A CRACK BETWEEN THE WORLDS Burying the dead in Oklahoma Living with the dead in Mexico

...I strained out the window, but we were gone before I could see more...

...I went with him to put it back where they found it, and he was very cross...

...This time he came back with a pair of red vigil candles in tall brass stands he had somehow spotted inside the big mahogany sideboard in the dining room, where my mother kept the silver services and holiday table decorations...

...I couldn't believe any of it, couldn't feel a thing but the deep ache of a sense of having been cheated...

...Some people not from here feel afraid at this time," she added...

...and we were each given a flower to add to the mound already on the casket...

...After he left, I got out the Christmas stockings we had always used, and prepared to tack them up along the front edge of the living room mantel...

...There were no overt displays of emotion of any kind, unseemly or otherwise...

...I would have to be prepared early, she said, because my dead had so much farther to come-all the way from the United States...

...I was getting ready to look for him when he marched into the living room, carrying a framed photograph-my mother's favorite-of both my parents laughing at some long-ago picnic...

...This is a vision of death very different from the lily-white, Anglo-Protestant, Midwestern American one I grew up with in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where death is dreaded, rejected, and denied...

...No one with any sense is going to call back people they disliked or feared...

...As we worked she explained that the candles should be lit all during that night, November first to second, when the dead are remembered and honored, and that the presence of my own calavera was a reminder that we are all mortal, and that the living are not really separated from the dead at all: Life and death are one single, never-ending continuity...

...The closed casket stood on a draped stand near the altar surrounded by banks of flowers...

...where it is regarded as the opposite and enemy of life, and the less said about it the better...

...I didn't mention it to my American husband...

...But I was puzzled and hurt when a particularly warm, bright, new acquaintance I had felt was becoming a real friend arrived at my house one afternoon and presented me with a purple tissue-wrapped bundle, which proved to contain a fine hard-sugar (alfenique) skull, the size of a large grapefruit and giddy with rococo squiggles, flourishes, and flowers...

...When it came time to accompany the casket to the cemetery, my sister-in-law summoned one of the limousines, put all three of her teen-age children into it, and ordered them taken home...

...Back up on the stool, he selected thumbtacks from the box I was using to hang the stockings, fastened the message to the edge of the mantel, neatly centered below the picture, then climbed down and sat in the middle of the sofa to appraise the effect-still without a word...

...It was bothering me, too, but I didn't know what to do about it...

...Father Eckel's resounding bass spun out the ancient graveside words ("Ashes to ashes, dust to dust...

...We were escorted to folding chairs arranged in a row on a rug of artificial green grass, and shaded from the thin cold winter sun by a green-and-white canvas awning, as if the sky might do us damage...

...I was having a hard time convincing Ian that he must return the broken, earth-stained skull he and some friends had picked up in the panteon (cemetery) behind our village church...

...No body...

...Looking around my living room, she said, "Aren't you going to make an altar for you calavera...

...This time he was gone longer...

...No dirt...

...It was as if she had never existed, or as if, by dying, she had committed the ultimate social faux pas...

...I have no idea what I said to her at that time, but as soon as she left, I rolled the thing back into its purple cocoon and hastily hid it away in the bottom of a cupboard...

...Come along," he replied, not looking at me...

...I had to explain at length that it actually belonged to someone else, though it seemed to have been abandoned...

...We're supposed to go home now...

...Then an attendant firmly grasped my elbow to lead us back to the waiting limousines...

...On it, in different colored Magic Markers, filling the whole sheet, he had written: "i LOVE YOU...

...This was the real thing, at last...

...The next day she dropped by with an armful of golden zempasuchtli flowers (a type of marigold), and helped me arrange them with special candles in little glasses that had golden crosses on the sides...

...My mother, of course, was being buried at his side...

...After many years of sharing in the life of Mexican villages, where death is accepted and even celebrated as an ongoing part of daily life, I was appalled to experience a personal death back in the United States where everyone seems to be joined in a conspiracy of silence to pretend that death does not exist, and where the newly dead seem to have simply vanished, as any mention of them is taboo in polite social conversation...

...Climbing up onto the stool again, he placed these carefully on each side of the picture, and then climbed down and again left the room...

...He wanted desperately to keep it and clung to the rule of "finders keepers...

...I felt a deep need to see my mother's body safely into the earth...

...Several days later she came back...

...The elaborate sugar skull with my name on it (which she had ordered specially) was a warm token of deep regard, offered only to favorite friends and family members...

...We spent that Christmas Eve at my brother's house with his wife and their three children, all several years older than my eldest...

...Nothing real but the tawny tough short grass in the thin winter sunlight, the wide pale-blue prairie sky so far above...

...My children grew up in Mexico...

