Days of the Dead (Day 1): Halloween
What we celebrate today as Halloween has its origins in the Celtic festival of Samhain, when people lit bonfires, told ghost stories, and dressed in costumes to ward off ghosts. It was celebrated on October 31 (the day before the Celtic New Year on November 1) as the final celebration of the harvest before winter.
The term “All Hallows Eve” came about with the advent of Christianity in the typical confluence of pagan and Christian beliefs and holidays. One of the popes declared that All Saints Day would now be celebrated on November 1st and so the rituals of Samhain and All Saints fused. The night before the day commemorating Christian martyrs and all souls in heaven became known as “All Hallows Eve” and, later, Halloween.
The salient point here is that pre-Christian humanity, closely bound to nature, dedicated a day each year to not only remember their dead and let ghosts roam the earth, but also to ritualize the advent of winter: a time which would kill many living things. With the coming of Christ and the Christian idea of resurrection, this focus crystallized into a more developed theology of heaven, hell, and purgatory. In both pagan and Christian holidays, however, we see this obsession with death, and it is this obsession about which I wish to speak.
How does one cope with grief? I started this blog first, as a place to vomit my feelings, and, second, as a chronicle of my journey since losing Lizzy. So far, the answer has been that there is no coping, no healing, no answers. It’s like you live your whole life trying to find ways to ease around the enormous elephant in the room who will never move and who you are beginning to suspect may be dead himself. Death is just that–this monumental bulwark to life and to living that no one can understand, control, or undo. All we have are the meaningless scrambles around the wreckage that just keeps coming.
And, at the heart of the matter, there’s absolutely no difference between me and a mother who lived 2500 years ago, who sat staring numbly into the fire, mourning the death of her child from disease. What has changed? Everything and nothing. It’s a vaguely comforting feeling–this commonality to human experience.
As with many things nowadays, I find myself watching everything from the outside in. There is nothing in me that wants to participate in Halloween this year, plagued as I am by memories of Lizzy almost a year ago in her black cat costume and Lizzy at 7 months old, giggling in a plush strawberry costume. I put Cecilia in one of Lizzy’s Halloween outfits, which says “Cutest Pumpkin in the Patch” mostly because if I didn’t, she would never wear it, and it would be one more thing that died with Lizzy. But there will be no trick or treating, no parties, no movies, and not even a family dinner. This year, Halloween is nothing more than a day of the dead, and a day to remember that people die every day, and one day, we will die too.
When I think about the ancient origins of Halloween, I think about how humans, from the earliest times, have had an innate desire to take time and make space for their dead. We see this in even the earliest traces of human civilization: in the rough stone of Neolithic tombs. From an anthropological perspective, Halloween is fascinating because it marks a holiday that we created specifically to remember our dead and perhaps even have a chance of interacting with them. The earliest celebrations of Halloween were inextricable from the superstition that on this night, ghosts walked the earth and we had a chance of contacting them. One way or another, for good or for ill, we could either interact with or must hide from these ghosts. But, either way, people believed they were there.
What is real and what is imagination? The earliest peoples were so fascinated with death and the need to believe they could somehow see their loved ones again that they fabricated an entire day about death and celebrated it accordingly. They watched the seasons changing, saw how everything died in fall and winter and lived again in the spring and summer, and decided to mark this time of year as the celebration of death, dying, and the dead.
But still, I do not think that the bereaved mother of 2500 years ago found that Samhain eased her grief or gave her answers anymore than I feel that Halloween does for me.
An important point here is that Lizzy is not and never will be a ghost to me. I’m caught in a strict dichotomy where either there’s nothing after death and therefore all that was Lizzy is gone forever or there is the heaven of my faith, and she is there in radiant glory with Our Lady and the Trinity, waiting for me and Cece to join her. There is no in between. Not for Lizzy. The thought of the color gray, the insubstantial wisps of something indicating–but not quite–being, the sense of cold, the proximity to night and the dark–all those things which are ghostly, are just not Lizzy. She is, in fact, the sheer opposite of them. I will never fear or think that she is a ghost. And this is, in part, why I have not sought out mediums or any professing to speak to the dead. It is simply not where Lizzy is or where I will attempt to contact her.
And so I’m back to where Halloween turns out to be nothing more than an intellectual exercise for me. It may be a day where I am missing Lizzy more than normal or wondering what she would have dressed up as this year, but it is not a day where I feel I can talk to her anymore than usual. Turns out, it’s just one more day to tick off the clock, counting down the days until I can see her again. Because, for better or worse, I’m not in a place where I believe in some sort of rampant in-between world, waiting to be unleashed. Oh no, I am very sure that if Lizzy is waiting for me, then I need to die in order to get to her. And so today turns out to be nothing more that what every day is: an opportunity to make myself worthy of her, so that when it’s my turn to die, I have a chance of going to where she is.
