May our dead live! 2023/10/30

During my years of basic schooling we set up an altar for the dead. Sometimes I got bread of the dead, other times marigold flowers or chopped paper. When it was time to bring copal it was much more difficult, since it was not easily found in the markets close to the house. I almost always ended up carrying ocote wood, which smelled like resin when you burned it; the teachers did not accept cataphyxiation. Another element that was very difficult to obtain was the pumpkin in tacha, which had to be cooked at home, at that time it seemed as complicated to me to make the recipe as to prepare handmade soap. Pumpkin, piloncillo and cinnamon were what was needed, but above all, not feeling small and that the world is too big was the most essential step. Now I know.

From school it went to the house, every year we began to set up altars, first remembering our great-grandparents, how we were little, we still had grandparents, the years passed and then the grandparents came in. The family was left with holes and the altar was being nourished. That strange passage of our dead being represented in photos is what filled our altar with life. And that is the important symbolic act that our Day of the Dead has. It is a recognition of those who are no longer here, by recognizing the hole left by their departure, an absence that, like memory, fills our lives with color, through the time shared, through the words transmitted, on many occasions through the songs that we share. sang or that we sing together, for the smile that becomes an example of many smiles that we can give in life... The altar of the dead is to include death in life in a "normal" way, but with the recognition of joy, because it is surrounded by the colors provided by the papel picado and the colorfully painted clay skulls (of more or less recent creation). On the altars of the dead on November 2, death is not a hole, but pure color, flavor and smell. The smell of cempasuchil and the smell of copal.

The altar of the dead is a feast of the senses, of sight, of taste (imagined because you never eat anything from the altar), of smells, perhaps of silence and the exercise of memory.

Death—the only certainty that comes with life itself—continues to be a difficult topic to address in everyday life, and life passes like that path that wants to gain ground on existence and leave death very, very at the end, as if when arrived the game would have been lost. In this sense, the festival and tradition of the Day of the Dead take on a very special place: it allows death to be included within life and the dead within our homes, it is an invitation for them to return. And although part of the imagination may be the possibility that a portal opens through which they return, what is undoubtedly manifest is that in our imagination and in our own mind they are granted the present place that perhaps they have every day in small gestures, frames of reference, ways of leading life and even prejudices. They are present all the time, but we do not see them as much as the day we can celebrate them not as a mourning anniversary, but as joy. That is a very particular passage.

The Day of the Dead is not a unique holiday in the world, it is part of pagan as well as Christian traditions, many towns have it and I celebrate it for each of them. I particularly celebrate that this is ours, the one that was told to us and transmitted to us by those who are no longer here, the one that we will transmit to our children and their children, about which we will tell stories that some will make into novels or films, but, above all, that they will always live in the modest grandeur of each altar, with its photos, its bread, its candles, its copal. May our dead live!