Our Day of the Dead
By Gene Aronowitz
Growing up in a Jewish Family, I was familiar with the Jewish rituals designed to honor the dead. The word shiva, as in sitting shiva, means “seven,” and this practice includes seven days of communal mourning designed to facilitate emotional healing after the funeral. On the anniversary of a loved one's passing, many mourners light a 24-hour candle. On the afternoon of the holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur, there is a public communal memorial service during which the names of all those being remembered are read. Although not an observant Jew, I have always tried to observe the spirit of those practices.
For over thirty years, ending in 2018, my wife, Linda, and I lived in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, which was then over 40% Hispanic, many of whom were Mexican Americans. During late October and early November, local bakeries were stocked with pan de Muerto, or bread of the dead, and with cakes, cookies, and rolls similarly decorated with the likenesses of skeletal skulls. Customers consumed these delicacies during Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, celebrated on November 1 and 2 each year. Their joyous observances are typically structured like family reunions, during which the departed people are presumed to be the guests of honor. Although neither Linda nor I is of Mexican heritage, we decided to use the Day of the Dead celebration as a model for our own remembrances. We decorated part of our 3-story Brooklyn brownstone townhouse with vases and garlands of marigolds from our garden and enjoyed the Day of the Dead bread and pastries. Then, in 2010, we decided to celebrate the lives of more relatives and light a candle for each of them.
It was easy for me to expand the list of our honorees.I was the family genealogist. Many of the people on the family trees were distant relatives with whom neither Linda nor I had personal relationships. However, we were able to identify 50 relatives that one or both of us knew personally and meaningfully. I printed a list of those individuals for our 2010 observance.
In the hallway on the third floor of our Brooklyn brownstone, we had a large marble-topped rectangular table built by Linda’s great-uncle, who had died 26 years before. We thought the table could serve as a suitable altar because it was large enough to hold the 50 clear glass votive candles we bought, one for each of the 50 people on our remembrance list. Each candle was designed to burn for 10 hours. As each was lit, I recited one of the names off the list, and we talked about our relationships with each relative. This process took almost an hour.
When the ceremony ended, we went down to our ground floor, but would check on our conflagration from time to time to assure ourselves that our home was not in danger of burning down. The last time we went up, about two hours after we lit the candles, we could hardly breathe;50 candles can consume a lot of oxygen. All the windows and doors in the house had been closed because of the near-freezing temperature on that November day. We opened them slightly and blew out all the candles. This eliminated the specter of the whole house becoming as asphyxiating as the third floor had become, conceivably suffocating us as we slept, prematurely having us join the ranks of those whom we were honoring.