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June 27 - July 3, 2023
Until she goes to her house-grave she will live with her family. They bring her food, tea, and offerings. She visits them in their dreams. It had only been two weeks since she passed through the soft, porous border with death. After the odor had dispersed, her family planned to sleep in the room with her. Agus—who, remember, slept with his dead grandfather for seven years as a child—shrugged.
The commenter hadn’t grown up believing that familial relationships continue after the death of the body. For Torajans, hauling someone out of their grave years after their death is not only respectful (the most respectful thing they can do, in fact), but it provides a meaningful way to stay connected to their dead.
Seeing Mom again, even in this altered state, might be less frightening than the specters of the human imagination.
Mexico City’s annual Días de los Muertos, or Days of the Dead, parade.
The Días de los Muertos parade did not inspire the James Bond film. The James Bond film inspired the parade. The Mexican government, afraid that people around the world would see the film and expect that the parade exists when it did not, recruited 1,200 volunteers and spent a year re-creating the four-hour pageant.
the parade was a crass commercialization of the very private, family-centered festival that is Días de los Muertos—the two days at the beginning of November when the dead are said to return to indulge in the pleasures of the living. To others, it was Días de los Muertos’s natural progression to a more secular, nationalistic holiday, boldly celebrating Mexico’s history in front of a worldwide audience.
Pan de muerto, or bread of the dead, is a roll baked with raised human bone formations and topped with sugar.
one of the main motivators in changing that perception was the southward creep of Halloween from the United States. In the early 1970s,
Mendoza wrote that her fellow Mexicans were ignoring the children who begged for pennies and cleaned car windshields just to survive, while in rich neighborhoods, “our bourgeoisie mimic the Texans and allow their children to go into others’ houses dressed ridiculously and to ask for alms, which they will receive.”
the festival also came to represent the struggles of many disenfranchised political groups. These groups adopted Días de los Muertos to mourn for those kept from the public eye, including sex workers, indigenous and gay rights groups, and Mexicans who had died trying to cross the border to the U.S.
Mexico itself is viewed as a world leader in practicing engaged, public grief.
“The archetypal woman is as a bringer of life,” Sarah said, “but my body was a tomb.” Sarah felt radioactive to all her friends and coworkers. She knew people wanted to live in a world where children are precious and invulnerable. “I was asked by society to hide my grief,” she said. “They didn’t want to confront such horrors. I was the face of those horrors. I was the boogeyman.”
MEXICAN POET Octavio Paz famously said that while citizens of Western cities like New York, Paris, and London would “burn their lips” if they so much as uttered the word “death,” “the Mexican, on the other hand, frequents it, mocks it, caresses it, sleeps with it, entertains it; it is one of his favorite playthings and his most enduring love.”
Claudio Lomnitz explained, “Mexico was bullied, invaded, occupied, mutilated, and extorted by foreign powers and independent operators alike.”
The funeral system in the United States is notorious for passing laws and regulations interfering with diverse death practices and enforcing assimilation toward Americanized norms.
Islamic custom is to wash and purify the body immediately after death before burying it as quickly as possible, ideally before nightfall. The Muslim community rejects embalming, recoiling at the idea of cutting into the body and injecting it with chemicals and preservatives.
Muslim funeral directors must compromise their beliefs if they want a chance to help their community in death.
Frida Kahlo, Mexico’s heroína del dolor, the heroine of pain. In her 1932 painting Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States, a defiant Frida straddles an imaginary boundary between Mexico and Detroit, where she was living at the time with her husband, the muralist Diego Rivera. The Mexican side is strewn with skulls, ruins, plants, and flowers with thick roots burrowed deep into the soil. The Detroit side contains factories, skyscrapers, and plumes of smoke—an industrial city that hides the natural cycle of life and death.
In a painting she created after her experience, Henry Ford Hospital (La cama volando), Frida lies naked on a hospital bed, the sheets soaked with blood. Objects float in the space around her, attached to her stomach by umbilical cords made of red ribbon: a male fetus (her son), medical objects, and symbols like a snail and an orchid. Detroit’s stark, manufacturing skyline disturbs the background. Regardless of her visceral distaste for Detroit and the horrible misfortune that occurred there, art historian Victor Zamudio Taylor claims it was here that “Kahlo, for the first time, consciously
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Kahlo was able to project this pain and confusion through her work, portraying her body and her grief without shame.
“Being in Mexico, it felt like a place to lay down my grief. It was recognized. I wasn’t making other people uncomfortable. I could breathe.”
Guanajuato, home to a famed collection of mummies.
The soil’s chemical components, along with the atmosphere in Guanajuato, had naturally mummified the bodies.
