“We fool ourselves, labeling only the unwell as terminal, for we each carry an inevitable expiration date. In Western culture, particularly in America, Death is presented as a terminus or a failing of medicine, technology, or fortitude when it is, in fact, a threshold: the grave, like the living body, is a fertile place." |
What will become of the images of the dead that you hold within your eyes? How will you leave those behind?
—Elias Canetti
—Elias Canetti
Vincent Van Gogh, Head of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette (1886)
En la muerte veo el rostro de mi madre. In Death, I see my mother’s face.
She grins broadly from a gaudy shop window in central Mérida: high, bone-white zygomatic arches, pearlescent sheen of sharp incisors.
Today is Día de Muertos, day of the dead. Her chalky visage and sunken black eyes are painted on garlanded women and girls whose skeletons jostle me in the crowded, narrow streets of the centro histórico. Around us, acrid smoke and raucous cheering meet contrapuntal blares of atonal threnodies. Torches flare with the orange of bobble-headed marigolds on the candlelit altars overflowing with fruit candy and chocolate, cheap bourbon and mescal, and sugary, air-puffed pan de muerta.
Awestruck, I move to join the miles-long Paseo de las Ánimas parade and immediately trip on uneven, broken pavement.
When I was sixteen, my mother became Death—or, Death became my mother. It was confusing. One devoured the other, or one inhabited the other, or one switched places with the other such that the two merged into a living dead chimera.
Her oncologist explained that the metastasized cancer was inoperable: It’s like someone spilled a pepper shaker onto your mother’s brain.
Though I tried, I couldn’t separate her into parts. Breast, brain, cancer, mother, Death: which was which? To embrace one meant holding the other, to excise one meant killing the other. Just before Christmas, they bedded down together in a shared grave.
For years, I prayed my mother would return to me, but she never did. Not in dreams or dark alleys or the trance state of drunkenness I invoked from my teens through my thirties. Not when I fiddled with Ouija boards or held séances on Halloween. I lit candles on her yahrzeit, hoping her ghost would flicker onto this earthly plane for a wisp of an instant, and…nothing.
It is embarrassing to admit this. I am no witch, no curandera. (Which is more cringeworthy: trying—or failing, again and again?)
Borges said that Death makes us precious and pathetic. “There is no face that is not on the verge of blurring and fading away like the faces in a dream.” We grasp ravenously for beloveds we cannot possess, which explains why I follow Death into this bacchanalian festival …boom…boom…boom… its mask the last coherent face my mother wore.
At home, her human face stares out from my studio shelves swathed in saints’ cards and amulets, bones and feathers and found occult memoria. In Mérida, the cemetery’s decorated graves, festooned with candles, photographs, and ofrendas, reveal that my shelves are a family altar: I attempt to commune with my mother, the hooly blisful martir, every day.
In distancing us from those we desire, Death is a source of the erotic. An innate cellular ache to close the space between bodies, it sets us on hopeless, romantic crusades—like this one.
Here, in the Yucatan, thirty-five years on, I seek my mother in the effigy of La Calavera Catrina, the bride of Death, the Dapper Skull. Her bald cranium topped with an outrageous wide-brimmed hat, La Catrina is dressed to the nines and dead sexy: She is that which can be imagined, even flirted with, but never possessed.
La Catrina reveals me as a jealous lover, having transferred my passion for my mother into an obsession with her possessor: the one she chose to spend eternity with. “Eroticism is the brink of the abyss,” Bataille writes. “From this comes a questioning of everything possible. This is the stage of rupture, of letting go of things, of looking forward to death.”
Is it happenstance that the December I turned forty-five, the age she died, was the last time I had sex? Death bed for bed death?
“Every once in a while,” Joy Williams writes, “news of Death’s particular methods and attention to detail seizes our attention like the cougar does the clueless rabbit, and we suffer some serious confusion and fright.”
That December, my dumb bunny heart began scampering at random—a flush of deregulating hormones, a harbinger of menopause—a sign my body has accepted its unwinding to a future end.
We fool ourselves, labeling only the unwell as terminal, for we each carry an inevitable expiration date. In Western culture, particularly in America, Death is presented as a terminus or a failing of medicine, technology, or fortitude when it is, in fact, a threshold: the grave, like the living body, is a fertile place.
It’s nearly midnight, the carnal air sugar-sick and half-spent. The crowd’s energy shimmers between exuberant and exhausted, frisson and orgasm. I turn back to the shop window to find La Catrina’s features have changed. Now, she wears bangs and a pageboy.
The estocada lands, hard: This journey has not been about grieving my mother or filling the voracious black hole that her absence spiraled into my life. The grinning skull isn’t hers; it’s mine.
Did my mother look forward to Death, in the end? Will I? How did it feel, with Death’s grisly bits wriggling around in her brain? What’s possible in the time remaining: rupture or rapture? Will it come as a surprise? Will I stand with presence at the edge of the abyss? Is it already too late?
Heaps of charred, clean-picked bones of the poor and relationless lay unclaimed and untouched in Mérida’s Cemetario General. In them, I see my own.
