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In the US, we celebrate Halloween. Everywhere I go this time of year, I'm likely to see suspended skeletons, undead clowns, rubber rats and snakes, zombie hands reaching out of cauldrons filled with candy, costumes in all their polyester glory, pumpkins carved in every conceivable shape, and all sorts of other tokens glorifying the threatening and chilling side of death and the human condition. When I was a kid, I liked trick-or-treating and haunted houses, thinking nothing of it. It was just a thing.
Then, I had my own kids. Trick-or-treating was going out of vogue, but the kids loved parties and trunk-or-treating. It was fun to see them dress in costume and enjoy the season. We still do, to some extent. But I stopped intentionally walking into Halloween stores the day I wandered into one and saw what looked like a plastic undead baby that had had an autopsy. That's the day my real experience with death and the "fun" side of Halloween came crashing together. And the fun side became a hollow shell that in no way captured one's real experience with death. It became a mockery of my grief. It was hard not to look at the plastic stitches on that plastic head and not think of other stitches on a very real head that had been alive such a short time before. I can't walk into a Halloween store again because I don't want to revisit that experience.
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When I went on a mission to serve the Spanish speaking people of California, I became familiar with a holiday I like so much better, the Día de los Muertos. If you've seen Pixar's "Cocoa," you'll be somewhat familiar with it. It's the celebration of the lives of loved ones now passed beyond the grave. It doesn't treat death as an abstract concept for thrills and chills but views death as part of life and the dead not as faceless zombies but as real people who are no longer among the living. That's the day I'd rather celebrate. They use bright colors to show joy at the thinness of the veil between life and death on that night, to show joy in lives well lived. Sure, I go through the motions of Halloween, for the sake of the kids. But my heart is in the Día de los Muertos. Give me that holiday any day over my own because, indeed, the dead are not just empty shells reanimated in horror stories but angels that will one day be resurrected to rejoin the living on a day to be celebrated. I look forward to that day.
