My friend is visiting for the spookytimes, and yesterday we took Rintrah on a walk to the cemetery across the street. People where I live, in Appalachia, as often as not they bury their dead in family lots on their own property.
My neighbor is buried up there, a young kid I knew in passing, who died suddenly last winter. He’s more a part of my life now that he’s gone than he was in life. Among the trinkets and stones adorning his grave is a tiny stone dog I placed there. That kid loved dogs, and he loved shiny stones, and I wish he’d had a chance to love more things and more people. But that’s the way of it, isn’t it. A life is complete no matter how long it winds up.
My friend, who is Jewish, put a stone on the pile of offerings left at the grave. She told me stones were traditional for decorating graves because they aren’t so ephemeral.
I said my respects to my dead neighbor, my dead friend, then walked back through the woods while Rintrah barked at deer and played with leaves. He’s always there to remind us of the present, to force us to appreciate beauty. And to scare away the deer, I suppose.
I didn’t grow up celebrating the whole of Allhallowtide, the three day holiday in the Catholic tradition that includes Halloween, All Saints’ Day (All Hallows Day), and All Souls’ Day. I grew up with Halloween though, and I’m grateful. I’m grateful for costuming and candy, I’m grateful for eeriness and a culture that no matter how atheist (or boring-christian) it gets will never do away entirely with ghouls and ghosts.
One of my first memories is wearing a spider costume. My mother, with four kids and a more-than-full time job, had sewn it for me. The legs were made from strips of black paper in accordion folds. It rained that year, and it messed up the legs. I remember crying about it while hiding from the rain under a stranger’s carport. I remember crying about it not because my costume was being destroyed, but because of all of the work my mother had put into the costume.
That could be a false memory. Maybe I didn’t cry at all. Maybe I only cried over my own loss, not in some empathic way. It’s impossible to know for sure.
It’s a happy memory, because it’s only by loving something that we can feel its loss. Loss reminds us that there was joy. There was so much joy for me in Halloween.
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