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Illustration by Juan Bernabeu<\/p>\nIllustration by Juan Bernabeu<\/p>\n
\u201cThe thought I often squelch now surfaced.\u201d<\/p>\n
By Joanne B. Mulcahy<\/p>\n
An almost-full moon hung low in the sky, illuminating the misty road to Ar\u00f3cutin, a Pur\u00e9pecha pueblo of about 700 people on Lake P\u00e1tzcuaro in central Mexico. On the night of November 1, my husband, Bob, and I left the nearby town of P\u00e1tzcuaro at 2:15 a.m. Friends had advised us to get to Ar\u00f3cutin\u2019s pante\u00f3n, or cemetery, around 3 a.m. By then, the main flood of tourists would be gone, while families honoring their dead would remain.<\/p>\n
Bob and I had been living part-time in P\u00e1tzcuaro for 30 years. Yet this would be our first experience of El D\u00eda de los Muertos\u2014an intertwined celebration of life and death that is a cornerstone of Mexican national identity.<\/p>\n
Moonlight slanted over P\u00e1tzcuaro\u2019s red-tiled roofs as we drove through the nearly empty town. A few celebrants wandered home from bars or the local pante\u00f3n. We soon hit a wild party at the turnoff for the docks to Janitzio, an island in the center of the lake. The P\u00e1tzcuaro region draws Muertos tourists from all over the world, but Janitzio is especially renowned. Hundreds of people milled about, many with painted faces and skeleton costumes. Impromptu stands sold beer and tequila, tacos and carnitas. A mariachi band in red-sequined outfits competed with boom boxes. We crawled through a line of cars so long that we contemplated turning around, but we were loath to give up so easily. Then, as suddenly as a scene change in a theater, the road to Ar\u00f3cutin opened, silent and shadowy.<\/p>\n
We passed Huecorio and a few other pueblos, weakly lit by smoldering candles in empty roadside cemeteries. Our headlights probed the unnerving darkness as we crept through the countryside. We\u2019d expected a horde of celebrants at the church of Santa Muerte in Santa Ana Chapitiro. Surely this was a night to honor the folk saint of death! Once the domain of prisoners and outsiders, and long shunned by the Catholic Church, Santa Muerte now draws tourists and locals to the shrine. I scanned the darkened buildings and registered no signs of life.<\/p>\n
My anxiety spiraled. What did I fear? We knew that carjackings can happen on deserted roads in Michoac\u00e1n. Some people worry that an uptick in political violence imperils Muertos traditions here. Drunk drivers threaten in all parts of the world, but we had encountered few cars. A dread of something deeper hovered. I tamped it down.<\/p>\n
Arriving at Ar\u00f3cutin, we parked and began the steep ascent to the pante\u00f3n, huffing our way through silent streets. Even the dogs stayed mute, eyes fixed warily on us. I thought of scenes from Juan Rulfo\u2019s Pedro Paramo, the famous novel said to have launched magical realism. The story follows a man searching for his father in a village inhabited entirely by the numerous and very dead offspring of his pap\u00e1. The book brims with an eeriness that engulfed me now.<\/p>\n
Finally, flickering candles signaled the pante\u00f3n entrance. An altar at the threshold honored the \u201canimas olvidadas\u201d\u2014forgotten souls. I made the sign of the cross, an automatic response borne of a Catholic upbringing. My mood shifted immediately to reverence.<\/p>\n
The day before, I\u2019d helped friends in Erongar\u00edcuaro, a larger pueblo on the lake, clean and decorate graves in their pante\u00f3n. We chatted as we pulled weeds and spread bright orange marigolds, cempas\u00fachiles, the flower ubiquitous during Muertos. Petals fluttered everywhere. A few strays landed on my jacket. I tucked them into a pocket, a shimmering hidden treasure. In Ar\u00f3cutin, the marigolds mixed with purple flores de terciopelo, some woven into the image of Christ on the cross. On each grave, offerings of Coca Cola, mescal, or Negro Modelo rested alongside baskets of fruits covered by bright embroidered cloths. I marveled at the splendor, embellished by a sea of blazing candles.<\/p>\n
We joined about 30 other people following the dirt paths snaking through the pante\u00f3n. Some were Mexican tourists, others clearly foreigners like us. A dozen local families clustered around their grave sites. Two old Pur\u00e9pecha women wrapped in rebozos dozed near a fire; a few men shared a bottle of tequila. Children played in one corner, leavening the solemnity of the scene.<\/p>\n
