Bright orange marigolds pop off of their stems, releasing an unfriendly scent into my hands. I bought three big bunches this year, because the excess of color and texture on Dia de los Muertos means as much to my eyes as the men on my altar mean to my heart.

November 2, the night when families all over Mexico flock to graveyards to welcome back the souls of their deceased relatives, is my favorite adopted holiday. With candles and flowers, I open the doors in my heart that hold the loved ones I have lost.

I didn’t expect to add Joe to my altar this year. I met him when he was 11 and I was 32. It was when his mom died a few years later that we grew close. Joe was hit by a speeding car last March as he was returning a rented truck he used to move in with his girlfriend earlier that day. He was 33.

His father texted, asking me to call immediately.

“What happened?” I said when I reached him.

“Joe’s been in an accident. He was” . . . this is when my tears began, because my body knew . . . “killed instantly.”

Joe’s father gave me a few more details. I told him how deeply I felt for his family. There was little more to say. Why would I ask why?

I put down the phone and sank into the sagging armchair in my living room, overwhelmed with empathy for Joe’s girlfriend, who’d been thrown instantly into that ambiguous non-widow status I know too well.

Joe’s untimely death renewed and deepened my acquaintance with grief. My body knew to let my heart be pulled under the riptide of sorrow into the deep, dark cavern of loss. I looked out at the insulting sunshine, letting death’s familiar finality invade me as I silently and steadily wept.

Someone snapped a photo of Joe and me at his older brother’s wedding. Joe is wearing a tuxedo and a red rose boutonniere. He has an enormous smile, his dark hair is close-cropped, his eyes are sparkling. We’re sitting on a patio. I’ve got my legs curled up under me, leaning in for the photo with my jawline resting just above Joe’s shoulder. His right hand on his leg emerges from the pristine starched cuff of his tuxedo shirt. I’m wearing a leopard skirt and black top, my legs obscured by a large potted oleander. I’m smiling a quiet closedmouth smile, but my weary eyes are warm.

After heaping the marigolds onto a large round ceramic tray painted with yellow and orange papaya, pineapples and bananas, I put Joe’s photo on the left side, nestling it among the flowers. Joe’s photo doesn’t have a frame – I’ve always kept it on my refrigerator. Tonight, there’s a bare space between the magnets that hold it in place.

On the table just behind the tray, I place two thick cranberry-colored pillar candles, ignoring my tears as I light the first one. I add two tall green beeswax tapers on brass candlesticks. The soft light flickers as I think of the happy tears I wouldn’t shed at Joe’s wedding, of the almost parental joy he lent me for twenty years.

My father Lynn, who died two and a half years ago after suffering five brain tumors in five years, is at the center of the altar. I’ve chosen a photo of the two of us, taken when he was 25 and I was about three months old, in 1963. He was thin and lanky with a crew cut and an angular profile, wearing a striped short-sleeved cotton shirt and chinos. He’s on a plastic garden chaise lounge, knees up to support me sitting in his lap. Against his knees, I’m facing him, wearing a voluminous, white, shortsleeved dress. I have almost no hair. His neck and shoulders rise off of the chaise as he leans in to smile at me, holding me upright with hands that are enormous against my infant body.

Dad’s influence in my life was supreme – the glow of his approval made any and every effort worthwhile. But when I made choices that worried him (like walking away from my career at 50), his uncensored anxiety invaded my bloodstream.

This black and white 2” x 4” photo, which has thumbtack pinholes in each of its four corners, now lives in a fancy Morrocan-style wooden frame – green, gold and white medallions inlaid into blond wood form a pleasing symmetry all around us.

To the left of Dad’s photo, I place a carved wooden Indian head neckerchief slide he painted while on one of his scouting trips. Dad, the towering figure in many more lives than mine, was devoted to cars, to proper grammar, to stories of family history, to his church and to the Boy Scouts of America.

The last time I saw my father was about six weeks before he died. I flew to see him over a summer weekend without specifying that it was a ‘goodbye visit.’ No one knew when the tumor and related crises would take him. I didn’t want him to suspect that my visit signaled a belief that his death was imminent. Still, I knew it might be, so when I left for the airport I put my hand over his, kissed him on the forehead and told him I loved him. I didn’t cry.