The frankness about death here—the absence of artifice—sets me at ease. Ruddy animal carcasses hang from hooks in the market, flensed of skin yet retaining heads, limbs, and feet. In the bathroom, one flushes only the biological products of waste. Bins next to the toilets bloom with the shit and blood and urine and toilet paper we tastefully hide and deny the existence of in the United States.
Five years ago, a surgeon stopped my husband’s heart; he died on a cold, well-lit table. That evening, someone resembling him returned to me, his heart bypassed five times. Two years later, an infection, a vegetation—endocarditis—grew in the grafted bovine valve and nearly killed him again.
Death has inhabited his body three times, beginning with a heart attack at age forty-six, an echo of the widowmaker that claimed his father at the same age. It’s difficult to say which is which: my husband and his father, me and my mother, Death and Death and Death and Death?
To cure my husband, I delivered infusions of antibiotics into his heart through a PICC line for six weeks. I became Isis, Queen of the Dead, who re-membered the parts of her mate she could find—all, that is, save the missing piece.
From above, the Yucatan peninsula glows liquid gold from millions of shimmering candles melting to puddled white wax on crumbling stone. The parade’s incandescent firelight trickles through the alleys and avenues like numinous blood channeled through a watershed of aortic veins--
—or, that’s what I imagine. Only the Moon knows.
In Mérida, the veil between worlds has, at last, thinned enough for me to intercourse with Death directly. Te ruego, La Calavera Catrina, por favor… Please, I entreat the Dapper Skull, hear my greedy prayer for more time.
Tranquila, she says. Mira aquí. The boundary between earth and flesh and other is erected for rather a short interval, really.
Sans desire, the universe will collapse in on itself. Love is, paradoxically, renewed by the tensions of space and distance: the ill-fated gap, the star-spilled night, the dark, empyrean shore whose crashing waves fracture the space-time between us. Uncured yearning makes possible a brief intimacy with the ideal. “To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful,” Anne Carson writes, “a suspended moment of living hope.”
The luxury of the well-loved child is the belief—the myth—that Death is about what’s wrested from her, not what she herself will lose: the mortal crumblings and existential chaos that she, like everyone else, must scout safe passage through day by day. Then the crusty scales fall from her eyes. It’s a surprise and a mystery to re-envision one’s ends as means—to consider each day a first rather than a last, to begin again (and again) from the middle rather than the start, whose unblemished freshness is long lost to the past—to resist borrowing fear and worry against an unarrived future whose imagined suffering forecloses the pleasures of the present.
The poet Naomi Shihab Nye says there’s a way not to be broken that takes brokenness to find it. I tread that pilgrim’s path faithfully forward, trusting that, one day, I will meet the horizon.
She grins broadly from a gaudy shop window in central Mérida: high, bone-white zygomatic arches, pearlescent sheen of sharp incisors.
Today is Día de Muertos, day of the dead. Her chalky visage and sunken black eyes are painted on garlanded women and girls whose skeletons jostle me in the crowded, narrow streets of the centro histórico. Around us, acrid smoke and raucous cheering meet contrapuntal blares of atonal threnodies. Torches flare with the orange of bobble-headed marigolds on the candlelit altars overflowing with fruit candy and chocolate, cheap bourbon and mescal, and sugary, air-puffed pan de muerta.
Awestruck, I move to join the miles-long Paseo de las Ánimas parade and immediately trip on uneven, broken pavement.
When I was sixteen, my mother became Death—or, Death became my mother. It was confusing. One devoured the other, or one inhabited the other, or one switched places with the other such that the two merged into a living dead chimera.
Her oncologist explained that the metastasized cancer was inoperable: It’s like someone spilled a pepper shaker onto your mother’s brain.
Though I tried, I couldn’t separate her into parts. Breast, brain, cancer, mother, Death: which was which? To embrace one meant holding the other, to excise one meant killing the other. Just before Christmas, they bedded down together in a shared grave.
For years, I prayed my mother would return to me, but she never did. Not in dreams or dark alleys or the trance state of drunkenness I invoked from my teens through my thirties. Not when I fiddled with Ouija boards or held séances on Halloween. I lit candles on her yahrzeit, hoping her ghost would flicker onto this earthly plane for a wisp of an instant, and…nothing.
It is embarrassing to admit this. I am no witch, no curandera. (Which is more cringeworthy: trying—or failing, again and again?)
Borges said that Death makes us precious and pathetic. “There is no face that is not on the verge of blurring and fading away like the faces in a dream.” We grasp ravenously for beloveds we cannot possess, which explains why I follow Death into this bacchanalian festival …boom…boom…boom… its mask the last coherent face my mother wore.
At home, her human face stares out from my studio shelves swathed in saints’ cards and amulets, bones and feathers and found occult memoria. In Mérida, the cemetery’s decorated graves, festooned with candles, photographs, and ofrendas, reveal that my shelves are a family altar: I attempt to commune with my mother, the hooly blisful martir, every day.
In distancing us from those we desire, Death is a source of the erotic. An innate cellular ache to close the space between bodies, it sets us on hopeless, romantic crusades—like this one.
