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DIA DE LOS MUERTOS: LESSONS FROM DEATH

A Sermon by the Rev. Susan Manker-Seale
November 2, 2003

Death is not the easiest topic to talk about, which is one reason why I like our having adopted the yearly ritual of Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. When we first celebrated it six or seven years ago, someone came up to me afterwards and said that that was the first time they had been invited to say their loved one’s name in any kind of ritual or worship situation since her death. It was very freeing and relieving to them. And healing.

Different cultures have created different responses to death, from the deep mourning of funerals to the celebration of wakes, from rituals and behaviors that protect one from the spirits of the dead, such as in the Navajo tradition, to those that invite the spirits to visit and stay a while, such as in the Aztec/Catholic tradition of Dia de los Muertos.

Religions probably evolved to help us make sense of death in the context of the meaning of life. Our inheritance from major world religions includes teachings about what comes after death, such as Heaven or reincarnation or resurrection. Humanity strives to overcome what we don’t understand and has spent millennia on contemplating death and resisting the ending that death presents to us who are seemingly without end, until the end.

The presence of Death certainly raises existential questions: How did we get here? What is the meaning of our existence? Where were we before birth and what happens to our sense of self after we die? Is this all there is? The illusion, of course, is that Death is not constantly present. When someone close to us dies, we are reminded of the harshness and finality of death, but death has always been with us, is always walking alongside our steps.

I call them “close encounters,” those times when we brush with death, as the saying goes. Once I started thinking about it, I realized there were many, many times I almost died. I guess, when others have realized that for themselves, they came up with the concept of guardian angels, like the “Family Circle” cartoon, where the little boy climbs all over the house and yard and the guardian angel saves his life about fifteen times in one cartoon frame alone.

For me it was having German Measles at the age of two; at around ten or eleven, swimming through the huge waves leftover from the hurricane in Galveston, and not being able to reach the surface until the last second when my lungs burst; at fifteen, stepping across a one lane street in Malaga, and out of it right before a speeding red car blew by my ankle; hiking the Hermit trail at night in the Grand Canyon at sixteen, lost, unable to see the trail in the darkness and waking up in the morning to find ourselves on the edge of an endless cliff we had not seen; breaking up with a college boyfriend and driving drunk and crying and not caring if I crashed; rock-climbing and spelunking and white-water canoeing in college in my dangerous, daring years; and many years later, with Curtiss and my children flying south of Puerto Vallarta in a thunderstorm and feeling the plane fall beneath us, and then again, before catching the wind once more over the mountains. That’s not all, and there’s no way to contemplate the times I was blissfully unaware of close encounters.

When I think about it, I’m amazed anyone survives as long as we do! My brother, Wendell, was not so lucky. He died at sixteen from a scuba accident; probably his air tank stopped working properly, but it was terrible for our family, and my first encounter with the deeply personal rift such a death creates. When I was very young, I remember my mother crying hysterically, and being told that my grandparents had been killed in a car accident, but I had not identified with them in the close way I did with my brother. I have wondered over the years whether it isn’t the intense identity bonds we create with some people that make their deaths almost unbearable. It’s more than love; it’s that they become part of us, and their deaths are our deaths, too.

The first lesson I learned from Death is the finality of loss, that nothing can change things back. The world is turned upside down from one second to the other, especially when death comes as a surprise or tragedy. We know life is change, that all things change and are changing all the time, but death is an ultimate change of the loss of boundaries when people have died by whom we had measured our lives.

That second, from the one to the next, is the greatest lesson of Death: all life is lived in seconds. Until one is truly dead, there is no second that does not hold the fullness of life. Each second holds the infinite possibilities of life and the eternal wonder of life, and therefore, it is precious and to be cherished - an existential gift, continuous and ever-changing. I know that I can cherish the one second of life, and then again, and again, and in time, the measure of my life will change as well, creating new boundaries of self and the ability to love what is lost without so much pain.

Mindfulness, then, is a way to get through the pain of another’s death; it is a way to go through life as well. As the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh writes in Peace is Every Step, “…happiness is possible only in the present moment.” (p. 6) By focusing on what is present before us, around us, within us, we can be appreciative of life in the face of death, another’s or our own, and try to accept what is.

Celebrating life is what I appreciate most of the Dia de los Muertos tradition. I love the fun people poke at Death. In spite of the awareness of Death’s ability to cause pain and suffering, people draw caricatures of Death, make sugar skulls, have a picnic on the gravesite, and feel love for those who have died, taking care to make a beautiful altar, cook delicious foods, and be with friends and family, cherishing life and love. Do the spirits really come visit? They do if people think they do, and if Cicero was right back in 60 B.C.E., when he said, “The life of the dead consists in being present in the minds of the living.” (The Treasury of Religious and Spiritual Quotations, p. 122) Dia de los Muertos is one holiday which brings to our minds in a cherished way those loved ones who have died, giving them life if but for a day or two, though we carry them also in memory throughout the rest of our lives. And Dia de los Muertos is a time when we can reflect on the lessons Death has taught each of us, over and over, for we know Death is ever-present in the always-changing nature that is the miracle of life.