even known it.

They’d known it all along. Now I was finally catching up. Positivity didn’t work.

Stripped of what had been nothing more than an onion skin layer of toxic positivity I went around with a diminishing sense of worth. Am I good enough? Was I good? Did I do the wrong thing? Have I been doing the wrong thing all along? Have I hurt rather than helped? What’s left but all this pain? What’s the point?

There’s no darkness like the darkness of disillusionment.

Still.

Even if I’d been wrong all that time. Even if my friends were right. Even if the world was full of grief and pain. Even if. I knew I didn’t like to live with the darkness eating my heart away like an erosive disease.

Even if.

For yes, there is pain. There is suffering, and misery, and heartache, and regret, and hurt, and grief so sticky and deep it feels impossible to pull one’s feet out of.

And yet.

As I write this with a bit of a lump in my throat and a gathering of tears in my eyes, as the clouds darken and build, as the roosters call out their afternoon triumphs, as my joints hurt with the impending rain and my body’s dysbiosis, as I sit with my doubt and my pain, emotional and physical, I know it’s not all there is.

There is also beauty, love, kindness, joy, laughter, comfort, contentment, hard work, thrill, adventure, achievement, rest, magic, light, creativity, growth, integrity, purpose, and connection.

Life is a coin and it has two sides.

And while that’s true, there’s a difference between toxic positivity and having a more positive perspective regarding life and living.

I think that’s the lesson I needed to learn through my hurt of being misunderstood.

Toxic is toxic. But good can also be good. What might not work for one, what might not be the right thing in that moment for someone isn’t necessarily wrong for all. Isn’t necessarily wrong for me. Without thinking it through, just feeling the hurt to my marrow, I’d let my friends’ words, spoken out of their hurt without any thought to how it might hurt me, work their way into my heart with poisonous power. Even though my own words and thoughts and perspective had worked for me for years and years and years, I let their comments become a truth. An absolute. Stupid positivity crap.

The funny thing is, we might say, this was just a clash of toxic negativity against toxic positivity. A war of toxicity. I couldn’t abide their constant negativity and they couldn’t abide my constant positivity. It was a magnetic repelling of forces. The real fact of the matter was that neither of us knew how to listen to the other. Neither of us understood or had compassion for what was needed. What I’ve learned in these intervening years, after forgiving myself out of that depressing time, is that the key is to be an active listener and to pay attention to the situation.

Positivity isn’t bad. As the Toxic Positivity article points out, if the person you’re positiving is reacting with smiles or perking up then the positivity is likely appropriate. If, however, the positiving shuts the conversation down or makes the person withdraw this is a strong sign that the positivity isn’t helping.

I’ll be the first to admit that there have been way too many times when I was an inactive listener. I’m sure my friends’ comment about stupid positivity crap felt true to them as I spouted my forceful positivity into their ears. In their case, not paying attention to the signals they were sending me, I was thoughtlessly spoon feeding them some toxic positivity. And I’m sorry for that.

But perspective, a positive or negative perspective can make all the difference in the world.

These days, I’m doing my best to be aware, to be kind while giving myself the grace to be human. That means I’m always growing and learning. That means I won’t always get it right. Not for myself or for others. But I can keep trying. While tuned in to the facts of reality, I can still lean toward the positive. I can keep living with an eye calibrated to color. For the color is as valid as the darkness. The color is just as real. Who’s to say that we aren’t all just wearing the tinted glasses of our own choosing? Day to day, during hard times and easy times, I can keep loving. And on those days when it all feels like too much, I can rest in the heaviness of it all. And when I can do so again, I can feel authentically grateful, truly appreciative of the good and bad, and not be afraid to hold the pain and say, you know what I see you and I’m sorry it hurts.

 

As for all this toxicity, maybe a better thing for all of us to do, after acknowledging it and its harmful effects, is simply to take the antidote. After all, isn’t it just silly to walk around with a bunch of poison in our bellies?

The positivity article can be found here: https://forge.medium.com/the-cure-for-toxic-positivity-155278b7daaa