From Here to Eternity

by Caitlin Doughty

  Sarah felt radioactive to all her friends and coworkers. She knew people wanted to live in a world where children are precious and invulnerable. “I was asked by society to hide my grief,” she said. “They didn’t want to confront such horrors. I was the face of those horrors. I was the boogeyman.”

  Sarah scoured the Internet for stories from other mothers who had suffered the death of a child. She found websites made by well-meaning women, often with a very Christian overtone (e.g., “my angel has taken his place in the Lord’s arms”) and stories that offered platitudes and euphemisms. To Sarah, these feel-good pick-me-ups were nothing but empty clichés. The accounts could not capture the wrenching agony and longing that she felt.

  Searching for comfort, she landed on the doorstep of her own heritage. “Sarah, you’re Mexican. You come from arguably one of the most death-engaged cultures in the world,” she thought. “How would your ancestors deal with this tragedy?”

  MEXICAN POET Octavio Paz famously said that while citizens of Western cities like New York, Paris, and London would “burn their lips” if they so much as uttered the word “death,” “the Mexican, on the other hand, frequents it, mocks it, caresses it, sleeps with it, entertains it; it is one of his favorite playthings and his most enduring love.”

  This is not to say Mexicans have never feared death. Their relationship with death was hard-won; it emerged after centuries of brutality. “Rather than becoming a proud and powerful empire,” Claudio Lomnitz explained, “Mexico was bullied, invaded, occupied, mutilated, and extorted by foreign powers and independent operators alike.” In the twentieth century, as the Western world reached its peak of repression and death denial, in Mexico a “gay familiarity with death became a cornerstone of national identity.”

  For Sarah, coming to terms with her son’s death wasn’t an attempt to erase her fear of mortality; she knew such a task was impossible. She just wanted to engage with death, to be allowed to speak its name. As Paz said: frequent it, mock it, caress it.

  Many children and grandchildren of immigrants, have, like Sarah, found themselves severed from their family’s cultural rituals. The funeral system in the United States is notorious for passing laws and regulations interfering with diverse death practices and enforcing assimilation toward Americanized norms.

  In a particularly heartbreaking example, many Muslims would like to be able to open funeral homes in the U.S. and serve their communities as licensed funeral directors. Islamic custom is to wash and purify the body immediately after death before burying it as quickly as possible, ideally before nightfall. The Muslim community rejects embalming, recoiling at the idea of cutting into the body and injecting it with chemicals and preservatives. Yet many states have draconian regulations requiring funeral homes to offer embalming and all funeral directors to be trained as embalmers, despite the fact that the embalming process itself is never required. Muslim funeral directors must compromise their beliefs if they want a chance to help their community in death.

  Sarah’s first, and most lasting, gateway into Mexican culture was the work of the painter Frida Kahlo, Mexico’s heroína del dolor, the heroine of pain. In her 1932 painting Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States, a defiant Frida straddles an imaginary boundary between Mexico and Detroit, where she was living at the time with her husband, the muralist Diego Rivera. The Mexican side is strewn with skulls, ruins, plants, and flowers with thick roots burrowed deep into the soil. The Detroit side contains factories, skyscrapers, and plumes of smoke—an industrial city that hides the natural cycle of life and death.

  While living in Detroit, Kahlo became pregnant. She wrote of the pregnancy to her former physician, Leo Eloesser, her devoted correspondent from 1932 to 1951. She worried that pregnancy was too dangerous, that her body had been damaged by the famous streetcar accident that shattered part of her pelvis and punctured her uterus. Kahlo reported that her doctor in Detroit “gave me quinine and very strong castor oil for purge.” When the chemicals failed to end the pregnancy, her doctor declined to perform a surgical abortion, and Kahlo faced the prospect of carrying the risky pregnancy to term. She begged Eloesser to write to her doctor in Detroit, “since performing an abortion is against the law, maybe he is scared or something, and later it would be impossible to undergo such an operation.” We don’t know how Eloesser responded to Kahlo’s request, but two months later, she suffered a violent miscarriage.