Hybrid forms of indigenous and Catholic symbols adorned the church adjoining the graveyard. A wooden Christ on the cross wore the apron traditional to Pur\u00e9pecha women, embellished with purple and gold sequined flowers. An Indigenous man in a huge wool poncho stood guard, his face serious and his eyes watchful. He nodded when he noticed my tears. Despite my lapsed church-going, the symbols and scents of Catholic churches in Mexico always resurrect childhood veneration. I was now deep into an experience I had not expected or fully prepared for.<\/p>\n
I knelt at the altar for a long while, pondering loved ones we\u2019ve lost these past few years. November marked five years since my mother\u2019s death during the COVID outbreak. The pandemic had robbed us of a group ritual for more than two years. Finally, on a rain-soaked July day, we buried her in the small Vermont town where she\u2019d grown up, next to my father who had preceded her by a decade. Now, a fierce grief returned. Had I done enough to show my love and gratitude while they lived? I rarely get across the country from our home in Oregon to visit their graves. I fought tears of regret, longing to slip into communion with the Dead.<\/p>\n
Would a collective gathering with my siblings, cousins, and other relatives create solace? What do rituals offer? In Ar\u00f3cutin, I felt connected to some unseen force. The veil between life and death, memory and forgetting, light and darkness felt porous. Cloaked by that sensation, I longed to linger. But I also feared that the gathering light of dawn would dispel the feeling. We left before sunrise.<\/p>\n
Everything about Muertos exemplified what we stand to gain by seeking out landscapes and cultures different from our own. An early experience with death in the US remains one of my most indelible childhood memories. One fall day, the nuns gathered our elementary school class to pay homage to a Catholic prelate in downtown Philadelphia. We filed silently past his coffin, his perfectly embalmed body cloaked in white silk vestments and a mitre. He seemed like a wax figure. I don\u2019t remember a single conversation in school or at home about this encounter, or about the passing of our beloved grandparents that followed.<\/p>\n
Years later, living with Bob in Derry, Northern Ireland, we attended a wake for a relative of our host, Helena. Bob had recently joined me after helping to care for his mother before she died. That staggering loss was still raw when we entered the Donegal home of Helena\u2019s relatives. The kitchen filled with friends and family laughing, drinking, and sharing the \u201ccraic\u201d\u2014that classic form of Irish storytelling. Upstairs, the air was somber, the body of the deceased laid out on a four-poster bed. Bob, unprepared for the sight of this old, white-haired woman, burst into tears. His reaction triggered sympathetic looks\u2014and later, on the drive back to Derry, a lighthearted joke from Helena about \u201cemotional Yanks.\u201d<\/p>\n
Though I didn\u2019t know it then, this mix of gaiety and a weighty reckoning with death echoes Mexican attitudes. As in Mexico, Irish traditions blend ancient practices, in this case Celtic, with Catholic beliefs. Sharing the sustenance of stories, food, and drink celebrates Irish lives in ways that resonate with the Mexican experience.<\/p>\n
In contrast, denial still dominates in much of the US. We bury consciousness of death long before we entomb our bodies. I hadn\u2019t expected how powerfully our trip to Ar\u00f3cutin would confront me with the inextricability of death from life.<\/p>\n
I watched Bob carefully negotiate the dark, misty road back to P\u00e1tzcuaro. Joy hummed through me as I pondered our 33 years together. We still map our hopes and adventures side by side, carry them forward, and relive them in story. We do so as though we will always emerge to plan the next phase. The thought I often squelch now surfaced: losing him would shatter me, something I fear far more than my own demise.<\/p>\n
Octavio Paz, famously and controversially, proclaimed that Mexicans \u201claugh at death.\u201d Nothing in that laughter assuages individual grief. Yet the more I acknowledged my fears, the louder the thrum of joy. In foregrounding death and loss, Muertos affirms life.<\/p>\n
Rituals often accommodate such contradictions. They highlight but also mitigate suffering. In Ar\u00f3cutin, the flowers spoke for souls otherwise \u201colvidadas.\u201d He once thrived, they say. She was loved. They are not forgotten.<\/p>\n
At home, I placed a few of the marigold petals from the Erongar\u00edcuaro pante\u00f3n in my desk drawer. Sometimes I take them out to ponder how this once brilliant flower now rests desiccated in my palm. A memento mori deepens the wonder.<\/p>\n
Joanne Mulcahy C\u201977 Gr\u201988 is a frequent contributor to the Gazetteand the author of Marion Greenwood: Portrait and Self-Portrait\u2014A Biography.<\/p>\n
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