Remembering the dead with tokens, love and laughter

It’s the first of November – the day after Halloween – and many people in the Bay Area are packing away their costumes and cleaning up after celebrations. But for others here, November 1 itself marks a significant holiday. It’s All Saints Day, when Christians commemorate all known and unknown saints. Tomorrow is All Souls Day. And November 2 is known to many Mexicans and Mexican-Americans as Día De Los Muertos – when we remember the dead. 

You can find recognition all over the Bay Area, often embodied in images of skeletons dancing or singing, and in altars built for the recently deceased. Those altars inspired KALW’s Kristi Coale a few years ago when she went through a very personal loss.

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COALE: My mother passed away last spring after a long illness. Within hours of leaving her body at the mortuary, I was sifting through photos, handmade clothing, buttons and sewing patters. Things that made her seem very much alive to me. I made up my mind then that I'd celebrate her memory onDía De Los Muertos. For years, friends of mine who've lost parents and siblings have observed this occasion the first few days of November by building altars to their loved ones. Putting out favorite books, food and shoes. It's a way of setting aside time each year to be with the spirit of the person.

I've been trying to figure out what my mother's altar might look like. So I went looking for inspiration. And I found it here – at the SOMArts Cultural Center, just outside San Francisco's Mission District, artists participate in this rite of Fall. Building "offrandes" or offerings to their deceased friends and family.

DENISE DONISE: So I just come back from Mexico from burying my father.

Denise Donise is the daughter of Mexican painter and teacher Roberto Donise.

DONISE: Then he found a center which still exists and that was just like a very big, big step because it allowed people, regular people, to become a painters without having to struggle like most artists.

l follow Denise's big brown-eyes as the focus on an early photo of her father as a young man. Sporting a goatee and a head of wavy black hair, he's standing in the center of a large circle of men, next to a well known Latin American leader.

DONISE: Well, that photo is when Fidel got into power. He, you know, Mexico was always close with Cuba and he invited all of those artists from Mexico to gather. And from many parts of the world too, but you know, that was a gathering of artists and there is my father right next to Fidel Castro.

COALE: And these are some of his brushes and paints here?

DONISE: Yeah (laughs). Those are, this is my heritage. This is what I brought back from Mexico now  that I went. His socks. (laughs).

Creating a day of the dead altar is a chance to laugh and marvel at what you hold on to remember someone.

SAHA ARAZ: It's random the things that remind you of somebody, but even putting it together a lot of emotion came back, just remembering the little things about them

Saha Araz is in her early 30s, the daughter of Palestinian immigrants. Her round, olive-skinned face lights up as she explains what memories of her grandfather flow from a magnifying glass and a pair of binoculars.

ARAZ: My grandfather, he used to read the newspaper with a magnifying glass. And his glasses! He loved to read and slowly lost his eyesight. But he had it always, you know, but it became weaker and he also watched TV with binoculars (laughs).

COALE: Could he just move the seat up a little bit closer?

ARAZ: You know, he liked to think of himself as an inventor and he always was figuring something out.

One thing Araz says her grandfather couldn't figure out, was how to return to Palestine even in death. And that reminds her that she doesn't quite feel at home here either, even though she was born in the Midwest and lives in the Bay Area.

ARAZ: I just, I felt like Michigan was a little big anonymous, but because they are laid to rest there it's almost, for the rest of us who've lived our whole lives here, you know they're kinda laying in the ground for us. So, it's where you find home. I don't know where it is yet.

Day of the Dead is about the unsettled nature of death. Native tribes in Mexico originated the ritual of preparing favourite foods and drink and presenting flowers, all to guide the spirits of the dead back. They believe the souls of the dead returned every year to celebrate, just as if they were living.

On this night, the SOMArts Cultural Center is hosting the opening reception for it's annual Día De Los Muertos exhibit. A group of fifth-graders from the private San Francisco School chant and act out the verses to a Costa Rican children's rhyme, "Los Esqueletos.""Los Esqueletos," the skeletons, follows 10 hours of mischief and merrymaking among the undead, starting with their leaving their tombs and ending when they return to sleep.

But this exhibit of the Day of the Dead is not all festive. One artist wants to call attention to deaths of seven people, all of whom were murdered within a two mile radius of the cultural center in late summer. Venezuala native Italana Lopez hopes her altar provokes people to think and act.

ITALANA LOPEZ: And I want to say to people, “Hey, you live here, you live there and all around you seven people died. What do you do? What do you feel? Do you feel something or are you going to get quiet again?”

Lopez's dark, deep-set eyes and white, knitted skull cap give her a haunting look. She's made an altar here at SOMArt with votive candles and flowers placed above a yellow tape outline of Latin American countries. She's also created virtual altars online through Facebook, Blogspot and Twitter where people can meet.

LOPEZ: It's interactive. You can say what you feel. You can add and maybe you can connect with other people that are feeling the same way as you.

This exhibit is a reminder of the journeys we all travel, emotionally and physically through life, death and memory. And it's helped me develop my own geography of memories of my mother – what will guide my creation of her altar. There will be photos, of course, and I'm drying some of her favorite flowers – geraniums.

But now I realize, I also need to include something else. Something fun. A pair of high-heeled shoes, like the one she wore when father fell in love with her thinking she was five-foot-nine. Fortunately for my family, my father still loved my mother, even after he discovered she was half a foot shorter. That's the kind of detail that brings the dead to life.

A quote at the exhibit says, "The dead are only gone when no one is around to remember them." The altars we make ensure that doesn't happen too soon.

The altars will be on display through Saturday, November 6. Read more about SOMArts current Day of the Dead exhibit here.