  In a painting she created after her experience, Henry Ford Hospital (La cama volando), Frida lies naked on a hospital bed, the sheets soaked with blood. Objects float in the space around her, attached to her stomach by umbilical cords made of red ribbon: a male fetus (her son), medical objects, and symbols like a snail and an orchid. Detroit’s stark, manufacturing skyline disturbs the background. Regardless of her visceral distaste for Detroit and the horrible misfortune that occurred there, art historian Victor Zamudio Taylor claims it was here that “Kahlo, for the first time, consciously decides that she will paint about herself, and that she will paint the most private and painful aspects of herself.”

  For Sarah, adrift amid a sea of “God has a plan for you” banalities, the frankness of Kahlo’s art and letters served as a balm. In Kahlo she saw another Mexican woman forced to grapple with impossible choices for her child and her own body. Kahlo was able to project this pain and confusion through her work, portraying her body and her grief without shame.

  Sarah’s son died in July 2013. In November of that same year, she and her partner Ruben, who is also Mexican American, visited Mexico during Días de los Muertos. “We weren’t coming to ‘visit’ death. We weren’t tourists,” Sarah said. “We were living with death every single day.”

  Among the elaborate altars for the dead and the very public images of skulls and skeletons, Sarah found both the confrontation and the peace that she hadn’t found in California. “Being in Mexico, it felt like a place to lay down my grief. It was recognized. I wasn’t making other people uncomfortable. I could breathe.”

  Among the places they visited was Guanajuato, home to a famed collection of mummies. In the late nineteenth century, bodies buried in the local cemetery were subject to a fee, a grave tax, for “perpetual” interment. If the family couldn’t pay the fee, the bones were eventually removed to make room for a fresh body. During one such disinterment, the city was shocked to discover that they were not digging up bones but “flesh mummified in grotesque forms and facial expressions.” The soil’s chemical components, along with the atmosphere in Guanajuato, had naturally mummified the bodies.

  The city continued to unearth mummified bodies over the course of six decades, cremating the less impressive mummies and putting the truly expressive ones on display in the town museum, El Museo de las Momias.

  Author Ray Bradbury visited these mummies in the late 1970s and wrote a story about them, adding that “the experience so wounded and terrified me, I could hardly wait to flee Mexico. I had nightmares about dying and having to remain in the halls of the dead with those propped and wired bodies.”

  Because the mummies were not intentionally preserved by the hands of other humans but naturally mummified by their environment, many of them have gaping mouths and twisted arms and necks. After death, the body reverts to “primary flaccidity”—all of the muscles in the body relax, dropping the jaw open, loosening tension in the eyelids, and affording the joints extreme flexibility. In death, corpses don’t hold themselves together. They no longer have to play by the living’s rules. The visual ghastliness of the Guanajuato mummies was not designed to “terrify” Mr. Bradbury, but a result of the bodies’ normal postmortem bioprocesses.

  The mummies, still on display, did not have the same confronting effect on Sarah. She turned a dark corner and stopped in front of the mummified body of a small baby girl, dressed in white and lying on velvet. “She looked like an angel with this halo of light around her, and I swear that in that moment I felt like I could stand there forever and just look at her.�
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  Another woman noticed Sarah’s silent tears and went to get her a tissue, quietly holding her arm.

  Other child mummies in the museum had their own props, such as scepters and crowns. These were the Angelitos, or Little Angels. Prior to the mid-twentieth century in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, a dead baby or child was considered a spiritual being, almost a saint, with a direct audience with God. These Angelitos, free from sin, could offer favors for the family members they left behind.

  The godmother would prepare the body, washing and dressing it in the garb of a pint-sized saint, and surround it with candles and flowers. The mother wouldn’t see the corpse until after this process, at which point the body had relinquished the burdens of grief, transformed into a heavenly being ready to take its place by God’s right side.

