377 days - Blog #95 secrets of the dead

So here we are.  Halloween.  I think of it more as the eve of November craziness… but for a few moments in between making baked beans and lasagna and a handful of no trick or treaters and getting my house ready for tomorrow… here’s some honest to goodness reflection on what the day is to me.

I lost my taste for Halloween two years ago.  At that point I was still very much grieving the death of my grandmother.  Anything that turned death into entertainment… well, wasn’t very entertaining.  I have yet to find it again.  Not that I was ever a really huge fan.  Which is odd, you might think, for someone who wrote a vampire novel.

Actually, maybe that changed it for me as well.  Creating that world and its macabre (though it really isn’t macabre as most paranormal gothic romances) required a lot of thinking about death and what comes after.  And loss.  And grief.  And healing.  Acceptance.

Maybe.  I don’t know.  Mostly it’s the former reason.  Death and loss is too real for me now.

But if Halloween is your thing, great.  Embrace it.  Love it.  Zombie or monster or bloody or corpse it up.  I think I’ll enjoy this evening home and think about the dead in my own way.

Because isn’t that what today is supposed to be?  When the veil between living and dead is thinnest?  The turning point from the fall connected to summer towards the fall connected to winter and all the cold and dark and rot that comes with it?  But in that mythos… a chance, a hope, an opportunity to reach out a hand and let it touch someone who is gone from this earth?  A hello from someone we miss or a spirit guide to give that hand a squeeze and say, yes, this is the right path.  Keep going.  Keep living.  Because life is where you are.  Not death.

I think of those dead a lot anyway.  My ancestors.  Ancestors I know through conversations with my grandmother, but mostly through the conclusions I’ve drawn from photographs and scouring the internet for census data.  Are they familiars because we share blood and a genetic code?  Because even in the shadows of those black and white photos, I see my bone structure or the gaze of a cousin or that gray hair I just spent a lot of money tonight to cover up.  

Or are they strangers?  Would they pick me out of a crowd?  What would they think of me?  A childless woman somehow managing to pay for her life on her own, with strong opinions and a fondness for cooking and writing and theater.  

There is a black album I have amongst the photos from my grandmother’s house.  It is an incomplete scrapbook – something to which I relate very much.  There are some scraps of paper from my grandmother that indicate that it is from her mother’s family.  The Conroys who lived in a big farmhouse in North Brookfield – the street was even named after them.  But there are pictures of people I don’t know at all.  Camping.  Going to some amusement park.  Weddings.  Happy times worth remembering in a scrapbook.

Does anyone else remember them now except me?  Is it not strange to contemplate in this world of the internet and the proliferation of photos across social media that the memory of one’s existence could be locked in one incomplete scrapbook that I open once, maybe twice a year? 

Where are they?  Some are dust in the St. Joseph’s Cemetery.  Their bones and the smiles and the eyes that radiate in those photos.  But what of the other… is it somewhere near that veil tonight?  Or has it moved on as the century has passed?

Are they here?  Do I really want to know if they are?  Do I really want to know if they are not?

I feel like something is really lost in the tradition (and it really is so cute to see little kids dressed up in costumes, even if it actually says more about the parents than the kids) of Halloween today.  There is a disconnect from the ancestral practice of connecting with our predecessors.  The ones who came before us.  Who carved the path so my generation could go to college… or not go to college.  To vote.  To have the decision to marry or not marry.  To work an 8 hour day.  To be able to say cooking is a hobby and not a mandatory daily obligation.  Who crossed an ocean to flee a potato blight.  Or polygamy.  (I really would like to if that is the reason my surname is Olson).   Or why one of them beat his wife but had a happy family in another state years later.  Are those my secrets to know?  Or are those the monsters that lie buried in their graves?

But mostly there were those happy moments.  The moments of friendship captured with a camera when it was an effort to capture something with a camera.  And before those images, I’m sure there were many more told through words.  Words that were forgotten in the crossing of an ocean.  But faces that had my chin and rosy cheeks and hair that may gray but can hold a fabulous curl.  

Maybe they are only dust now.  But something of them still pulses in me.