SPIRITS OF OUR PAST

Traditions twist together like grapevines sometimes.  Harvest festivals morph into Thanksgiving. Local spiritual traditions are syncretised into Christian rituals. And Halloween, now mostly a fun spooky festival, erupts as a zombie from the grave from its roots as a Gaelic holy day of Samhain, a liminal time where the veil between life and death is thin and souls can more easily visit the living world.

Although some scholars dispute this interpretation of Halloween, others insist that the Eighth Century Catholic holiday to honor All Souls (or All Hallows) on October 31^st followed by the next day’s festival honoring All Saints evolved from the Gaelic festival.  Regardless, the commonality in these two origin stories is natural season of Earth moving from light into darkness in the Northern Hemisphere, the birthplace of both Gaelic spiritual rituals and the foundation of post-Christ Christianity.

Along with honoring the harvest, the theme is also one of honoring the people that came before, a time to honor our ancestors and recently departed elders. I’ve lived now in Tucson for nearly 30 years and the Hispanic cultural tradition of El Dia de los Muertos offers some of the most colorful rituals around All Hallows Eve. This is the day for honoring family members who have passed on before you. It is a time to do a little housekeeping at their gravesites, sweeping and cleaning the graves and headstones and then decorating them to let your ancestors know your living family is celebrating their importance to present day lives.

Some Southern Arizona cemeteries erupt in color, with the smaller and more traditional cemeteries beginning to take on the feeling of someone’s living room. South of Tucson, in Tubac which was part of Spain not so very long ago, families gather to sing and talk in and around the gravesites of their ancestors at the old ‘cementary,’ founded in the 1700s. You see giant coolers, grills and sofas among the historic gravesites. You hear guitars and violins as family members serenade their dearly departed. It’s a family reunion in a graveyard.

Tucsonans also have the unique All Souls Procession in which to publicly express appreciation for those who have gone before.  The All Souls Procession is a grassroots event, drawing around 35,000 participants, some dressed in creatively wild costumes and others simply holding pictures of those they want collectively honored. No judgment here – whoever the participants choose to honor is exactly who deserves honoring.  The 2013 All Souls Procession starts at the southern end of 6^th Avenue and winds up and through Downtown Tucson. Its emphasis is on creatively honoring your departed while supporting others’ grief and love for theirs.

Today in church (yes I actually go to church every once in awhile), our entire service was dedicated to honoring our loved ones who no longer are with us, recognizing that we are who we have become not only due to the influence of our parents and grandparents but also those family members who choices and decisions created cultures of education or enlightenment or sense of family or rural living that have impacted who we are today. We were asked to share our stories of remembrance – a beautiful way to honor our dead.

The first story I thought of is still too fresh to speak out loud so I chose another equally important story in my life. Here on this page, I don’t have to worry my voice will crack or tears will stream down my face. Here I can tell my stories of the dying days of my mother and father.

My father died first, way back in 1993, of Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma when he was still in his 60s. I was living in New Zealand but traveling often back to help my Mom care for Dad. In the last few months, my small son and I moved into Mom and Dad’s house. At one point, after it became obvious the chemotherapy was not slowing the progression of the cancer, my father became increasingly irritable, sometimes outright mean. My mother came to me in the hallway after a particularly unpleasant interchange with my Dad and directed me to ‘talk to your Dad’. “Uh, you mean about the whole dying thing and him being to mean to us?” I clarified. My mother nodded, tears in her eyes.

I took a deep breath and walked into Dad’s sick room. “Hey Dad, I need to talk to you. You’ve been really unbearable lately. I just wanted to let you know that if you are being mean to everyone in the hopes we won’t miss you so much when you die, you are doing a really good job. You DO know you are dying don’t you?” 

With that, my father and I talked about death and dying and finding spiritual meaning in death and how we, my four siblings and my mother, would cope just fine when he died.  After that, Dad seemed a little less irritable, a lot of his meanness about anxiety over how my Mother would fare and whether we children would make sure she was ok. I was honored my Mother chose me, the second child, to have ‘the Talk’ with my Dad. I found joy in helping ease my father’s sense of helplessness. Not too many weeks later my Dad died, his last days surrounded by a tag-team of his children.

When my Mother’s dying from Lewy Body Dementia began, nearly 20 years later, I was living alone in Tucson. I got to know the Dallas airport pretty well in the intervening months from the time she was provided hospice and the nearly 12 months before she died. Every time I left my Mom’s sick room in order to fly home I knew that moment might be the last moment I had with Mom. I cherished each one of those leavings but the one right before she died is my most special memory of her dying.

Every time I visited Mom, I would read poems and stories and People Magazine to her. And even though she could not really track what I said, the cadence of my voice and my hand in hers seemed to bring her joy and peace. One of her favorite authors had been James Herriott, the Yorkshire country vet who wrote fairly maudlin but endearing stories of country life. As the weeks added up to months, I read James Herriott to her again, out loud.

On my last visit before her death, Mom was very close to the veil, not eating, speaking or moving most of the time. I read anyway, out loud again, even though I had no sign from her that she could even hear me. I read for four solid days. I reread to her Herriott’s love story about meeting his wife and of their first date and honeymoon. I read until I was nearly hoarse. And when the moment to drag myself away from her bedside and into my rental car came, I put the book down and told her how much I loved her and that I knew Dad and her sisters and brother were waiting for her in that beautiful place and would be okay if she decided to go before I got back. As I left her bed, tears streaming down my face, I once again croaked out “I love you Mom”.  And as I walked by the foot of her bed, I heard her rusty voice tentatively and softly say “I love you too.” For a moment I almost thought I heard it in my mind; my mother had not spoken for days. But her day nurse looked up and confirmed what I knew – my Mom had said her final goodbye to me.

So on this All Saints Day, I celebrate my honored dead. I celebrate my father and my mother, all my beloved pets – Wolf, Cucumber, Tippy and silly Sonora. I celebrate my ancestors and cousins who did the best they could through the Great Depression, World Wars and Viet Nam. We may feel unique but we are all composites of our family. This is the day I honor them all.