  Friends and family were invited to the party, not only to honor the child but also to impress and gain its favor; remember, it now possessed great spiritual power. Sometimes the child was even carried from party to party, with other children acting as the pallbearers, with the parents and family in procession. Often the Angelito was photographed or painted amid a brilliant tableau.

  For Sarah, though she holds no belief in the saints or the afterlife, it was the recognition of the child’s death that moved her. “These children were treated as so special. Something was done just for them,” she said. There were parties and paintings and games and, most of all, tasks to perform for the child—tasks beyond the lonely, interminable silences.

  EACH YEAR, on the evening of November 1, the border between the living and the dead thins and frays, allowing the spirits to transgress. Out on the cobblestone streets of Santa Fe de la Laguna, a small city in Michoacán, old women bustled from house to house carrying pan de muerto and fresh fruit, visiting their neighbors who had lost someone that year.

  I ducked my head under an entryway draped in golden marigolds. Right above the door hung a framed picture of Jorge, who was only twenty-six years old when he died. In the photo he wore a backwards baseball cap. Behind him were posters from bands. “Slipknot? I don’t know about that, Jorge,” I thought, wondering if it was bad form to judge the dead for their taste in music. “Oh, the Misfits! That’s a good choice.”

  Through the entryway was Jorge’s three-tiered altar, or ofrenda. Each item his family and friends brought to his altar was designed to entice him home that night. Since Jorge died that year, his family erected his altar at the family home. In years to come they will move the offerings to Jorge’s grave at the cemetery. He will continue to return as long as his family continues to show up, inviting him to come back among the living.

  At the base of his altar was a black chalice of copal incense, its pungent aroma wafting into the air. Candles and marigolds adorned a three-foot-tall pile of fruits and breads. The pile would only grow as the evening went on and more members of the community stopped by to make their offerings. When Jorge returned he wouldn’t be a corpse reanimated, but a spirit, consuming the bananas and breads on his own spiritual plane.

  At the center of his altar was Jorge’s favorite white T-shirt, illustrated with a sad clown and “Joker” written in script. A bottle of Pepsi awaited his return (the appeal of which I understood—gross as it sounds, I’d come back from the dead for a Diet Coke). Further up there was more traditional Christian imagery, several Virgin Marys and a very bloody crucified Jesus. Strung from the ceiling were colorful paper cutouts of skeletons riding bikes.

  About a dozen members of Jorge’s family gathered around the ofrenda, preparing to receive visitors until late into the night. Toddlers ran underfoot wearing sparkly princess dresses, their faces painted as skeletal catrinas. They held small pumpkins for gathering candy from adults.

  Sarah had come ready with a bag full of candies. Word got out among the children, and she was swarmed with catrina-faced kids with their pumpkins, many with lit candles inside. “Señorita! Señorita, gracias!” Sarah dropped down to their level, doling out the candy with the calm, loving disposition of the elementary school teacher she had once been. “We made these same pumpkins with candles in them for Días de los Muertos in my classroom every year, but one little fire and the administration makes you stop,” she said with a wry smile.

  Santa Fe de la Laguna is home to the Purépecha, an indigenous people known for their unique pyramid architecture and their feather mosaics made from prized hummingbirds. In 1525, with a population debilitated by smallpox, and aware that the formidable Aztecs had already fallen to the Spanish, their leader pledged allegiance to Spain. Today, school in the region is taught bilingually, in both Purépecha and Spanish.

  Many of the elements that welcome the dead today—the music, the incense, the flowers, the food—were already in use among the indigenous people before the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century. At the time of the conquista, a Dominican friar wrote that the native people were happy to adopt the Catholic festivals of All Saints and All Souls because they provided the perfect fronts for their existing festivals honoring the dead.

  Attempts were made over the ensuing centuries to eradicate the practices, which were “above all, horrifying to the illustrious elite, who sought to expel death from social life.” In 1766, the Royal Office of Crime banned the indigenous population from gathering in their family cemeteries, cruelly cutting them off from their dead. But the customs, as they so often do, found a way to persist.