Here, in the Yucatan, thirty-five years on, I seek my mother in the effigy of La Calavera Catrina, the bride of Death, the Dapper Skull. Her bald cranium topped with an outrageous wide-brimmed hat, La Catrina is dressed to the nines and dead sexy: She is that which can be imagined, even flirted with, but never possessed.
La Catrina reveals me as a jealous lover, having transferred my passion for my mother into an obsession with her possessor: the one she chose to spend eternity with. “Eroticism is the brink of the abyss,” Bataille writes. “From this comes a questioning of everything possible. This is the stage of rupture, of letting go of things, of looking forward to death.”
Is it happenstance that the December I turned forty-five, the age she died, was the last time I had sex? Death bed for bed death?
“Every once in a while,” Joy Williams writes, “news of Death’s particular methods and attention to detail seizes our attention like the cougar does the clueless rabbit, and we suffer some serious confusion and fright.”
That December, my dumb bunny heart began scampering at random—a flush of deregulating hormones, a harbinger of menopause—a sign my body has accepted its unwinding to a future end.
We fool ourselves, labeling only the unwell as terminal, for we each carry an inevitable expiration date. In Western culture, particularly in America, Death is presented as a terminus or a failing of medicine, technology, or fortitude when it is, in fact, a threshold: the grave, like the living body, is a fertile place.
It’s nearly midnight, the carnal air sugar-sick and half-spent. The crowd’s energy shimmers between exuberant and exhausted, frisson and orgasm. I turn back to the shop window to find La Catrina’s features have changed. Now, she wears bangs and a pageboy.
The estocada lands, hard: This journey has not been about grieving my mother or filling the voracious black hole that her absence spiraled into my life. The grinning skull isn’t hers; it’s mine.
Did my mother look forward to Death, in the end? Will I? How did it feel, with Death’s grisly bits wriggling around in her brain? What’s possible in the time remaining: rupture or rapture? Will it come as a surprise? Will I stand with presence at the edge of the abyss? Is it already too late?
Heaps of charred, clean-picked bones of the poor and relationless lay unclaimed and untouched in Mérida’s Cemetario General. In them, I see my own.
The frankness about death here—the absence of artifice—sets me at ease. Ruddy animal carcasses hang from hooks in the market, flensed of skin yet retaining heads, limbs, and feet. In the bathroom, one flushes only the biological products of waste. Bins next to the toilets bloom with the shit and blood and urine and toilet paper we tastefully hide and deny the existence of in the United States.
Five years ago, a surgeon stopped my husband’s heart; he died on a cold, well-lit table. That evening, someone resembling him returned to me, his heart bypassed five times. Two years later, an infection, a vegetation—endocarditis—grew in the grafted bovine valve and nearly killed him again.
Death has inhabited his body three times, beginning with a heart attack at age forty-six, an echo of the widowmaker that claimed his father at the same age. It’s difficult to say which is which: my husband and his father, me and my mother, Death and Death and Death and Death?
To cure my husband, I delivered infusions of antibiotics into his heart through a PICC line for six weeks. I became Isis, Queen of the Dead, who re-membered the parts of her mate she could find—all, that is, save the missing piece.
From above, the Yucatan peninsula glows liquid gold from millions of shimmering candles melting to puddled white wax on crumbling stone. The parade’s incandescent firelight trickles through the alleys and avenues like numinous blood channeled through a watershed of aortic veins--
—or, that’s what I imagine. Only the Moon knows.
In Mérida, the veil between worlds has, at last, thinned enough for me to intercourse with Death directly. Te ruego, La Calavera Catrina, por favor… Please, I entreat the Dapper Skull, hear my greedy prayer for more time.
Tranquila, she says. Mira aquí. The boundary between earth and flesh and other is erected for rather a short interval, really.
Sans desire, the universe will collapse in on itself. Love is, paradoxically, renewed by the tensions of space and distance: the ill-fated gap, the star-spilled night, the dark, empyrean shore whose crashing waves fracture the space-time between us. Uncured yearning makes possible a brief intimacy with the ideal. “To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful,” Anne Carson writes, “a suspended moment of living hope.”
The luxury of the well-loved child is the belief—the myth—that Death is about what’s wrested from her, not what she herself will lose: the mortal crumblings and existential chaos that she, like everyone else, must scout safe passage through day by day. Then the crusty scales fall from her eyes. It’s a surprise and a mystery to re-envision one’s ends as means—to consider each day a first rather than a last, to begin again (and again) from the middle rather than the start, whose unblemished freshness is long lost to the past—to resist borrowing fear and worry against an unarrived future whose imagined suffering forecloses the pleasures of the present.
The poet Naomi Shihab Nye says there’s a way not to be broken that takes brokenness to find it. I tread that pilgrim’s path faithfully forward, trusting that, one day, I will meet the horizon.
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Gabriela Denise Frank is a transdisciplinary artist, editor, educator, and winner of the Fern Academy Prize for the essay. Her writing and visual art have appeared in BOMB Magazine, Channel, Poet Lore, EcoTheo Review, SAND Journal, DIAGRAM, Northwest Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. The author of How to Not Become the Breaking, she serves as creative nonfiction editor of Crab Creek Review. www.gabrieladenisefrank.com
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