Three years before, when the second brain tumor was wreaking havoc on him, I’d collapsed in tears, so afraid of his life ending in pain or the prison of diminished capacity. I was unable to comprehend my world without him as its anchor, but each successive health crisis pushed open my capacity a little more. Losing my father was a slow letting go, a soft, gentle years-long grief that allowed me to honor everything he had been in my life without losing myself to blinding sorrow at the end.

My father’s hand was icy the last time I touched it. He died on a Sunday morning and waited in refrigeration until we buried him on that Thursday afternoon. Dad didn’t want to be embalmed. My close it and found myself alone with my father – still and serene in the simple coffin, flowers all around. White and yellow, I think, but I’m no longer sure.

I reached into the coffin, laid my small warm hand on his large cold one and said goodbye for the last time, tears clouding my vision. I wiped my eyes, walked out to the sunny parking lot where all of the relatives and friends were gathered and encouraged everyone to come in for our prayer before we drove to the cemetery.

On the table just behind the altar is the sculpture of Juan Diego and Guadalupe that my father bought in Guadalupe, California. He was told with great sincerity by the store’s proprietor that this statue of Juan Diego kneeling before the Virgin holding a tilma flooded with flowers was handmade in Mexico. Dad was a great lover of irony – when he saw the gold “Made in China” label attached to the base he was even more delighted to present the sculpture to me.

After losing my father, I walked into an uncharted world, carrying thousands of memories and no map. About 18 months after he died, I was at the park near my apartment when I saw a little girl run exuberantly across the grass and leap into her dad’s outstretched arms. I burst into instant, overpowering tears.

On the right side of my altar is my fiancé, Marc, who was killed 26 years ago, just two weeks after we got engaged, when I was 30. I took the photo I’ve chosen for the altar at the Bronx Botanical Gardens in 1993. He’s sitting on a bench in front of a mossed brick wall with several enormous pots of dull magenta flowering plants in terracotta pots behind him – a great contrast to his blond crew cut and pale skin. He’s in an artless olive-green windbreaker and navy blue t-shirt, smiling in a small way that manages to be both impish and dignified. His Adam’s apple is enormous, his cheekbones powerful, his haircut severe, but his blue eyes are calm and contentedly in love.

To the right of his photo, I settle a Lego helicopter into the flowers. Marc, a pilot in the Coast Guard, died in a helicopter crash. He brought that Lego helicopter on a vacation we took to Santa Fe for Valentines weekend, about six months after we met. I’ve had it with me ever since – moving it from New York to Palo Alto to San Francisco without dislodging the little pilot inside or breaking the propellers that rotate.

At the front of the altar I lay a palm-sized etched silver heart that opens to hide something precious. Marc’s captains bars, bent in the accident, sat in there for years.

I was sitting at my desk in Manhattan booking a media tour when the phone rang one morning in August. It was my fiancé’s brother. “Marc’s been in an accident. Do you want to come to the hospital?” he asked.

“Yes. Yes. I’ll come to the hospital,” I said, staring at the grimy black base of my desk phone and the beige upholstery on my cube wall.

Four days later, Marc died.

Surprise tears more violently at the heart. The shock of losing Marc re-ordered my DNA. Facing a profound loss on the cusp of adulthood swallowed my capacity for hope and tore apart my dreams.In the weeks and months after his death, my grief came in molten, furiously propelled waves. The hot density of it would flow in, drowning my senses and my capacity to reason. The grief would growl and stretch, enveloping my body and subsuming my brain. I would shake, or sweat, or cry, or all of the above when it had possession of me. It took months for me to learn to be still, to breathe deeply and to let it run through me. It was my first practice in surrender. I’m finished with my altar now. Tradition would have me include all of my deceased relatives, but I observe Dia de los Muertos in my own small way. Warm in the candlelight are just the three men I’ve loved most in the world, the three men who are gone – the man who was to be my husband, the man who was my surrogate son, and the man who taught me how to be in the world. My altar is my way to spend an evening wrapped in love for them, in the company of their vibrant spirits, to cherish them with a ritual that feeds my senses and my heart.

I leave the candles that illuminate my loved ones’ faces burning all night.

Share This: