Día de Muertos, Day with the Living
Letters are evidence, memories are not. I struggled to make a suitable ofrenda for the dead family I want to remember—my dad’s dad, my mom’s mom, and my mom’s sister. I have no photos to put up, so I scrounged bits of evidence: a portrait of my grandfather my friend Lin drew, the prayer card from my aunt’s funeral, and the heart-shaped necklace containing my grandmother’s ashes. I also struggled in deciding what to ‘serve’ them. I have so little memories to go off of, to remember simple things like what they loved to eat and drink, so I instead just used battery-powered candles and prayed extra hard. I really tried to ‘feel’ Día de Muertos this year, but my attempted reflections of those lost turned into something different. The dead are final, yet there are very real ghosts of possibilities that haunt me every day. I see them as transparent others, if dance step diagrams where whole people, side-stepping, twirling, eluding my vision at the last moment. These are the apparitions of people who are still alive but could’ve very well died at certain points of their lives by choice, people lost from years of familial estrangement, people I don’t remember anymore, memories I’ve co-opted from others to cope. Hell, I’ll dance with all of them. Maybe I use fake candles on my ofrenda for all the fake almost deaths and fake possibilities and fake nostalgia I’ve been privy to, the real grief I experience on the daily for all of us who have stuck around for a little while longer.
I wrote a letter today for the first time in years. Just like photos, letters are evidence. Letters are proof of someone’s existence. If I write a letter to you, I want to prove to you that I exist, that I survived to exist on this timeline with you. Put this letter in a box with my other letters, and come back to me when you’ve had some time. Place a letter from me up on your ofrenda and put the pictures up on the walls instead. Put so many photos of me around your house that your guests can’t help but ask, who is this? And you remember. And they learn.
There were so many photos on the walls, kitchen cabinets, refrigerators, mirrors, and backsplashes of my aunt’s house. I’d come in with a game plan to look through as many photo albums as possible to make up for the 15 years of estrangement, but the whole house was a photo album, evidence of myself. Each room was a page that I carefully turned after looking at the young-ish faces of my mom, her sisters, and my mom’s sister’s kids. I walked the house like a museum, hands behind my back, maybe emitting the occasional “I see” or “Interesting choice.” This house hasn’t had this many people in it in years, everyone kept saying. No one knew what to do with it, least of all the house.
I struggle to explain the particular beauty of experiencing extended family for the first time. I can’t turn this newfound discovery of people really invested in getting to know you and being better for the sake of each other into a digestible metaphor. How can I best relay the awkwardness that turns into tangible tingly giddiness of realizing connection, that is realized in tandem with the twinge of grief for those same years lost, losing yourself in conversation with more and more family members, coming back up for air only to see you’re all simply enjoying one another’s company? I don’t know what to do with all of this heaviness, levity, newness, and nostalgia besides write about it, as if to say, here is proof of it all. Here is the evidence. I exist.