on not forgetting our dead

grief & ancestral work this Day of the Dead

It’s going to be three years since I lost him. I learned to love him deeply in life, through a brutal illness and am learning to love in loss. I don’t know what I would’ve done if I didn’t search deeper within when he died. If I didn’t lean into the tender voices of his sisters, my tia Lepes, gently nudging me to open up to the ancestral work we come from that my faith upbringing demonizes and erases. Traditional mexican women rooted in their indigineity whispered and I listened. It was the Divine in them speaking to comfort my affliction and I responded paying no mind to the weak doctrines I grew up with or scared preachers yelling in street corners. The greatest irony in hearing about “lost souls” they speak of is not realizing just how much everybody is lost on this one thing called grief regardless who you are. How disconnected, disembodied, spiritually emaciated we all are when it comes to journeying with our grief, from not mourning openly or commemorating our dead, from seeing Rituals of remembrance, sacred altars, heirlooms as something odd and strange when we come from a lineage, a history of people who lived in such a way as normal as it was to breathe. People who lived fully and loved vastly that it didn’t end on this side of eternity.

We’ve truly lost our way desensitized and aloof af.

So much that even when grief pours out on the streets by protest of the oppressed, angry and disempowered—this is seen as indecent and wrong behavior. So much that the mother wailing after losing her Black child at the hands of police brutality, or a child crying from having their parent ripped from their arms by another violent ICE kidnapping, or a near death beating of a trans sibling for existing in their full holy selves is seen as simply another headline. We’re missing the point. Missing in comprehending the sanctity of life, the sacredness held in our bones, and in those who transition and still have so much to say and teach us.

No well wish, offered prayer, or “they’re in a better place” can provide relief for the life shattering, existential and traumatic experience of losing a loved one. Not the colonial frameworks we’ve been dealt with or the superficial world we live in where everybody falls prey to not dealing and facing grief.

The pain, the sense of losing our footing and direction, feeling completely lost after La Muerte comes and takes—ushers for desahogo, for ritual, for us to dive deep, plot down and take root. We listen to the wisdom of our indigenous elders, to the stories untold hidden in the quiet. Softy they hum it’s not over. Our love, our memory, and connection with them has not died. Ritual keeps and preserves us and them. Our dead are very much alive and active in our lives offering protection, guidance, strength, care in this janky world because Lord (and they) know we need it.

What was it like to be in that last dream you didn’t want to end? When did that one song play when you least expected it? Yes that one where you heard their voice sing, laugh and speak. The hummingbird, the butterfly, the skies, the smell that comes every now and then bringing you back to them….

Rituals heal me over a belief system that told me to forget my dead. The ancestors that my upbringing calls demonic and say to leave alone and not engage (this is hella anti-indigenous btw), have kept me in one piece with the Holy Ghost.

I’m getting ready to go deeper in this ancestral work I started with papi almost three years ago when he left. We’d always say we’d go more down into Mexico beyond Baja but this time it’s going to look different. Cempasúchil, indigenous warmth, pan de muerte, a latina solo travelers group, and printed photographs of him, papi viejo, abuelos, and Jessie are tucked in my backpack on this Volaris flight. I just know I’m going to be a wreck. I’ve already been but I also know Papi is waiting and I’ve never felt more ready.

For my loved ones in memory, heartache and loss….