A more hallowed Halloween

I have quite a few friends who revel in Halloween.  The macabre and the gothic and the otherworldliness of it are features I have seen celebrated with much relish.  I have relished participation in some of those celebrations over the years.  I think – more than anything – the theatrical part of me enjoys the opportunity to put on a costume.  (If it affords an opportunity to be clever like wearing my Higgins dress with a bloody bandage around my neck and declaring myself Ann Boleyn or an empire dress with bits of dried oatmeal in my hair to be Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, so much the better.)  But… really… I am kind of not interested in Halloween.  In the last few years I have even found it tedious with the over the top inflated balloons on the lawn and the increasingly grotesque personification of monsters and innards pouring out of one’s body in the form of latex. 

I know the turning point for me was three years ago when Halloween ended the month when I experienced one of the hardest hitting deaths of my life thus far – that of my grandmother.  It came quickly on the heels of a friend, whose life was taken far too quickly by breast cancer.  Death stopped being an amusing costume and decoration for me that year.  And pretty much every year since.

I don’t use that perspective to pass judgment or criticize those who like Halloween.  I just choose not to participate with much enthusiasm.  I’ll show up at a Halloween party because I like my friends.  Maybe I’ll wear a costume, but only if I have time to think about it… which I probably won’t… because when I think of this day, I think of other things.

I’ve spent a lot of focus in the last several months on Ireland, Irish history, Irish American history and culture and the world of the Sidhe.  The Sidhe, if you hadn’t paid attention to any of my previous mention of them here, were or are a fairy race from Ancient Ireland.  Or maybe they aren’t fairies.  They could be gods forgotten by mankind.  Or … the dead.

I’ve been constructing my own world of the Sidhe… which if they exist (as a proliferation of flies on one July afternoon made me wonder) I hope will not offend them.  And if not, I am not entirely decided if they are the fae or the dead.  They are somewhere between the living and the not living on this earth, and today (Halloween) is the day when that delineation is less obvious.

I actually intended to spend more of this day in that world writing out some scenes of one of my manuscripts.  But being the Saturday after a VERY long week the day passed in a very otherworldly sense of time.  

I opted to hide from the possibility of trick or treaters with no candy in my house that I could have left over and decided to go visit my parents, whom I saw little over the course of my recent production weekends.  What was meant to be a relatively short dinner so I could get home and work on that writing turned into a discussion of some of my research and the notion that today is a day to honor the dead.  Specifically our ancestors.

Some of my contemplation of Irish immigration to Central Massachusetts has led me to the rabbit hole of internet genealogy.  I’ve pursued the Irish… and the French Canadians… and the Swedes almost to the point that I have to pay extra on ancestry.com for international access.  But, as some of my understanding of the Irish culture in 19^th century Worcester Country increases, so does my fascination with those ancestors who came from or were immediate progeny of those immigrants.  Especially when I consider they aren’t that far removed.  
 

So I started filling my mother in on these details of our people and the surnames that were lost with marriages.  Like, we have a Murphy in our lineage.  Lots of Marys.  An Elizabeth who was called (even in a census) Fanny.  I was telling her about the streets where they lived in Main South and the uncertain timelines between marriage date and the age of the first born.  Names of great uncles that may or may not be easy to remember.  That was the point at which I grabbed her laptop and logged onto the family tree.  We looked up the census records and then through Google maps found the house where my great grandmother moved back in with her parents after her husband turned out to be a total douchebag.  Or the fact that my grandmother was a young child one street over from the street where I used to visit a friend for his Oscar and Christmas parties before he moved to Florida.  Indeed, I think our family settled on a fair number of streets in Main South in the first part of the 20^th century.  

Two weeks ago (in an abbreviated burst of time before a Sunday matinee), a few of us gathered at Livia’s on Main Street to celebrate the many aunts who have birthdays in October and November.  The restaurant is across the street from the three decker where my grandparents lived until the birth of their sixth baby. (Three bedrooms, one bathroom with four adults and six children.)  The buzz of the restaurant was quick (and delicious).  Our conversation was a blurred catch up of lives separated with the ordinary business of our lives… but I wonder if I had the chance to take a pause, would I have felt the presence of our ancestors who lived there?  My great-grandmother, a force with whom to be reckoned I’ve been told – but who lived a few streets away from there in 1920 with a 3 ½ year old and as they recorded it an 8/12 year old who was my grandfather?  With the man who would subsequently impregnate a teenager and then disappear to New York to start a new family?

Maybe all these details are minutiae to you.  But these are all the things I contemplate as the hour nears midnight on the day when the veil between the living and the dead is thinnest.  I have a fire in the wood stove and a candle lit on the coffee table.  Are they here with me?

And more importantly… I contemplate on this day… do I serve the lives they lived that made mine better?  So that I did not have to grow up in Main South, but in a four bedroom house with three bathrooms surrounded by trees and a large lawn?  So I could go to college and have a career in museums and art?  So that I could live a life without being obligated into a marriage to preserve the reputation of my character?  So that I could spend an evening with my mother sharing wonder and sentiment and delight in the discovery of the lives unknown that came before us… but made us possible.

So no, it’s not as simply or mindlessly fun as zombies and blood and guts.  But it is something to think about the blood that courses through my veins and the way it connects to those just on the other side of the veil peering through on this day.