Cheersing to Death in Mexico
Yesterday, I started crying in a pedicure chair.
I’d gone back to the place where I’d gotten a manicure the week before and where I’d had to bail on my planned pedicure because it was the Friday of Día de los Muertos, or the Day of the Dead, and I was running late. (I had to be at a friend’s house to meet up before driving down to Xochimilco to spend the afternoon poling down the canals of one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city. Xochilmilco is also the only place that still has active canals and where the residents use long, thin boats called trajineras to get around. Canals and boats were all over Mexico City back when it was a lake that had yet to be filled in by the Spanish, greedy for more land.)
The nice manicurist ladies were asking me how my trip to the canals worked out. I told them about the beautiful ofrendas we got to visit at the various little restaurants and plant shops our boat stopped by. About the mariachis who strummed their impossibly round guitars against their impossibly round bellies and produced gorgeous tunes we all swayed to, even if we didn’t know any of the words. About how special it was to watch night fall over the water, the other boats defined by their darkness against the waves, as our boat captain, Juan, steered us carefully between the canal banks and the boats and the docks. About the fun of buying an elote from the vendor who’d cozy up next to our boat and pass over dripping cobs of corn, of making friends with the 20-person Mexican family enjoying a vat of mole and accepting the styrofoam dish of chicken in rich chocolatey sauce they passed over, of eating envelopes of obleas, their thin sand-colored wafers held together by a strip of chocolate frosting and adorned with a heavy crown of sprinkles.
I’d loved being there for Día de los Muertos, I told them. “But being in the cemetery was even better.”
My pedicurists stopped buffing my heels with an electric sander and looked up. “You went to the panteón?” she asked.
“Not to take pictures!” I said quickly. But she looked pleased, not offended. “We wanted to see what the celebrations looked like up close.”
“And what did you think?”
Reader, they were beautiful.
We went relatively early, around 8 p.m.; per our cab driver, families would be coming in until the early morning, at which point they’d camp out till daybreak. We walked in alongside families with arms full of marigolds and lilies and pulling carts of steaming food.
Some families were waiting for the grave cleaners—young men with bottles of sudsy water and belts full of rags—to finish polishing their loved one’s grave. Others had finished the clean-up earlier and were sitting in folding chairs around graves lit with candles that made the marigolds glow like small suns and the shadows grow long around them. One family had already begun serving their loved one’s favorite meal, eating off of paper plates and laughing over the sound of a speaker system blasting music. Almost every grave was covered in flowers, even the ones whose family members were yet to arrive that night. A few graves looked like they’d been forgotten, with weeds growing knee-high over the plots and the tombstones illegible, covered with dirt and moss; those prompted our small group to wonder if a savvy Mexican teen had yet invented an app to maintain graves even past when your own family died or moved away. But the majority of tombs, whether they were dedicated a century ago or last year, were adorned and adored.
I’d never seen a cemetery so alive.
All of my experiences with them were of places of reverence. Places to be quiet and be sad. To pay dutiful respects with the solemnity the fact of being surrounded by dead bodies required.
This was a party.
Not always a raucous one; plenty of families were celebrating quietly, talking in low voices and passing drinks around the semi-circle they’d formed in front of a gravestone.
But it was a party nonetheless. It was a celebration, and that was a big heap of cognitive dissonance for me to work through.
My mom died when I was 12. I was in Catholic school, and the Catholic conception of death didn’t help me much. It felt so final. One day, my mom existed, just like I did, a body that could breathe and think and express. Then she was gone. Not the body—that stayed on for a while—but my mom, the person, was gone.
Religion class had taught me that there were three possibilities for her life-after-death. If she was good, she’d go to Heaven forever; bad, Hell forever; medium, Purgatory until it got figured out.
But that seemed so simple—and so final—a system to come from a god who a) created the entire world and b) loved us so much he’d given us his only begotten son. How could he just give up on some of us and damn us to a lifetime in flames? It seemed unlikely. I couldn’t believe that my mom was somewhere else, this other dimension of existence, and that I’d only see her again were I to be the same amount of bad or good as she was during her life.
