Why do the dead keep dying?

My uncle’s funeral was yesterday. As a kid, I was always a little nervous to talk with Tio Mando, not because he was mean because he was macho and I wasn’t. But as I looked at him in his casket, I almost felt his remorse, and I didn’t know why until the preacher, Tio Mando’s nephew, gave the eulogy. Throughout his speech, authentic and heartfelt as it was, he consistently told us that Tio Mando is gone, that he is not on this earth, that he is far away from us.

This took me aback, because my grandparents were from the state of Michoacan, Mexico and even then the older ones were born in Mexico and got citizenship later, and on top of that, we’re a devout Catholic family. Tio Mando being described as away from us led me to reflect on cultural and historical understandings of dying and death as it pertains to our familial ties. I looked back towards my ancestors and tried to understand how they understood and interacted with death.

In the ancient world, before the conquest of the Yucatan Peninsula and the rest of the Americas, our ancestors did not understand death as a termination, it was often seen as a graduation into another stage of life. The Nahua and Mexica (commonly referred to as Aztec), for example, understood death as a transformation into the next phase of existence, where male warriors who died in battle fighting under Huitzilopochtli would simply appear as hummingbirds, as emissaries for their new lord. And again, this transformation wasn’t the end either, because these former human warriors now had a new life with new tasks and obstacles that continue into another cycle. Yet, this understanding of death, though it is deeply rooted and from the people where my family comes from, it is absent from our talks.

Even if no one remembers death as a transformation, we as Mexicans celebrate Día de los Muertos, a time of the year when the spirits of our dead ancestors return to earth and we eat, laugh, and remember with them and they depart when the sun rises the day after. That’s the reason why we set out the ofrendas (“offerings in Spanish”), the makeshift altars, usually displaying the person’s personal items or things they enjoyed in life on the middle layer, along with statues of saints and pictures of the deceased on the top, and incense, rice, calaveras, and cempaxochitl on the bottom. Especially considering the offerings that displayed on the ofrenda, Catholicism rests at the core of the holiday and it’s noteworthy how saints have historically interacted with death.

And as Catholics, we are in communion with the saints, the souls of faithfuls and ancestors returning to our world to intercede on our behalf and deliver our petitions, and when our petition is answered, we give thanks with prayers, incense, ex votos, or simply remain in their employ, especially if you’re a devotee of a specific saint. Saints, in this sense, move between the dead and the living, receiving the prayers of whoever calls on them and moving past death to intercede before God and back again to the living to deliver the answer to our prayers. Evidently, these historical, theological, and cultural roots would predispose us to believe that he would come back, but alas, they do not. And after the nephew finished the eulogy, there were nods of approval and applause.

We, the living, discriminate against the dead for the same reason we discriminate against the elderly and the mad: they can’t use their labor power to produce capital, or at least, not as much as most people. Historically, the elderly were consulted for their wisdom as many might be familiar, and even the mad, madness in the ancient world was often associated with a connection to the spirit world or deities. Even the dead were consulted, like Orpheus consulting his dead friends to escape the underworld, or King Saul, who seeks a witch to ask a dead prophet’s guidance. Dying was a boost to social status. Outside of visions and magic, the dead where integrated into social life. The graveyard was at the center of town, where everyone would gather, share, and connect, but this historical understanding of death has been shunted to the margins by the rise of the “rational” assumptions of our modern epoch.

In Symbolic Exchange and Death, the post-Marxist philosopher, Jean Beaudrillard, claimed “At the very core of the ‘rationality’ of our culture is an exclusion that precedes every other. … preceding all these and serving as their model: the exclusion of the dead and of death.” As it is such, societies living in the neo-liberal epoch are typically characterized by what they banish, mad societies banish the mad to asylums psycho-chemically, and we, in our so-called Dying Society, banish the dead out of social life, which is exactly what happened to Emilio.

I met my new friend Emilio Garcia after my tio’s burial. I got this nagging feeling to go to the corner of the cemetery and what I saw was a wall of dead overgrowth. I was about to leave until the sun glinted off of something underneath the overgrowth. I started cutting, breaking, and sweeping, until I found a little tombstone. Emilio Garcia, born in 1949 and died in 1951, was under that tombstone. I stared at his name and my mind was racing, what a terrifying experience it must be for a 2 year old to stay all alone, surrounded by scary vines and branches with no one to comfort them.

We in the modern world disenchant death and it loses all symbolic exchange. Death turns into a graphic complete with industries and grifters trying to convince us to buy their product so we can avoid it. The dead are ghettoized, shunted to obscure corners of the city to become non-persons, to be forgotten, avoided, to die in death.