DAY OF THE DEAD IS EVERY DAY
Traditions like these demonstrate how crucial it is to work with — not against — death
The flowers are the wrong colors. Vivid crimson, lemon-yellow, bright pops of blue. I blink at the photo my father has texted my sister and me, showing off the new set of artificial flowers he put on our mother’s grave for All Souls’ Day, and think, Blue? In October? I ask about the flowers I had placed there a few weeks ago on my last trip to Houston. “The fall colors?” he says. He is driving back to his house in Corpus, already a stretch down 59 South. Behind his voice I can hear the road. “They were faded already.”
I recall the bundle I had chosen so carefully, browsing the selection at the Michaels in Dickinson just off the Gulf Freeway. Sunset-orange sunflowers, burnt-red roses with long stems my mother would have loved. And marigolds: the iconic flower and symbol of Día de los Muertos. A tradition neither my Mexican American father nor my Filipina mother ever celebrated.
Fall colors, he called them. My mother would call them that too, if she were here, if we were standing in Mount Olivet Catholic Cemetery in Dickinson deciding what to place on the graves of her parents instead of hers, behind them. But she isn’t; we aren’t. My father is driving somewhere in South Texas. I am sitting in my San Antonio office, just an hour from my hometown of Uvalde where my dad still works and my sister still lives, where an entire community still reels and rages from grief. Thinking of the days ahead where we will all be asked to remember our dead. The many days we have been doing just that.
For thousands of years, it is said, the tradition of Día de los Muertos has been practiced in Mexico. The Aztecs believed that death was not an end but simply the closing of a chapter; instead of mourning the deceased, they celebrated their lives. Day of the Dead offered a window where the deceased could return from the spirit world and move through the mortal one.
Today, Mexicans gather on Día de los Muertos — observed Nov. 1 and 2 — to honor our dead and prepare for their presence among us by making ofrendas, or altars, adorned with candles, flowers, food, photographs and cala
veritas de azucar, or sugar skulls.
They are not the only ones to designate days of the dead. Go west, across the Pacific, where the Philippines celebrates Undas — All Souls’ Day — in similar fashion. Typically, during Undas, cemeteries run thick with visitors as Filipinos head to the graves of our deceased family members. We bring treasured photos to place at the grave, light candles and say prayers, offer favorite foods, flowers and drinks.
I come from two families and both those cultures. Both Mexico and the Philippines, colonized by Spain, have deep ties to the Catholic Church. As does my family. The Riveras and the Garzas go to Mass on Nov. 1 for All Saints’ Day, and the next day, All Souls’ Day, we honor our dead — through prayers, memories and stories shared aloud, and lit candles in a church or at home. We bring flowers as an offering to the graves we can visit.
In the United States, grief is often treated like a phase, a temporary state that one needs only to pass through and come out on the other side to move forward. When my mother died, I kept waiting for the grief to go away. It does ease; its sharp edges smooth. But I carry it each day. Communities like ours, traditions like these, demonstrate to us all how crucial it is to work with — not against — death. To find joy and comfort in it. Annual events are only the beginning; adhering to the rituals fully is just the start. For many of us, finding ways to commemorate the dead is a year-long practice, and we are working at it.
I have never brought a candle to a cemetery on Undas.
I have never built an ofrenda. There are so many graves these days.
I remember Halloween in Uvalde. The parade for all us schoolkids, showing off our scary, silly and best my-mom-made-this costumes, trekking down Getty and Nopal streets waving at our parents on the sidewalks. I don’t remember big celebrations for Día de los Muertos. Surprising, perhaps, for a town just an hour from the border and in which some 80 percent of the population identify as Hispanic.
But this year, there will be one. Uvalde will host a festival in the downtown plaza on Nov. 2, dedicated to the 19 students and two teachers killed in the May 24 shooting at Robb Elementary, the horror that has shattered us, brought us and our shattering to the national stage. According to the Uvalde Leader-News, there will be ofrendas — altars for the victims as well as “a grand altar for the community to honor their loved ones.”
We are weeks away still, on this Saturday in mid-October, when I drive home for a weekend with my sister and we run errands in town. No ofrendas yet, no grand celebration of life. I see a few sproutlings for Day of the Dead. A marigold wreath on a neighbor’s door, calaveritas de azucar painted on a window. At Hillcrest Cemetery, amid the graveside flags and crucifixes, the dying grass, we spot clusters of gold-orange flowers here and there.
