The Poetry of the Dead

Copal. Papel picado. A kilo of guavas. Sugarcane. Chocolate skulls. A dozen candles. Marigold petals. A shopping list for Days of the Dead reads like a poem, and creating an altar out of the items on the list feels like poetry. I have the good fortune of calling Mexico my home and so I have inevitably adopted the traditions of this place. Since my first experience of Dias de los Muertos, when I built my own tiny little ofrenda, it has become my favorite holiday of the year. Now I dedicate a large table in my house to my yearly offering to the spirits, and I have helped groups create huge altars that are as much installation art as they are communal connections to the dearly departed.

Whether the ofrenda, or “offering,” created for the dead is large or small, its effect on me is always the same. When the billowing warm scent of copal incense, candle wax and ripe guavas hits me, I remember that all of creation is made of energy and that the barriers between “physical” and “non-physical” are thin indeed. The offering reminds me that life and death are just flip sides of the same coin. The ofrenda lights up the doorway where death and life meet. I remember that thousands of years ago the ancestors of Teotihuacan, this magical place where I live, buried their dead in the fetal position, knowing that death was simply a birth into a new life.

The symbolism and traditions of Dias de los Muertos are as variable as the convoluted history that went into its making, merging numerous pre-hispanic festivities with the Catholic holidays of All Souls Day and All Saints Day. Each year a bit more tradition is lost to the barrage of Halloween consumerism, plastic pumpkins and cheap costumes streaming down from the States, but core symbols remain the same in any celebration of Dias de los Muertos. Marigolds are important, sold by the armload, stuck in vases, heads plucked off and dotting the altar, a fiery orange line of petals laid out from the front door to the offering table. Marigolds symbolize fire. The spirits returning to this realm from dark Mictlan can find their way by the light of the bright path of petals pointing to their fiesta. Because the journey is long, the living welcome the spirits with something to drink, water or a shot of tequila. The living “sweeten” the journey for the spirits by offering treats – sugar-glazed breads, chocolate, big clay cazuelas full of fruit. On November 1st, children go door to door “asking for skulls” as physical stand-ins for the dead children honored this day, receiving treats off the altars and eating them on behalf of the spirits. On November 2nd, the spirits of dead adults are honored, and the church bell rings the death toll all night long.

I recently looked back at a description I wrote of my first little celebration of Dias de los Muertos, to see the holiday again through new eyes: “I sent my prayers to all the dead coming, all those I didn`t know and the few that I did, to the friends, to all the ancestors. You could almost imagine them flying overhead, peering down on this little village perched between train tracks and pyramids, chuckling at our sweet blind humanity. You could imagine them watching us as we laid out chunks of sugar cane and chocolate. You could feel their smiles, knowing they live always in the light in the atoms in the air right next to us. I asked the powers that be to send healing through all my past and future ancestral lineages, knowing that on a night like this there is no past and no future.”

I think, what an amazing culture – where the ancestors buried dead babies in clay pots to return them to the womb, where the ancestors buried family members directly under the floors of their house to keep them close, where to this day the dead are laid out on the kitchen table all night for a wake, then carried through the streets with mariachis and marching bands on their way to church, where the dead are celebrated every year, where they get to come back to this world for a couple of days to eat their favorite meal, where the living have a sweet window to death, and the dead always have a doorway back to life.

What do these kinds of traditions mean to us? How can these poetic colorful symbols and practices speak to us in our own lives about celebrating both the dead and the doorway between life and death? What can we “offer” to the spirits to show our own appreciation and gratitude for Life? That is what this holiday is really about, giving thanks for the wondrous opportunity to live a life, to be Life, no matter on which side of the doorway we find ourselves.

(Image: Ofrenda, soft paster on amate bark paper, 2010)