17. Death and Traditions… or Traditional Death, a Point of View from the Living

Welcome to musing interruptus. Thank you for clicking, thank you for listening. Today it is a celebration of life after death. The afterlife on Earth… It’s just a party, but parties are fundamental celebrations of milestones, and today, it’s not just for the living. Saying goodbye can be sad. Some stories will haunt you, even if they are not your own. A friend that held her husband’s hand in his final hours, the words she whispered. The woman that took care of her ailing husband after a lifetime that had led them down separate paths. The children who sat vigil of their father’s final hours. The parents who survived a child. The grandchildren who learn about the soul-searing loss on a Sunday morning from a parent. Most of the stories are love stories. That is the ingredient which gives saying goodbye a big dose of hurt. Ego and attachment are another, but I won’t get into those. Not today. Today is about the other side of goodbye after the mourning clothes have been put away. Afterlife happens on different planes. The belongings of our departed hold energy, either because we bestow them with energy or because our loved one did. Whatever your belief, decisions on what happens to those things can be a mire. Whoever deals with it is probably the person who most needs to. Sitting with loss, processing it over and over until the rooms our loved ones once inhabited are empty. However empty you think you have left a place, there are memories of life that remain. That cannot be packed up and shipped off to the Good Will or auctioned at Sotheby's. Once the rooms have been cleaned and you walk away, the echo continues within. Some utterances unintentionally on a loop, some phrases that become their legacy. At first it can be overwhelming. As time passes, and part of their energy remains present, the living might find ways to honor that energy. There isn’t a physical place, most times of the year. Some visit graveyards, niches in a church, special places, where mourning is welcome. In Mexican culture, we are taught that respect for our dead can manifest as a celebration of their lives through memory and physically creating a spread of what our loved ones most enjoyed. An altar to their life and memory. We prepare the path for them to come back, once a year, we sit with their memory and energy more openly. Drinking and eating their favorites, listening to the music, maybe saying a prayer, or just talking. It’s ok to cry and laugh, to sing and let oneself sit with their loved ones because they have permission to be there, on November 1st and 2nd. You see, we say goodbye to the physical body, to what hugs and kisses felt like, to their breath and smile. The rest of the person is invited to stay and roam or just stop for a visit. Sometimes even intercede. Who's to say? In the US we have Halloween, a Celt tradition that would also welcome their dead back, in time to celebrate the harvest of the year and prepare for the roughness winter had in store. Survival included communion with the energy of their loved ones. A combination of both types of sustenance for the cold season to come. The harvest and the spirits of their departed. Presently, a different type of celebration has evolved. It's more the practice of camouflage, to trick the spirits who might want to pull the living to the afterlife, ahead of time. It's a matter of survival. As we know, not all spirits act on their best behavior, just like when they were human. Dying does not make your energy better, so you’d better do that in your lifetime. A good costume is required after 8:00 pm on October 31st, to make sure you can pass undetected among the spirits that come back to play on All Hallow’s Eve. The Catholic religious tradition starts on the evening of the 31st and culminates on November 2nd. If you ask me what I like or celebrate. I do both. They are both part of my spiritual life. They both help me feel close to my friends