A couple of days ago, we hired a taxicab to take us to Romerillo, a tiny village about 30 minutes out of San Cristobal. Our driver, Carlos, was a guy who had worked in Florida for a couple of years, so he spoke near perfect conversational English. He was surprised that our main purpose for the visit was to look at their cemetery. This cemetery is known for its stunning display of a cluster of twenty feet high painted wooden crosses at the highest point of the hillside where it is situated. The grass on the hillside is well cut by the herds of goats that are brought to graze on it.
You can see these crosses, about 20 or 30 of them, from the road through this little hamlet. Scattered on the hillside are simpler, smaller crosses marking individual graves. The graves are mounds of earth on top of which are plain wooden planks which symbolize doors to the underworld. On the Day of the Dead, relatives bring flowers and offerings to the grave, lift up the “door” to the grave, and they have conversations with their deceased family members. There were the occasional more “elaborate” grave which had a simple headstone carved with the name and information of the occupant. Most of the graves had simple crosses as markers.
The Day of the Dead (El Día de los Muertos) is a festival celebrated mainly in Mexico and elsewhere in the United States and Canada by people of Mexican heritage. The holiday focuses on gatherings of family and friends to pray for and remember friends and relatives who have died. The celebration occurs on the 1st and 2nd of November, in connection with the Catholic All Saint’s Day and All Soul’s Day. Traditions include erecting private altars honoring the deceased, and using sugar skulls, marigolds, and the favorite foods and beverages of the departed. In the case of residents in towns like Romerillo, families actually talk to their dead.
This holiday can be traced back to to indigenous practices dating back thousands of years; it has been linked to an Aztec festival dedicated to a goddess called Mictecacihuatl (known in English as “The Lady of the Dead”).
It seems to be that “primitive” cultures who have elaborate rituals and celebrations honoring their dead have incorporated death into the cycle of life. Their mythologies have a place for death, and life and death are considered almost equal in value. Whereas in many modern cultures death is something that is confusing and difficult to talk about – on the one hand, many are afraid of it and have no way to think about it. On the other, religious dictates offer too narrow a view on death as a lead into an afterlife in which we are judged and punished or rewarded based on what we do in this life.
For those who aren’t atheists or agnostics, religion offers a way to think about death, but it can be just as confusing. I once heard a eulogy titled “What Comes Next?” in which the minister essentially said that it didn’t matter much what you do in life, it was what would happen to you afterwards that counted. So you are to live your life in fear of being punished after you die. Doing good deeds in life had the ulterior motive of saving your own ass in the end.
I thought it should have been the other way around – that it mattered completely how you lived your one life, because this life is all you can know about here. It is the one time and place in which your perceptions and actions can count. If there is another plane in which we get to exist after we die, great, but as far as I’m concerned, we will then have to be in that one on whatever terms we get to negotiate, and earn our merits for that place.
I’m not sure I’m into talking to dead people, but I think it’s good to not be afraid of death, and it’s even better to live this life as fully as we can, doing whatever good we can do for ourselves and others along the way.