In death, corpses don’t hold themselves together. They no longer have to play by the living’s rules. The visual ghastliness of the Guanajuato mummies was not designed to “terrify” Mr. Bradbury, but a result of the bodies’ normal postmortem bioprocesses.
child mummies in the museum had their own props, such as scepters and crowns. These were the Angelitos, or Little Angels. Prior to the mid-twentieth century in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, a dead baby or child was considered a spiritual being, almost a saint, with a direct audience with God. These Angelitos, free from sin, could offer favors for the family members they left behind.
it was the recognition of the child’s death that moved her. “These children were treated as so special. Something was done just for them,” she said. There were parties and paintings and games and, most of all, tasks to perform for the child—tasks beyond the lonely, interminable silences.
EACH YEAR, on the evening of November 1, the border between the living and the dead thins and frays, allowing the spirits to transgress.
Jorge’s three-tiered altar, or ofrenda. Each item his family and friends brought to his altar was designed to entice him home that night.
He will continue to return as long as his family continues to show up, inviting him to come back among the living.
At the center of his altar was Jorge’s favorite white T-shirt, illustrated with a sad clown and “Joker” written in script. A bottle of Pepsi awaited his return (the appeal of which I understood—gross as it sounds, I’d come back from the dead for a Diet Coke).
Sarah had come ready with a bag full of candies. Word got out among the children, and she was swarmed with catrina-faced kids with their pumpkins, many with lit candles inside. “Señorita! Señorita, gracias!”
At the time of the conquista, a Dominican friar wrote that the native people were happy to adopt the Catholic festivals of All Saints and All Souls because they provided the perfect fronts for their existing festivals honoring the dead.
For the families, this night is not just a one-way acceptance of offerings for their dead; it is an exchange with the community.
It felt safe inside the walls of this cemetery, like being in the center of a glowing, beating heart.
Sarah stopped at the grave of Marco Antonio Barriga, who died at only one year old. A picture of Marco showed a dove flying above him. His grave was a fortress, seven feet high, reflecting the size of his parents’ grief. Marco had died twenty years before, but his grave was still covered in candles and flowers, proof that the pain of losing a child never goes away.
“One particularly vile woman screamed over and over that I was a murderer. I couldn’t take it, so I walked directly up to her and screamed in her face, ‘My baby is already dead! How dare you!’ ”
More than three years later, the weight of her son’s death is like a constant anchor in Sarah’s body. In the cemetery in Tzintzuntzan, as Sarah stared at the photo of baby Marco, Ruben lovingly rubbed the small of her back. She broke the silence. “Parents just want to show off their baby. They are so proud. If their baby dies, that opportunity is taken away. This is their chance, to show they still love their child, they are still proud of him.”
died. She felt pressure to maintain her “dignity” and to keep her grief silent, lest her visceral trauma depress anyone else.
The Western funeral home loves the word “dignity.” The largest American funeral corporation has even trademarked the word. What dignity translates to, more often than not, is silence, a forced poise, a rigid formality. Wakes last exactly two hours. Processions lead to the cemetery. The family leaves the cemetery before the casket is even lowered into the ground.
healing what is certainly the United States’ most painfully chronic ailment: its denial of death . . . and its abandonment of the bereaved to a kind of solitary confinement.”
“I think most mothers have at least some fear of being imprisoned by the birth of a child,” Sarah said. “I’m always aware of all the things I can do, all the places I can travel, these pilgrimages I can take, because I don’t have a young child. I’m aware of all the time I have. It makes it more valuable, because I possess this time at a terrible cost.”
Frida Kahlo’s true feelings on bearing children may never be entirely clear.
This process, known in the ocean science community as a whale fall, creates an entire ecosystem around the carcass—like a pop-up restaurant for the alienlike creatures of the primordial depths.
The whale is the epitome of a postmortem benefactor, part of an arrangement as beautiful as it is sensible—an animal dying and donating its body so that others may thrive. “Try the grey stuff, it’s delicious,” the carcass seems to say. The whale, in short, is a valuable necrocitizen.
Whales spend their whole lives supporting the environment that surrounds them.
We owe our very lives to the soil, and, as William Bryant Logan said, “the bodies we give it back are not payment enough.” Though, presumably, they are a start.
You have to be careful with language if you’re Katrina Spade, the person leading the charge, as the New York Times put it, to “turn corpses into compost.
Dr. J runs the Forensic Osteology Research Station (FOREST) at Western Carolina University. You might have heard this type of facility described as a “body farm,” where corpses, donated to science, are laid out to decompose for forensic study and law enforcement training. But, as Dr. J is quick to point out, “body farm” is an inaccurate term: “A farm grows food. We don’t grow bodies.
The bear burials (bearials, if you will) acted as practice for the undergraduates. After a bear decays down to bone, the students set up a systematic grid and collect the bones to bring back to the lab for examination. Successfully processing a bear permits a student to work on the human beings, located not in the parking area (I was pleased to discover) but in a 58-by-58-foot pen up the hill, fenced in with razor wire to keep out the curious, which include coyotes, bears, and drunk college students.
A senior in forensic anthropology,” he drawled. For self-preservation I attributed the “ma’am” as a Southern thing, rather than a sign of my advancing age.
