Día de Muertos

I believe that Mexico has an incredibly healthy relationship with death. Correction: that should read Death, with a capital D. Mexicans are constantly making fun of Death, and when she comes (yes, in Mexico, it is a woman: La Muerte), she marks not an end but simply a change. The most beautiful feature of the whole relationship is what Emily and I got to experience a taste of this past weekend in San Miguel: Día de Muertos. The whole point of this festival is that over the course of a couple of days, all of your dead relatives come back to visit for a little bit. Families build altars to give their deceased loved ones everything they might be missing in the afterlife: good food, drinks, cigarettes, even toys for dead children.

But the part of the holiday that impressed me the most is when the families all head up to the local cemetery (or Panteón) to commune with their loved ones and decorate their graves. Emily and I went up to the panteón in San Miguel to see the action, and I had never before seen a cemetery so lively, so beautiful, and above all, so positive. I think we in the States have the impression of cemeteries as very scary places. We hold our breaths when we walk by one, and we certainly don't hang out in them at night. Part of our avoidance of cemeteries may not just be the fear factor, either: the cemetery is a bit of a sacred ground and many of us don't feel right just browsing the gravestones; we visit for funerals or to see the grave of a loved one, but little more than that. All of that gets flipped on its head in Mexico.

As Emily and I walked towards the cemetery, we were first struck by the long pathway crowded with vendors selling flowers for the holiday for use in decorating the graves. Then, when we went into the cemetery itself, the place was packed with people, som of them tourists like us, but mostly locals spending their time hanging out by this or that loved one's grave, laughing and clearly enjoying their time there. Not long after noticing how many people are there, we noticed how beautiful the place was. The typical flowers for el Día de Muertos is bright orange, and the normally tame colors of the panteón were overwhelmed by not only orange by many other colors of flower, not to mention various other decorations for the holiday. Día de Muertos is not at all about mourning; it is all about reconnection with family and the celebration thereof, and the colors and the overall spirit of the panteón on Saturday reflected that. It touched me and I hope that I can integrate some of that positive attitude and positive relationship into my own life.