Day of the Dead

When we moved to the multicultural region that is the Bay Area two decades ago, there were some customs and celebrations that I, as a WASPy East Coaster from a fairly homogenous town, knew about mostly in theory. Chinese New Year. Indigenous People’s Day rather than Columbus Day. Halloween as the High Holy Holiday of the Castro. All of it appealed to me, made the fabric of where I live more colorful, rich, and tasty.

I folded some of the foods and traditions into our family life in a way that I hope would land on the “respectful and admiring” side of the cultural appropriation line, in the same way I make corned beef and drink a Guinness exactly one time every year and that’s on March 17. But nowhere have I come to cherish another culture’s tradition more than the Mexican celebration of ancestors on November 1, Dia de los Muertos.

I’m hesitant to even write about this because this descendant of Yorkshire sheep farmers is truly no kind of authority on how Day of the Dead even works. What I know, I picked up from the Latina teachers at the girls’ Montessori playschool, where the kids decorated sugar skulls and brought home tin hearts punched out of aluminum sheets. You create an altar with pictures of the people you love who are no longer with you, with candles and symbols of things they love, maybe some of their favorite foods. Marigolds are nice. Candles. Also colorful tissue paper hangings.

The social studies classes in the kids’ elementary and middle school added to what I knew, learning vicariously through the shoebox altars the girls brought home that they’d created out of paper and clay. Those were made shortly after my father-in-law BT passed away, and why I created our first altar on the mantel over the living room fireplace. I added in my favorite picture of BT in which he’s shaking sambal oelek into a wok, some candles, a preschool-crafted skull. I added an orange batik napkin that was made in Java, just like BT.

There was a moment of quiet communing as I set things in place, my concentration solely on the question of what things BT loved. (If I’d been able to find a miniature version of the New York Times that would have been epic.) I filled up a tiny glass dish with uncooked grains rice, his favorite food, and as I set it down I said out loud, “BT, if you’re with us, how about you give us a sign?” Then I laughed, sort of kidding but not really, and walked away.

A couple days later I glanced over at the altar. There in the middle of the rice was what looked exactly like a thumbprint, and there were grains of rice spread across the batik napkin. It looked a whole lot like someone had used a thumb to flick them out. You know, a sign?

I never missed the chance to set up the altar after that. Until last year, which was three months after my own dad passed away. I just couldn’t. Too raw.

But this year, after I set up BT’s side of the mantle (sorry it was brown rice this year, I know you didn’t like that nearly as much but we’re on a whole grain rice kick right now courtesy of your youngest granddaughter, take it up with her, I beg you) I started working on my dad’s. Up went some candles, a picture I love of him giving his annual Camp History lecture, skeletons driving a car (Dad loved to drive,) and a Willie Nelson CD. Also had to put up a bottle of Rochester-brewed cream ale and a golf ball with the insignia of his firehouse. It felt meditative to find just the right things that represent Dad, and arrange them carefully.

Then I began to cry. Because I desperately, desperately want my dad to give me that thumb-in-the-rice signal that he’s here with me. And in part I was crying because I feel ashamed for even hoping for it, like I am insulting my dad’s memory. Dad was a guy who dealt in the here-and-now, reality, didn’t go for that woo-woo stuff.

I mean, maybe that wasn’t BT rearranging the rice back then; maybe someone knocked into the mantle and spilled it. Maybe when people go from us, they’re just gone, and whether we remember them especially fervently once a year doesn’t make a difference. Maybe there isn’t really magic in the world.

Maybe all of that is so. But I’m grateful that generations of people who handed down Dia de los Muertos traditions give me reason to hope that the opposite could also be true.