Day of the Dead-to-Me
Many years on October 31, I’ve eaten both fistfuls of candy corn and a plate of pomegranate seeds. Halloween, or Samhain (pronounced “sow-en”), as many neo-Pagans call it, brings a perfect balance between the festive and the sacred. Samhain is the time the veil thins between this world and the next (usually the underworld), and we enjoy divination and set out water and food for our ancestors.
This year, I felt detached from my usual rituals. Marigolds didn’t beg me to scatter their petals to my doorway, creating a bridge between myself and departed loved ones. My tarot decks only made it as far as my desk. As I struggled to connect with the idea of the dead, I saw my focus had shifted on a more liminal space, the uncomfortable frictions and insatiable curiosities about what it means to be dead — to me.
Some close friendships blazed up with intimacy and adventure, maintaining the Technicolor memories even as they just became too difficult for whatever reason. I miss walking the railroad tracks and drinking Amstel light, I miss making scavenger hunts, I miss eating cherries in bed, and yet I have to remind myself why these friendships imploded. That our problems grew more and more irreconcilable, even as the sight of cherries in the grocery store makes me wonder if I did try hard enough.
But I did. Those things just lacked the infrastructure to last.
What do we do with those relationships? Seriously, what do we do?
Let me tell you, incessant Googling and social media stalking is not the way to go.
So many times I’ve stared at the last picture one friend — the one with the cherries — sent. It was of her outstretched arm on a gray beach, and I saw the sleeve of her sweater but mostly the smooth stones she was holding out. She knew I’d appreciate the stones, their perfect, compact stories.
We didn’t know that’d be the last communication, In stones, atoms vibrate in place but are packed too tightly to move. They, like our friendship, is crystallized.
We obsess over the images of stones and cherries. Talk about a scavenger hunt, except nobody has actually hidden any clues or prize. It’s mostly confirmation bias. Even if it’s only happened once that I see an ad for hot stone massage while thinking about her, I look for the next step, as if this is a mystery I can solve.
In 2003, a street psychic in New Orleans gave me a red glass heart, and how many times have I invoked it in (ultimately terrible) poems because in hindsight the glass heart later felt like a magic clue of events that later unfolded? In writing I obsess over the images and the stories, but the obsession also permits me to revisit them from altered vantages. It’s not so much that I change the endings as I end the stories where I damn well please.
I hold the red glass heart up to the light, and the sun illuminates just one curve in the heart. Which is pretty much what it’s like to write about memory.
I love a good crossroads deity. I frequently make service to Papa Legba, leaving him pennies or rum at crossroads or thresholds. He also likes candy, corn, and tobacco. He can open roads and find opportunities (though he is a trickster, so there can be twists), and he also has the power to open the door to access other entities. (These entities are called loas or lwas in Haitian voodoo and are similar to saints.)
These relationships I’m writing about, the ones I’m calling liminal, are indeed crossroads. The word “liminal” comes from the word for “threshold,” and we know doors are places both for entering and leaving. And we can linger in doorways themselves.
Believe me, I know.
At this crossroads is also that tension between the smooth stones and the more active states of matter. If there’s a libation or message to be left for the liminal living, let us do it at the crossroads, at the threshold, holding out smooth stones on a beach all full of crashing waves.
At Samhain we talk about the myth of Persephone, how Hades whisked her away to the underworld for part of the year, letting her return to her fertility-goddess mother for the rest. This myth explains the change of the seasons, but maybe it also explains change itself. What it means to never know if your place is in the dark or in the light. The myths don’t get into how Persephone traveled between the realms, and I obsess over what that journey must have been like.
It’s a Samhain custom to set out libations — or at least water — so your ancestors and beloved departed will find relief for the hunger and thirst they feel upon returning to this plane. Do we feed our difficult ghosts? And how do we ever quench their thirsts?
I don’t think we do.
Instead we realize “dead to me” is just acknowledging that someone haunts us, lovingly or painfully or both. I can’t bring myself to set out refreshments for these people as if they’re crossing over. But I’ll honor them. At the crossroads. A splash of water, a stone, a handful of cherries.
Whatever I leave, the scavenger hunt will always bring me back there, waiting for clues that may never appear.
I write all kinds of things here on Medium, and you can find my poetry/music journalism/ fiction at http://www.erinlyndalmartin.com or Twitter at @erinlyndal. If you enjoyed this article, please share it, and you can also throw me a dollar for coffee.
