Dia de los Muertos
So nice that Mexico has declared a national holiday in honor
of my birthday!
However, confronted with an apparent conflict of interest,
I’ve contemplated either no longer celebrating my birthday on November 2nd
as I have all my life, or alternately not celebrating Dia de los Muertos (Day
of The Dead), one of the most revered and significant events here in Mexico
also celebrated on the same day. However, eventually realizing that one of
these events inevitably leads to the other, and that I will be dead for much
longer than I’ll be alive, I’ve decided that some form of reconciliation is in
order.
The entire country is celebrating today, but perhaps not
(only) for me. The dead apparently return to this earth every autumn after the
harvest, and this entire week is a series of extraordinary celebrations
culminating with the Day of the Dead. Before moving here I never had any
inclination to spend my birthday in a cemetery, but on this day I do.
Everywhere I go dead people are staring back at me, trying
to take me arm-in-arm and dance me down the street to the tune of Michael
Jackson’s Thriller, zombies shudder in the night as they serve cocktails at the
local bar, corpses casually smoke cigarettes on the street corners, skeletons
rattle their way to the checkout line at the grocery store, intricately
decorated skulls stare back at me from the behind the glass cases of the
pasteleria, dismembered appendages adorn cakes and cookies, even our daily
bread is decorated with bones.
November 2nd is All Souls Day or Dia De
Los Muertos (Day of the Dead). All the streets around the cemetery are blocked
to traffic and the crowds are so dense you can walk down the cobblestone
streets without your feet ever touching the ground. Food stalls and flower
vendors, fruit stands, and candle makers line the streets. Walking through the
cemetery is like walking along the midway at the local carnival. The air is
filled with confetti, fluttering paper streamers, and billowing smoke from
candles, incense and BBQs. Giant plush bears, dolls, and balloons adorn the
graves. Riotous color is everywhere. Flowers everywhere. Enormous bouquets of
lilies and gladioli of every color and description, some elegantly arranged in
traditional urns, others placed simply into cut-off plastic Coca Cola bottles
fill the cemetery grounds. Huge standing sprays of real and artificial flowers
in garish colors, some still wrapped in cellophane like your grandmother’s lamp
shade, stand almost one atop another jousting for space on the small and
disorderly plots. Candy skulls and sugar crosses, prayers and offerings adorn
each grave. The names of loved ones are carefully spelled out on the grass with
pungent, orange marigold blossoms. Photographs of loved ones, offerings of
food, flags, prayer books, rosaries and images of the Virgin Mary are
everywhere. The remnants of last year’s celebrations lay raked and stacked into
enormous ragged piles against the cemetery walls, evidence of the frenzied
weeks of preparation that preceded the opening of the carnival.
In many ways Dia de Los Muertos seems not unlike our own
Memorial Day (only on steroids); families clean and tidy the graves of loved
ones, wreaths are laid and flags are planted, photographs are kissed and placed
alongside names etched in stone, speeches are made, prayers are whispered,
mourners cry and laugh, and the 24 mournful notes of the bugler echo across the
evening sky.
In Mexico it is all this and more. The cemeteries are
absolutely jammed full with people; the entire town crammed into the equivalent
of four square blocks. Families hire musicians to play the favorite songs of
their departed loved ones, so the air is filled with the Mariachi music of 20
different bands, all playing different songs and all within 50 feet of each
other. People are singing, talking, laughing, and telling stories and jokes
among themselves and with their departed loved ones. They picnic, dance, and
sing. They pray, and cry and remember. It truly is an extraordinary
celebration.
Our own services and
celebrations by comparison seem impoverished. Increasingly it seems we don’t
know what to do with our dead. Many now eschew formal religious traditions and
are looking for an alternative, perhaps more personal or less expensive
approach to the burial plot and memorial stone, others believing that ever
increasing cemetery acreage is simply unsustainable opt for cremation with
their ashes divided up among the family, pressed into keepsake jewelry and
bowling balls, or strewn about in various favorite places, some become organ
donors, still others choose to be freeze dried apparently in the hope at some
point of coming back around for a victory lap.
All this is fine perhaps, but
unlike the concept inherent in traditional cemeteries, strewing your ashes
around in various locations leaves no place in the community for life and death
to come together. No communal bonding, sharing and understanding, no songs or
hymns sung in communion with the dead and the living, no annual remembrance
made, or stores told; life and death remain eternally separate.
Our memorial services have
seemingly left the traditional cemetery behind, and are instead increasingly
being transformed into Celebrations of Life, YouTube videos, or Facebook pages,
events that may include a gathering of friends and relatives, business partners
and bowling buddies, everyone except the deceased, lest the presence of an
actual body break the illusion of a cloudless celebration, spoil the contemplative
mood and reveal the awful truths about grief, loss, life and death that our
thinned-out ceremonies cannot bear.
Life and death are inseparable here. Life and death are at
once a joyous, raucous, and communal celebration… one that I’d be honored to
share on my birthday… or otherwise.