I now believe that there’s probably no afterlife, not in any way our earthly bodies or minds could process. But I see the purpose for believing that there is, and I’d rather believe in the version of death celebrated during Día de los Muertos.
I’m not Mexican, and I don’t want to pretend to be an expert in this holiday, but I’ll tell you what I’ve learned through talking to people here who have grown up celebrating this holiday and through reading about it.
Before the Spanish came, and indigenous cultures with their own religions thrived, people celebrated the deaths of their loved ones during a three-day holiday that fell in summertime. They’d honor those who had passed, remember them, and invite them to come back and visit; in their belief systems, death was something to be celebrated, not feared, and dead members of their community were kept alive in spirit through shared memory. When the Spanish—and that means the Catholics—invaded Mexico, they allowed the locals to keep their holiday but moved it to the end of October / beginning of November, to coincide with the All Saints’ Eve / Day and All Souls’ Day holidays, much like pagan celebrations of the spring equinox got rebranded as Easter.
Today’s celebrations continue in the same style and with many of the same beliefs as they did centuries ago, though they’ve gotten a bit of a boost from a Mexican tourism campaign in the 1980s and pop culture coverage like the 2015 James Bond movie Spectre, which included footage of a Day of the Dead parade in Mexico City that didn’t actually exist, but did start up in 2016 in response to the film.
Día de los Muertos is a day to celebrate the lives of your deceased loved ones, not to mourn their loss. It recognizes that life and death are separated by a veil so thin as to be almost insignificant. The spirits of the deceased pass through it and visit their families, and the families are happy to call those spirits home. Death is not something to be afraid of. It’s not a final sentence. It’s just what comes after life.
Traditions and customs include the following:
- Ofrendas, or offerings. These are constructed everywhere. I saw one in my Pilates studio, one in the grocery store, and plenty inside homes, government buildings, and museums. These altars, filled with bright colors, flowers, and things that the deceased loved to eat / drink / use, are usually customized to a person or people, and will include their photo(s), but can also be set up to honor the holiday, and not a specific person (which is what you’ll usually find in more commercial ones). Personal ones are meant to call the lost spirits home and welcome them to the land of living, so they usually have water, food, and a candle for each relative. The candle is especially important, as it lights the path home for the spirits.
- Cempasúchiles, or marigolds. These orange flowers are chosen for this holiday because their bright color and strong scent are meant to guide the dead back to their ofrendas. In Mexico, they’re grown by the millions in October, nourished by the rainy season of September; you can’t pass by a corner flowers shop or kiosk without seeing a bunch of marigolds for sale. Lesser-used but still popular are crestas de gallo, or a bright magenta flower named for the rooster’s crest it looks like.
- Papel picado, or pierced / cut papers. These brightly colored silhouettes show scenes of death, life, and nature. Now that Coco has come out and is so popular around the world, scenes from the movie are also brought to life in these strung-up paper decorations.
- Catrinas, or women dressed up (and men, sometimes, too) as glamorous skeletons, with painted faces and big-skirted dresses. This isn’t actually that old of a tradition; in 1947, Diego Rivera painted a mural that included a skeleton dressed in a large hat, meant to be a commentary on the rich sector of society (and to pay homage to political cartoonist José Guadalupe Posada, who had originally sketched a female skeleton decked out in European fashion to represent Mexican high society’s obsession with taking on European qualities). This may now be the most popular symbol of the holiday.
- Pan de muerto, or bread of the dead, and other foods and drinks. Because crossing from the spirit world to the land of the living can be tiring, Mexican families always set out food for their loved ones to replenish their energy and spirits. Often, the family will make the deceased’s favorite meal. Pan de muerto, a sweet roll covered in sugar and meant to look like a pile of bones, is also common. In the days after the holiday, the family usually eats the food that they’d set out for the spirits. But they find the food to be tasteless and to have lost its essence, its flavor. That’s good, though, because it means the spirits were able to consume the spirit of the food. Eating the food left out is the final step in the cycle of celebrating life, as it lets the food’s nutrients feed those who are still living, said several locals I talked to.