...I managed to glance out of the rear window in time to see the attendants hastily striking the canopy, sweeping the mounds of flowers off the casket, and whipping aside its covering skirt...

...When the red candles burned down, I replaced them with others from the tidy little box in the sideboard that my mother had been keeping for Christmas...

...Later in the evening my brother returned us to my mother's house, where he and I had grown up, and where I was staying with my children...

...My four-year-old listened big-eyed to my tale of how Santa Claus would come right down this chimney (now full of flickering artificial gas logs) to fill their stocking as he had done for me and their Uncle John when we were little...

...It was indeed a "lovely evening" full of good food and warm family feeling, but not a word was spoken about their grandmother: She was not referred to, her name was never mentioned...

...No hole...

...This understanding and acceptance of death-as an integral part of the cycles of life that Mexico taught me- continues to sustain me over the years.ontinues to sustain me over the years...

...When he returned he was carefully carrying a full-size sheet of newsprint from his big drawing pad...

...So it is only our loved ones we call, and during that time when the bells hold the door open, this valley is filled with the powerful, loving presence of many souls...

...I dug it out of the cupboard and she helped me set it up on the mantel, and suggested that I add a photograph of my father, at that time my only close deceased relative...

...What unwittingly horrendous cultural error had I committed, what had I done to this woman to make her wish me dead...

...Dumbfounded, I realized that to my child's thoroughly Mexican sensibilities, the unmentionable nonexistence of his grandmother's death was profoundly disturbing...

...I turned to my brother...

...If I forgot, the children reminded me...

...The traditional service was dignified and reassuring, the eulogy brief and sincere, but properly restrained...

...The next surprise came at the funeral...

...How quaint...

...Ian had obviously decided that if no one else in the family (including me) had the simple good sense to do the correct and necessary things for his grandmother, he would just have to take care of it by himself...

...How Mexican, I thought...

...I lit candles, turned on the Christmas tree lights, and darkened the room...

...A CRACK BETWEEN THE WORLDS The Mexican way of death Ann Roy Newly arrived in Guanajuato many years ago, I was fascinated by the colorful displays of sugar skulls and skeletons that suddenly appeared on the streets just before Halloween...

...It seemed very big and lonely back there as we moved away at a dignified pace...

...Without a word, Ian pulled a stool over to the mantel, climbed up, set the picture squarely in the middle, climbed down, and disappeared again...

...My children pressed close to me as we were driven away...

...This happened late on the night of December 23, and the family decided to put off the funeral until December 27, "so the children could have a nice Christmas...

...Some years later we moved to Tepoztlan, Morelos-the pre-Aztec mountain village renowned for its powerful magical traditions-and an ancient Tepozteca neighbor came to tell me about the "crack between the worlds" that opens up there soon after midnight on November first, and is held open for one mystical hour by the concerted ringing of all the church bells in the valley...

...In a daze I allowed myself to be steered to the cars and deposited with my children into a vast new-smelling back seat...

...But that is only because they do not understand...

...In front of us, the casket was invisible, fully draped by a voluminous modesty-skirt of green baize, which also completely disguised the fact that there was a hole underneath...

...Why waste such a wonderful opportunity to be together with those we love...

...I gasped...

...It had always stood on top of her writing desk...

...My children sat quietly beside me...

...Numb as I was, I suddenly realized exactly where we were when I glanced down to see my father's headstone peeping out from under the coy carpet of plastic grass, just beside my left foot...

...My children, of course, came to the cemetery with us...

...They embrace us and we them, and we are all together again, for a while...

...But-if s not over...

...Then we all three sat on the sofa and sang the familiar carols, as we had always done on Christmas Eve, before going to bed...

...She explained that she was telling me about this opportunity well ahead of time so that I could complete all the necessary preparations and be quietly ready to call and receive my own dead when this precious moment arrived-when all the bells began to toll softly together...

...The whole family was present, sitting together in the front rows of "our church," Trinity Episcopal...

...Even the coffin camouflaged...

...Sinister glowing red tinfoil eyes glared from its hollow eye sockets, and across its bony forehead was inscribed in elegant Victorian script: "ANA" I was appalled...

...Nothing...

...When it became obvious I hadn't the faintest idea what she was talking about, she explained, and I received my first lesson in the tradition and meaning of the Mexican Day of the Dead...

...The elder, Ian, age eleven, had disappeared into the back of the house...

...It was my first "American funeral...

...At the end of 19681 returned with them to Tulsa, and we were there when my mother, their grandmother, died in the hospital...

...I had a sudden clear memory of the afternoon several years before in Marfil, Guanajuato, where we lived when we first moved to Mexico...

...I suppose the other kids just retrieved it later...

...Ian seemed well-satisfied...