The Departed

I learned about El Dia de los Muertos in high school Spanish class but did not actually experience it until living in New Mexico in 2008.  A parade assembled as it had for decades and wound through a gauntlet of cheering spectators in the South Valley of Albuquerque.  Cars transformed into mobile altars and floats transported dancing men and women dressed as skeletons in 19th century formal wear.  White and black were used to demarcate bone from empty space but everything else was ablaze in color.  The marigolds, dahlias, Mexican puppetry, music, dancing and altars honoring loved ones who have died were booming with life.  That Day of the Dead, I felt like a spectative sponge, taking everything in.  

 

The parade ended at a cement block community center housing local family altars with offerings of sweet breads, sugar skulls, flowers, fruit and often the family member's favorite meal.  Outside, strands of bright white bulbs connected vendor booths and illuminated families eating tamales and perusing artwork for sale below. Skull-masked grandmas pushing skeleton pajamaed babies in strollers covered in a rainbow of handmade tissue paper flowers.  Dogs wearing marigold wreathes. I went home thinking that Latin American cultures do a better job than most of joyfully commemorating their departed and bringing death out in the open.

This year I saw an ad in the newspaper advertising a Day of the Dead parade in Petaluma, a town 17 miles south of Santa Rosa.  I recruited David and Ellen, not knowing what to expect.  This is not New Mexico.  We arrived at the purported starting place, the bridge joining the Petaluma Riverwalk to find only a handful of other white people in street clothes like us. I was already disappointed.  Then the skeletons filed in, joining beach ball sized paper mache faces on sticks, and two costumed dance troupes.  Toddlers, grandparents and many teenagers inbetween comprised Grupo Coyolxauqui, masked and adorned with three-foot-feather headdresses, shells jangling at each ankle creating a rhythm even before the first drum strike.  The crowd grew as twilight fell.  A skeleton dressed as Pancho Villa distributed candles amongst all comers, helping people light them one by one.  Competing music from different ends of the mob rumbled and suddenly we were in motion along the riverwalk. It was then that I realized we, everyone, was in the parade. 

Soon we found ourselves in near darkness, the only light from hand held candles and a few widely spaced street lamps.  As we turned right onto the edge of Washington Boulevard, the procession necessarily narrowed to accommodate traffic and David, Ellen and I found ourselves on the heels of Grupo Coyolxanqui, dancers still spinning in unison already thirty minutes into the parade.  Wafts of tamales and pupusas from the vendors at the community arts center ahead soon overtook the cedar incense emanating from the procession.  After mingling with death, dance and drums I found myself very much alive, and ravenous. 

The town of Petaluma built a community altar within the arts center where the parade ended but clearly the party had just begun.  The mulitiered altar had a chair on top.  After wolfing down a pupusa we doubled back along the parade route to downtown.  We couldn't find our car.  We couldn't remember where we had parked our car.  I knew David and Ellen would pull it together and locate it.  Instead I followed behind them thinking about the chair.  The chair was for the departed.  A place to rest during a visit back with the living. 

As winter nears, wimpy as it may be in California, I thought about what I wanted to let go of and what I wanted to invite back.  The list in both columns is quite long but one has tugged on me since the Day of the Dead. I let go of many things during seven years of medical training, as is done by necessity.  Some were small and became routine: sleep, sitting down to eat, peeing when I needed to pee.  Some where big and painful: baby and wedding showers, birthdays, weddings, funerals, reunions.  Events commemorated on altars.  During medical training I missed many more than I attended.  And even for those that I successfully pulled a massive schedule swap and incurred federal government level favor-debt to attend, I often could only give my physical presence.  That ate at me because that is not who I am.  So now, I am inviting back events to sit in a chair and fully celebrate their significance, even if just for myself, as some are long departed.