Raising Up the Day of the Dead

The most beautiful story I heard this week was the story of a death.  I learned that the mother of a friend died in late September.  It was a “good” death.  She was almost 90, a wife and mother of four from a prominent Southern clan.  But for the past four decades, she had been addicted to sedatives.  Those who loved her had protected her as best they could, but in the course of this dance of accommodation and denial each in their own way paid a heavy price.  One son is already gone, another daughter is recovering from a stroke, and a third daughter is herself institutionalized with sczchizophrenia.

As word went out, the extended family gathered from far and wide, nieces, nephews, grandchildren, from their various locations.  Local houses were soon filled with the gathered clan.  She was to have two “send offs” — the first, from the church where she’d worshipped with her husband and children for years, some distance from the surviving son’s home.  The second, closer to him, and the nursing home where she’d spent the past 6 years.

In the chaos of such things, her remains were at first displaced, then found.  The first service saw the singing of her favorite children’s song, the testimony of relatives who’d remained in that area, the long and voluptuous telling of stories for the benefit of the next generation.  The mourning party then moved north for a second church service.  This was the one that evoked the greatest angst for my friend.  His sisters and sister-in-law had asked to deliver eulogies.

The weight of the mother’s overbearingness, her demands, were still fresh in everyone’s mind.  Her refusal to use her hearings aids, requiring more personal visits as she couldn’t hear the phone.  Her demands that her nursing home room be decorated with valances and upholstered furnishings like her original home.  Her petulance and never-satisfied expectations. Her many wounding moments of jealousy and mood towards the women, the pain she had caused with her addiction.  My friend said he held his breath, from his pew, wondering how those so wounded by this woman would remember her for the assembled.

But in the end, all rose to brave moments of honoring and resolution.  When it was over, he told me, they “put on the dog” – a lively party filled with more tales and talk good food and drink.

When the long, exhausting days over, my friend lay down, ready for sleep.

But sleep wouldn’t come.  Instead, as he lay there in the dark, a vision came to him.

“I suddenly could see my parents very clearly,” he told me.  “They were kneeling with my sister and me, in front of the fireplace, as if in a photo.  Mother must have been in her 40s.  It was Halloween, my mother’s great season.

“She threw the most wonderful “witch” events for us as children, the whole neighborhood would come.  She’d put us under a sheet in a darkened room and we’d pass peeled grapes as she told us that they were eyes, and sausages that became fingers.  She told marvelous stories, and thrilled us to the core.

“That night, she was beautiful.  She wore an outfit I still remember, and remember, too, her love for it.  We were all smiling.  Happy.  Healthy.  I felt a peace and closeness to my mother that I hadn’t felt for many many years.”

It was as if a veil had been taken away.  He was able to see her again as her true self, her soul shining through…

The next night, she appeared to him again.  This time, he woke to hear her say, “I’m trying to reach you!  Please call me.”

Anyone who has lost a loved one knows that these occurrences are actually common.  For years, on the anniversary of a brother’s death, he would enter my room at the exact hour that he died.  Others arrive in my consciousness on a regular basis through objects that are especially imbued with their presence – a tea cup, a diamond necklace, a rosary.

The window between worlds is actually very thin.  And this day, Halloween, and tomorrow, All Saints, is a time to acknowledge and celebrate this.  We have so much to learn from the Mexican Day of the Dead, an evolution of the Aztecs’ understanding of the cyclical nature of the universe and time.  The border between the spirit world and the real world must dissolve regularly, if we living are to be whole spiritually.  For Mexicans (as for medieval Spaniards), feasting and dancing and story telling, music, chocolate, wine and special bread, were the ways to guide departed souls “back” to life for time, to open the window, to let the dead speak, between worlds.  Just as the fulsome nature of my friend’s “send offs” seemed to open the heart’s and perceptions intentionally for true communion and healing to occur.

Monday, All Saints Day in the Christian calendar, is an adoption of these and earlier pagan rituals.

It is so helpful for us to remember its origins.  If we don’t, we lose something infinitely precious in our understanding of what it means to be a saint.  Too often, Christian saints are so sanitized that they tower on unreachable pedestals of virtue, sacrifice, and powers of mystical vision.  They aren’t us, we aren’t them, and we never will be.

But my friend’s story of his mother tells a different tale.  This was a woman who, just a few years earlier in another nursing home, took up with a fellow resident and flew the coop with him for several days, driving around the countryside with no license and just a handful of credit cards, who read aloud each Advent to her children, who did her best.  A woman who by her own lights, loved.

The dead teach us that our souls endure beneath layers of brokenness, and that holiness is actually an evolving series of choices ever in counterpoint to the vicissitudes of what St. Paul called, “the flesh.”  We are embodied souls, until we aren’t.  Only at that point, perhaps, are we able to reveal ourselves as we truly are.

Until then, as Halloween so beautifully dramatizes, we are costumed and masked, knocking on all the doors in our worlds to be offered sweetness, kindness, to be welcomed in.

Namaste.