Day of the Dead

By John Ballard

Our Mexican neighbors stopped putting up elaborate D�de los Muertos lawn decorations a couple years ago. It could be that in this Southern Evangelical hotspot somebody said something that made them uncomfortable. Or maybe as children get Americanized the old ways seem quaint. But I think they have lost something important. I rather miss seeing them.

This Halloween season Craword Killian reflects on his younger years in Mexico. And the memory of a threatened pandemic causes him to imagine the impact such a catastrophe could have in our country. By now most people have forgotten, lulled into a false sense of security because nobody they knew died.
Not this time, anyway. 

In Mexico, my parents, brothers and I sometimes went to the cemeteries on November 1 to witness the Day of the Dead (as it's called there). Families would picnic on their ancestors' tombs, and it was a colourful event. November 2 was the Day of the Dead Children. (I well recall many funerals where Pap�asily carried his child's little white coffin on his shoulder.)

It didn't even cross our minds that we might risk getting sick by a visit to the cemetery. We never drank the tap water, or bought food from street vendors, but mosquito bites were just routine. (In one house, I roomed with a scorpion. We were taught to bang our shoes on the floor before we put them on in the morning.)

And we learned to appreciate,if not enjoy, the Mexican intimacy with death: we went to the bullfights on Sundays, and saw the embalmed arm of a famous president, and the exhumed mummified corpses in the Guanajuato cemetery.

Given the horrendous war now going on in Mexico between the government and the narcotraficantes, the Mexican flirtation with death may be wearing thin.

But they and many other cultures probably have a healthier attitude toward death than North Americans and Europeans do. In our culture, death is something awkward and embarrassing, consigned to hospitals and hospices. When we die, it's a kind of faux pas, leaving our friends and colleagues with nothing to do but tell the bereaved how desolated we are�so the bereaved have to console us for how bad we feel.

Apart from being an attitude only a deeply protected culture can afford, our attitude will make the next major pandemic harder on us than on the Third World countries we now patronize.

We elders already understand that losing our contemporaries is the biggest hazard of long life. But even we, unlike the Haitians and Pakistanis and Indonesians, are not prepared to help bury our grandchildren.