  Over one home in Santa Fe de la Laguna, a sign in Purépecha read, “Welcome home, Father Cornelio.” Cornelio’s altar took up an entire room. I laid my bananas and oranges atop a growing pile, while the family’s matriarchs swooped in to offer us large, steaming bowls of pozole and mugs of atole, a hot drink of corn, cinnamon, and chocolate. For the families, this night is not just a one-way acceptance of offerings for their dead; it is an exchange with the community.

  Observing the action from the corner of the room was Father Cornelio himself, in the form of a full-sized effigy. Effigy Cornelio sat on a folding chair, wearing a poncho, black high-tops, and a white cowboy hat tilted down, as if taking an afternoon snooze.

  In the center of the altar was a framed photo of Cornelio in which he wore the same white cowboy hat as his effigy. A wooden cross rose up behind the picture. Hanging from the cross were the iconic calaveras, or brightly colored sugar skulls . . . and bagels. “Sarah, is it normal to hang bagels off the altar?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “You’ll see a lot of bagels.”

  After visiting several family homes to make offerings, I asked Sarah which altar had most moved her. “The happiest time was not with the altars, it was with the children.” She gestured to a boy, three or four years old, toddling past with his pumpkin bucket, wearing a Superman cape. “It’s bittersweet. Right now, my son, he would be exactly that age.” Bashful, the little Superman held out his bucket for candy.

  WE CONTINUED our journey south to the larger town of Tzintzuntzan, which holds a raucous street festival during Días de los Muertos. Vendors cook pork and beef on large metal skillets, music blasts from speakers outside local businesses, children pop firecrackers in the streets. Up a gently sloping hill, at the edge of town, sits the local cemetery.

  Walking into the cemetery on the evening of November 1 was nothing short of revelatory. The cemetery glowed with the light of tens of thousands of candles, which the families plan and save all year to provide for their returning dead. A small boy worked diligently at his grandmother’s grave, relighting or replacing any of the hundreds of candles that had been snuffed out. The candles’ radiance mixed with the smell of marigolds and incense, creating a golden haze drifting among the graves.

  In recent years, many cities in the United States have begun holding events for Días de los Muertos, including a massive celebration at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Hollywood Forever is only minutes down the road from my funeral home in L.A., and I have attended the celebration several times. Hollywood’s celebration is impressive in scale and execution, but
in feeling and emotion it falls miles short of Tzintzuntzan’s. It felt safe inside the walls of this cemetery, like being in the center of a glowing, beating heart.

  Baskets sat atop the cement platforms of the graves, so the dead who returned would have something to carry their offerings back in. Small wood fires burned, keeping the gathered families warm. A band, made up of trombones, trumpets, drums, and a massive tuba, moved from grave to grave, playing songs that sounded, to my untrained ear, like ranchera mashups of mariachi and college fight songs.

  Sarah stopped at the grave of Marco Antonio Barriga, who died at only one year old. A picture of Marco showed a dove flying above him. His grave was a fortress, seven feet high, reflecting the size of his parents’ grief. Marco had died twenty years before, but his grave was still covered in candles and flowers, proof that the pain of losing a child never goes away.

  Before coming to Mexico, I had known that Sarah’s son had died. But I did not know the circumstances. Alone in our hotel room, she revealed the devastating truth.

  At Sarah’s first ultrasound, a chatty technician slid the wand over Sarah’s stomach and suddenly fell silent. “I’m going to bring the doctor in,” she announced.

  At the second ultrasound, the specialist was astonishingly blunt. “Ah, I see a club foot here,” she narrated, “this hand has three fingers; this hand has four. Poor development in the heart. Oh, look—he has two eyes, though! Most don’t.” And then the final kick to the gut: “I just don’t think this pregnancy is going to be viable.”

  Sarah’s baby had trisomy 13, a rare chromosomal condition that causes intellectual and physical abnormalities. Most babies born with the condition will not live beyond a few days.