This past weekend, during what turned out, much to my joy and satisfaction, to be a successful writing workshop, where I guided participants to start writing the story of their ancestors (learn more about it here—bellafigurapodcast.com/workshops) one of the attendees noted at the start of our live Zoom session that it was the autumn equinox. I remarked that it was, of course, perfect for the work we’d assembled to do. Autumn, when the darkness begins to lengthen and the cold begins to encroach, is a period where we are closer to the dead than the rest of the year, just as the earth, dormant and frozen, is closer to death.
The various holidays that mark the season, from Halloween to All Soul’s Day to Día de los Muertos, all commemorate this liminality. It’s only post-Civil War, and in the New World, that we’ve begun to distance ourselves from what this period truly means. But in our ancestors’ world, where the dead were laid out in the beds they’d slept in, tended to by their own family members, and where, in short, death was accepted as a part of life, these days were sacred, observed and ritualized.
My mother remembers going to the cemetery every year on All Souls Day when she was a young girl in Southern Italy. The entire village would assemble, cleaning out the graves of their dead. My late aunt, my mother’s older sister, knew which bones belonged to whom. They would pack a picnic, spend the day cleaning the bones and the graves with vinegar and water, take a break to eat in a sort of celebration, and then put everything back where it belonged. There was nothing strange about this: It was a ritual to honor and memorialize their ancestors. It was a sign of respect, and in fact, if you didn’t take part, it would’ve been viewed as brutta figura, because who leaves their dead unattended and unremembered?
To honor this season, I wanted to share my PDF, “Ten Ways to Honor Those You’ve Lost,” with all of you. I’m hoping these simple, everyday practices will help you to connect in a visceral way not only to your ancestors, but to this time of the year, which asks us to slow down, to quiet down and to part the curtain that divides what can be seen and what cannot be seen. The invisible draws closer. We can pause to feel it. We can let it know it’s honored and not forgotten.
Thanks for being here with me, truly.
xoxo,
Dolores