Day of the Dead

I stumbled upon Dia de los Muertos in October of 2001 while wandering around Pilsen on my lunch break. I had been in Chicago for about six months, and my dad had been dead for four. I had few friends in the city and even fewer at my job, so I spent most of my work day soaking in grief and wandering around the blocks adjacent to my office.

One afternoon, while approaching a small patch of grass the city tried to pass off as a park, I saw a folding table draped in a bright yellow cloth and festooned with marigold garlands. On top of the table, there were large cardboard boxes covered in bright paper and crepe garlands stacked up like a short pyramid. I got closer to investigate and saw a placard in English and Spanish proclaiming that this was a community altar for Day of the Dead. It was late October, so a few people had already started decorating the altar with photos, notes, and neatly packaged bags of candy and food. Mementos like toy cars, rubber chickens, funny figurines, and action figures were also tucked in to the growing pile, and I imagined these were whimsical inside jokes between the grievers and the deceased. I was drawn to the juxtaposition of festivity and grief - the first time I had seen a reflection of my conflicting feelings of mourning and celebration for my dad's "homecoming". I became obsessed with the idea of adding to the altar for my dad.

I wrestled with the idea of the altar for a week. I made a list of what I could bring: A picture of my dad, a photo of a lobster tail, a small toy gorilla. I went back to the altar again and again and watched the tiers become cluttered with hundreds of notes, objects, and squirrel-eaten food. The "pagan"-ness of it gave me pause. The fact that I was not really part of the community or the culture gave me pause. But the gut-churning longing to join with these anonymous People Who Had Lost, to add my ache to the pile of grief, to find a bit of humor and festivity in the darkness, kept me coming back to the altar.

Eventually, I wandered a little farther on my altar-watching trek and made it to the National Museum of Mexican Art and saw that they had a whole exhibit about Dia de los Muertos. Sugar skulls, dancing skeletons, paintings, sculptures, and helpful descriptions helped me put together a bigger picture for this new obsession. When I got to the very last room of the exhibit, my breath caught in my throat. I saw a small alcove plastered with neon post-it notes on every inch of the wall. Notes that people had written to their beloved dead. Notes, the description informed me, that would be collected and burned on the Day of the Dead as a kind of offering. Perfect. I cried with relief and sadness as I grabbed a green post-it and scribbled:

I miss you dad, but I'm so glad you're finally Home.

I stuck it on the wall with the hundreds of other notes of love and longing and release and I left. I didn't go back to the altar. I didn't want to see it succumb to the elements, as it was designed to do. I had fulfilled the need to be part of a collective mourning.

When my mom died a few years later, I thought about driving down to Pilsen and hunting for an altar. I didn't. We remembered her in different ways, and my Chicago circle was much bigger. More of my friends had known and loved my mom, so I had a communal mourning for her in a way I hadn't with my dad.

This year, my brain was pulled to the altar again. Another quieter, lonelier grief stirred fleeting ideas of a road trip to the city. This year, I thought about finding a community altar to grieve the loss of tiny twins who I should have delivered about a week ago. Miscarriage is such private grief. No one knew them - not even me! There are no photos, no favorite foods, no shared memories. The doctor didn't even print out the ultrasound picture. I saw them exactly one time, and that was on the day I was told "So, there are two, but neither has a heart beat".

I have been thinking about those twins a lot this month. I'm pregnant again, and everything looks good so far, but announcing it to the Facebook world was scary. I think about the fact that I would have been a mom of twins right now, but I try to trample down the sadness to embrace the new life.

We had a different kind of communal mourning for the twins, even though only about 15 people in the world even knew they had existed at the time. Like I had when my dad died, I was aching for a way to express some kind of public yet anonymous grief. I wanted to scream at everyone I met in those first few weeks "MY BABIES DIED!". I didn't actually do that, so there was a lot of pent-up emotion bubbling up in my heart. Easter was right around the corner. I read in the bulletin of the church we were attending that congregants were invited to bring any kind of flower to the altar on Easter Sunday, and they would provide small notes and floral picks so we could write a note with the memorial information on it and stick it in the plant. So this Easter, I latched on to the redemption story and let go of the festive macabre. I brought a small, double-bloomed hydrangea to the altar at church, pulled out a white square of paper and wrote:

With love for our twin stars.

So, I didn't celebrate Day of the Dead this year. I did, however, ugly cry through most of the church service today as we celebrated All Saints Day. On All Saints Day, we remember the famous, officially-recognized saints of the church (St. Augustine, St. Peter, etc) as well as all those who lived in faith but aren't famous (my mom, dad, grandma, etc). Those saints who have joined what the church calls The Great Cloud of Witnesses. All Saints Day seems like the perfect celebratory day of remembrance for me now. I can't say that the Twin Stars were saints, per say, but I believe we'll meet them some day, and that they're already hanging out with their grandma and grandpa. That's a reason to celebrate, even if I miss them all like crazy.