This year, the días are too long, the muertos too many.
Outside Sebastian, on a small patch of the once-massive El Azadón ranch in the Rio
Grande Valley, my aunt Virginia is praying. Around her the graves, lovingly tended but crumbling with age, of los Cavazos, my great-grandfather’s family. Laid to rest on the land that was theirs. And about 20 miles away, she will do the same at the Mercedes city cemetery, the gravesites of my greatgrandmother’s family. Both places are studded with white and gray headstones, carved angels pressing their hands to their cheeks, crucifixes and pedestals mottled with dirt and the stain of years.
To our ancestors, Aunt Ginny brings flowers — wreaths of sunshine-yellow and orange, blue and white and red. She says prayers, takes a picture and sends it to the Garzas. Digital offerings work for us, scattered as we are these days. But from our phones in South and Central Texas, New York and even Costa Rica, we see the graves and the flowers she has placed. We remember the relatives who are gone, the ones we knew.
And the ones we never did, we remember them, too.
In the years after my mother moved to Texas, her siblings and parents followed her little by little from the Philippines. Most of them settled in Galveston and the Bay Area. My mother is buried in Dickinson, just behind her parents, just across I-45 from True Cross Catholic Church where my niece goes to school, where my family still attends every Sunday. Each week a shifting group of Rivera aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews — depending on schedules — attend Mass, then drive to the cemetery to visit. If I am in town, I join them. We bring flowers both real and artificial; we tidy stray grass and weeds and wipe the headstones with wet cloths and Whataburger napkins pulled from our cars. We pray. We laugh and take selfies. We talk to them as if they are here. “Inay, we love you! We ate at your favorite restaurant, Tatay. You’d be proud, Ate Rose.”
“I know why we try to keep the dead alive,” writes Joan Didion in “The Year of Magical Thinking,” her transcendent memoir and study of grief. “We try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.”
How many of the rituals we keep in the immediate wake of loss, the tidal wave of grief, are meant to keep the dead with us a little longer? Play their last voicemail over and over again, tattoo their handwritten message on the soft belly of your arm. Curl up in their clothing, their blankets, their smell. How deeply loss hits anew when the scent finally leaves, when the sound of their laugh or their snores drifts from memory. In Houston, an ofrenda for those killed in Uvalde has been made at MECA, the Multicultural Education through the Arts and Counseling nonprofit, and I expect there are more across Texas. In a place like my hometown, grief is still splintering, channeling for so many of us into demands for change and accountability, to keep this from happening again.
Where is the path that takes us from sorrow to celebration? How many days until we get there?
We are driving down Main Street, west through Uvalde, and my sister points. “Look.”
The murals. Just a few of the 21 vibrant paintings that have taken shape in the last six months, like wildflowers behind buildings, upon once-empty walls. The bright, smiling faces of our dead. A loving celebration of their lives; an offering to their families that we can all see, share.
I wonder about the grand ofrenda on Día de los Muertos — if one ofrenda could ever be big enough. If we will spend the rest of our lives making smaller, symbolic ones for our dead each day. A mural, a sign. A painted ribbon on the back of a car window. A donation. A vote.
Call them Undas, Día de los Muertos, All Saints, or All Souls. On the first two days of November, we are called to remember the ones who have left. But for many of us, this is just another day. Some of us are already moving through a world painted by grief in new colors. We are learning them. We make tributes in our own ways. My father replaces my Houston-weather-beaten flowers with bright ones in bold, happy colors that mean little to the tradition of Día de los Muertos or Undas, but simply remind him of my mother, colors she would love. Tomorrow I will drive north to attend the funeral of a dear friend — a celebration of life, according to the official description. I will cry, smile at her picture, wear the earrings that remind me of her, hug her family tightly. I will mourn and give thanks both. My sister and friends, my neighbors in
Uvalde, will gather on Nov. 2 to share food and drinks and memories, laugh, cry, place offerings at ofrendas public and secreted away in our hearts. We know each day is a day of the dead, and for the living.
As I write this, the sky is still dark. I wait and listen for my mother. I will talk to her a bit, as I do in these rare moments when I am up in the quiet of not-quite morning. Together we will wait. Watch for a new day.