At Peace.

The Day of the Dead. Halloween. Totensonntag. We celebrate the dead. Every culture, in their own way, honors those who came before us. We honor the ones, who died too young, after a long illness, a violent or a peaceful death after a fulfilled life.

In the end, death is always peaceful. Relieved from the tribulations of life, we vanish. Life is turned off. Watching Samba die in my arms, she took a final deep breath and then all life vanished from her little canine body. This might sound morbid to some but death is part of life. Although terribly sad to watch someone die, it does prepare us for what we will encounter sooner or later.

The celebrations of loved dead ones are a joyous affair here in Mexico. Instead of mourning the dead in somber attire, the ‘Dias de los Muertos’ is exactly that: ‘A Day of the Dead’. It is believed that the souls of the departed live close to the living and can come back for a short time each year on ‘their’ day. Aztec celebrations of the dead, which go back 2500 years and lasted an entire month, were mixed with Spanish traditions sanctioned by the Catholic church after Cortez conquered Mexico. It created a joyous mix of cultures, ancient and new, and is a celebration of possibility: of a colorful afterlife with numerous momentous returns. The dead are integrated into life on earth for a day. Death as a facet of life.

The cemetery was busy. Families brought large, colorful reefs to the graves, along with food, drinks, music and folding chairs to spend the afternoon close to the dead. More and more people came in the late afternoon after work. A band played in a far corner, graves were swept and decorated, barbecues lit. A candy man sold candies, there were street vendors of reefs and colorful flowers made out of corn husks, a water truck and an ambulance stood by. Only few old graves weren’t visited, probably because the family had moved away or the line had died out. A woman was mourning the recent passing of her teenage son and decorated his grave with his pictures. She wore a T-shirt with his photo and the pain still fresh on her face.

Halloween celebrates our fears, the skeletons in our closet, our shortcomings as humans faced with death. Dressed up with scary make-up and costumes, we flirt with death. Death feels hauntingly close. Trick or treat. We are looking to gauge the depth of our fear or better our fear of death itself. The days are short and the nights are long during the season of honoring the dead. The customs may vary from country to country but are deeply ingrained in the culture.

A celebration is a form of release and all celebrations are especially epic in Mexico. The 2nd of November is a Mexican holiday and most Mexicans take this day off and the Dias de los Muertos is celebrated over several days in Mexico. In Mexico City a street in the city center is blocked off for a week and transformed into a giant shrine collage of pictures, flowers and offerings build by anyone who wants to participate.

Here in Puerto Peñasco it lasts three days with a parade of pangas floating in the harbor decorated with shrines for the remembered, with a picnic at the cemetery, concerts, dance performances, elaborate processions and a catrina costume contest. Many girls, boys, women and men dress up in Catrinas costumes, their faces and bodies painted as skeletons.

The Catrina was invented as a caricature and then adopted as the celebration’s mascot – ‘La Catchina Catrina’. During the Mexican revolution of 1910, artist José Guadalupe Posada etched a caricature of a skeleton dressed like an aristocratic lady with a wagon-wheel size hat, her white painted face was meant to make fun of indigenous women painting their faces to appear white and to look more like the Spanish invaders. The skeleton’s dress referred to the pre-revolutionary feudalistic time, the time before the revolution, a time which was newly dead. A little while later, the famous Mexican painter Diego Rivera gave the ‘Calavera Catrina’ her first full size appearance in a French noble woman’s dress when he painted her in 1945 in a mural about the Mexican revolution paiting her standing between Frieda Kahlo and himself.  From then on, there was no stopping Catrinas on ‘Dias de los Muertos’ and everyone loves to get their faces painted in her likeness with hollow, deep, black eyes and a black heart for a skeleton nose, their hair adorned with colorful flowers and rosettes.

In the Maramureș region of Northern Romania, the ‘Merry Cemetery’ of Săpânța was also started by an artist. Since 1935, Stan Ioan Pătraş carved around 700 tombstones out of oak with a colorful, naïve paintings and short, ironic and candid first-person poems seemingly told by the deceased about their lives. The cheerful attitude towards death and colorful painting style goes back to ancient Romanian and Dacian traditions. Pătraş most talented disciple Dumitru Pop continued the tradition after his master’s death exporting tombstones all over Europe. The happy celebration of death caught on and many ordered their tombstones while alive – they want to be remembered joyfully.

In Germany ‘Totensonntag’ is a rather somber affair. It’s grimly cold in November and graves are visited all bundled up and only for a short while until families flee the cold and the situation. Understandably, a visit with the dead is hard when death is portrayed as the end of all connection between the realm of the dead to the living. Religions offer ideas and images of an afterlife, but without a real possibility for connection that is little solace for the ones left behind. We have to deal with our loved ones passing and it rips a hole in our hearts and lives, no matter how happy they might be wherever they are. How does one celebrate a loved one who has passed? How to fill the hole which was left by someone irreplaceable, someone we could talk to, we felt accepted by, someone we deeply loved?

We walked Puerto Penasco’s cemetery on the ‘Dias de los Muertos’ and decorated untended graves with flowers we had brought to honor our loved ones, who had passed. We spent the afternoon telling their stories, we ate candies and grilled corn in the midst of the Mexican family gatherings. The winter sun stood low giving it all a golden glow while the living were celebrating in peaceful harmony ‘life & death’.