November 2—All Souls’ Day
As a kid and a Roman Catholic growing up on the Texas-Mexico border, November 2, All Soul’s Day, was a day of prayerful remembrance of the faithful departed. My family and I went to church and then to the cemetery. This was a day to leave flowers on newly cleaned headstones. In my childhood, the experience began as private and somber and quiet.
The cemetery was not a new or strange place to me, even as a child. It was familiar. I knew its roads and over time could rely on muscle memory from the entrance to the final stop. My father almost daily visited the graves of his father and mother and created an idiosyncratic ofrenda—just a rake to gather up leaves and a hose to water the grass of those plots. Still, I think now that this was a form of communication and storytelling—loud for its unceasing recurrence.
I knew November 2 was also known as Día de los Muertos—a day of the dead. The cemetery was a place where most times, my father was a solitary figure in the expanse of green grass, mesquite trees, and forgotten flowers strewn throughout the grounds. To see the dozens of other families there on November 2, was a revelation.
Everyone was there together to remember.
When done as a collective, the memorializing became something else—communal, celebratory.
That is the point—to remember our loved ones who have passed on. We say that we want them to know that we have not forgotten them. But the remembering and the activities associated with Día de los Muertos remind us that we are still here—here to remember, to reflect, to record, to document, to celebrate.
Forged in my young mind was that Día de los Muertos is really a day for the living.
It is the living who want their difuntos to know they are not forgotten, but also the living want everyone else to know what their loved ones were like in life.
It is a human compulsion. It is a primal one.
Telling Stories of the Dead
“Misery” is a story by the great Anton Chekhov. The protagonist is Iona, a man who drives a horse-drawn cab for a living. His son has died. As Iona goes through his day picking up fares, he has this urge to talk about his son, to tell the person he’s chauffeuring that his son has died, to talk about his son with the man standing on the corner, to say it out loud—to remember his son to anyone who will take the time to listen.
No one listens. All the people Iona encounters are going about their day, getting from one place to the next, living their lives. At the end of his workday, Iona feeds his horse and tries to say what’s been burning in his throat all day. He says it into her ear in the quiet of a warm stable. We don’t know what he says exactly. We don’t need to know. The story itself stands for this expression, this articulation of feelings for which there are no real words.
I think that is what is at the heart of Day of the Dead, too. The altares and ofrendas tell the stories for us when there simply are no words.
The “First” Day of the Dead
In the almost 30 years that I’ve called San Antonio my home, I’ve observed the ways that the Day of the Dead has taken on new and magnified meaning. There was a time in the not so distant past when one could not find Day of the Dead tchotchkes at HEB, let alone an entire aisle dedicated to decorations, kitchenware, and other knickknacks. Etsy shops dedicated to Day of the Dead jewelry and attire are a booming business. Many brick and mortar stores now feature Day of the Dead-themed clothes and jewelry and homewares. A movie like Coco or The Book of Life might not have been easily accepted once upon a time. They are now “new animated classics.”
This evolution is not without its critics claiming that such outsized consumerism is appropriation that discounts the true roots of Day of the Dead.
This week, the families of the slain children and teachers from Robb Elementary School in Uvalde experienced their first November 2 without their loved ones whose lives were so senselessly and tragically lost.
For days we heard the news of all that transpired after May 24, the details of the horrors of that event, the news about the confusion among almost 400 officers on the scene who did not do all they could have done that day, and the utter failure of local and state leaders to tell the truth about what occurred.
We remember those things, too.
So when someone like Makenna Lee Elrod’s mother says she is a Baptist and has never celebrated Day of the Dead but is doing so this year, that sounds right.
Let the things the children loved—the candies and snacks, the Starbucks drinks and beanies, the stuffed animals and sports pennants—sing on. Let those families put up the framed photos of their babies smiling back at us in the glow of veladoras. Let those images remain on T-shirts and keychains and posters and murals and tattoos. Let them be part of the remembering—beyond the horrors of how their lives ended.
The Mariachis should play Juan Gabriel’s “Amor Eterno” in the most soaring and seismic rendition imaginable from the town square in Uvalde. The cries of devastated families are louder.
The candles across so many festooned picnic tables could have lighted the way one town over on November 2 in Uvalde. The outrage of a community burns brighter.
The teachers’ memorials reveal the hidden lives of these educators—two women who by all accounts gave everything to their young charges at school for most of the waking hours of each day and still had more to give to their families at home. All of that is lost now—except for what remembering can render for the bereft. And on Día de los Muertos, the rest of us can remember them, too.
Surprised by Joy
At the end of Chekhov’s story, “Misery,” Iona tells his horse to imagine how she would feel if her little colt were to die. Even this call for empathy is important to him after a day of being rebuffed by every other human being he encountered. In the end, the mare lowers her head to eat her hay in the warm, dry stable, and he sidles up close to her ear to share the story of his son.
If the story can stand for all the things that we find most difficult to articulate, an altar that tells the story of those we love and lost can speak volumes, too.
On June 12, 1812, William Wordsworth learned of the death of his daughter, Catherine, several days after she died and was buried. Wordsworth and his wife were inconsolable for a number of reasons, including that they had been traveling and were not present when Catherine died. Wordsworth’s wife was haunted by the idea that had she been present, she could have somehow stopped her daughter’s death.
A few years later, Wordsworth penned a sonnet that revealed his surprise and shock at being able to feel joy again. It begins with these lines:
Surprised by joy – impatient as the Wind
I turned to share the transport – Oh! with whom
But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb,
That spot which no vicissitude can find?
Wordsworth’s sonnet to Catherine comes forth across over 200 years to memorialize his little daughter.
We all do this in ways large and small—evoke the names and stories of those we love best.
To assemble an altar for a loved one for Día de los Muertos the first time--the first achingly wondrous time—is to be “surprised by joy.” May it be so next year, too.