The symbolism of Día de los Muertos is gorgeous. The actual set-up is gorgeous, too. It’s worlds away from anything I’ve ever experienced related to death. Literally, worlds. Having not a heaven and a hell but a land of the living and a spirit world makes death less a final judgment and more of a continued celebration.
It’s beautiful. I wish it’s something we in the States (or in the non-Mexican world at large) celebrated as part of our culture.
It solves one of the biggest anxieties I have about death: the forgetting.
I worry often about how much of my mom I’ve forgotten. Memories diminish over time. I’ve forgotten what she smelled like, how she walked in heels, what her voice sounded like. Some things haven’t gone yet: the slope of her nose. The color her cheeks turned when she was excited. The khaki shorts, white t-shirt, green knitted vest outfit that was a summer staple. How she explained to me what happened on 9/11. When she’d make spaghetti and meatballs and roast an entire chicken the day before to use the fat (the juice? the bones? honestly, it’s unclear) in the sauce. The notes she’d leave on my pillow as proof that she’d checked on me in the night (and that the giant rat, which I feared lived in the basement for several months after seeing The Nutcracker, hadn’t come to take me away).
You know how a string of Christmas lights will work for years and years without fail, and then one year, you’ll pull out the box and plug them in and a few bulbs will have gone dead during their hibernation? That’s how the memories go. I don’t plan to lose them, but I don’t think about something for a while, or it doesn’t exist in a photograph or an artifact, and when I next check, it’s gone.
I can talk about my mom with others, which helps some memories stay strong. I’ll share them with my Aunt Carrie or my sisters or my dad. But everyone I’ve met after I was 12 has never known my mom, so the circle of people with whom I can reminisce about her keeps growing smaller.
And even with people who did know her, the American culture of grief is nothing like the grief shared here in Mexico on Día de los Muertos. Aside from the first tsunami of grief that washes over us at the funeral and in the days before and after, we deal with grief individually. When it pops up—when we’re hit with a wave of sadness or loneliness or anger—we handle it ourselves. Because if everyone else is having a good grief day, not weighed down by the injustice of a woman dying at 41 before seeing any of her daughters reach adulthood, why bring them down with you?
It seems like Mexico avoids some of the pitfalls of individual grief by making it a ritual part of Day of the Dead traditions. In so doing, they strip away some of the loneliness and replace it with familial warmth. I’ve seen families break down in laughter as they stand around a grave site, sipping cups of orange Fanta and cheersing to the full cup on the ground. Families here spend these three days sharing stories, making comfort foods, and solidifying the place that their loved ones’ memories hold in their minds, hearts, and heritage. Even the youngest grandchild who never met the abuela who passed away years ago knows that her grandmother liked to drink pulque (fermented agave sap) and eat barbecue chicken and train puppies, because she’s grown up celebrating those aspects of her ancestor’s memory.
I don’t know what would be right for my mom’s ofrenda. One of the hardest things about losing a parent when you’re still a kid is that your relationship with them will always be stunted in your adolescence, which is, by nature, a time when you were focused on figuring out yourself and blind to everyone else, especially parents. What was my mom’s favorite food? Could it have been her spaghetti? That’s certainly what mine was at the time.
But some things are clear. We’d play Carol King and Lenny Kravitz. Dessert would be banana cake with cream cheese frosting, eaten only by cutting long slices off the end, “just tidying up the edges.” And there’d be nail polish, of course. I only get pedicures because her toes were always perfect.
I tried to explain some of this to the lady sitting in a chair at my feet yesterday, painting my toes Very Cranberry and actively not commenting on my tears. I’m not sure she understood.
But that’s okay. I got to share some of my memories. And sharing them means they’ll be harder to forget.
Cheers, Mom. And Grandpa Max and Grandpa Jack. Next November, I’ll leave you some snacks.
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