No, not the George Romero movie.
As I walk around my neighbourhood during one of my favourite times the of the year--when every day the street looks new because of the leaves that have turned colour overnight, or fallen--front yards are sprouting creepshow-style Hallowe'en decorations. Reinforcements of our culture's pervasive belief that life and death are absolute, mutually exclusive opposites. That life and death, or at least death in its daily guise as change, don't continuously permeate one another. Death is hideous, repellent, to be feared and avoided at all costs, those bloody, severed plastic hands hanging from the bush by the sidewalk tell us. On the morning of November 1, when the pumpkins go out with the garbage, we can all go back to the safety of being on this side of the divide.
What a contrast with the traditions of the Día de Muertos--the Day of All Souls. The veil grows thin, becomes permeable. The dead visit the living, the living visit the dead. Connections are renewed. The dead live on in the ways they've touched our lives. Their life flows through us, even as we live, and will live on when we cross over, in the lives of those we've touched. The dead aren't scary. They're beloved. And we're reminded that we're on our way to join them, as mortal as they are, not to terrify us, but to bring us together.
To be whole ourselves, we need to pass through the veil. We need to remember. We need not to suppress grief for those we've lost, however we've lost them. For some of us, above all and most traumatically to AIDS. Or to violence. They're with us, they're within us.
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