Collectively Remembering Those We've Lost
Collectively remembering those we've lost.
Last week, I happened to go on a hybrid walk in the park with a friend of mine, Eli Pariser. He mentioned he had just participated in a surprisingly powerful civic ritual called Our Living Cemetery. He described joining a virtual video call with five acquaintances plus a facilitator and having an unexpectedly moving, shared experience of remembering his dead.
Our walk happened to coincide with me debating my family’s Halloween plans this year. I had asked on Instagram what people were thinking about doing for Halloween and was energized by the outpouring of creativity: @louisemackin’s neighbors are designing a street-wide riddle with one word per pumpkin per house on their block, @laurensanyal is attending a Zoom Halloween Parade with costumes and kids crafts, @sarahdrewkornhauser is arranging a backyard piñata in the shape of the coronavirus, @shaunasever had made a homemade-12-foot-PVC-pipe candy chute, and, @amerliawyly’s church in Richmond, Virginia is doing a Boo Through. The most common answer was some version of a “candy egg hunt” or scavenger hunt, or what @jacq_mason called “a rebrand of Easter for Covid.”
Once again Covid-19 is forcing us to rethink a beloved tradition: How do we do this, this year? What’s essential? Who is this for in the first place?
And so, I know you’re not shocked, I did some research. And I discovered that Halloween is sort of a rebrand of Samhain (an ancient Celtic festival) for Christians. (Two Roman festivals were originally combined alongside Samhain, and then various popes tweaked the dates and created All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day.) And perhaps not surprisingly, American Halloween is its own unique mix of multiple interactions over centuries and across people. In the early colonies, Halloween apparently took the form of public “play parties,” which were public events meant to celebrate the harvest. Neighbors would “share stories of the dead, tell each other’s fortunes, dance, and sing.” Over time, Halloween (All Hallows Eve) became the evening before All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day and focused more on ghosts and goblins and trick-or-treating. Meanwhile, a different tradition sprouted in Mexico and other areas of Latin America that took place on the two following days (November 1st and 2nd) called Día de los Muertos. There are many ways to celebrate and mark Día de los Muertos, but a core part of the festival is remembering the dead. “We put up framed photos of my grandparents and create a little makeshift altar with lights. In the evening we take some time to reflect in front of them and think about their lives, the memories, feel gratitude, and pray to/for them,” Jacqueline Switzer, a friend of Mexican origin, recently wrote me.
One reason Halloween may have become secular (and so much more commercial) may have been to allow everyone in a diverse society to participate. (It’s complicated to create collective rituals for the dead when we have wars over where we believe the dead go.) And, perhaps not surprisingly, we have very few forms to publicly, collectively process grief and honor our losses.
Groups like Modern Loss and Death Over Dinner and one of my personal favorites, The Dinner Party, have each developed powerful shared practices to make death and grief less taboo in community.
And yet, this year feels like we need something for all of us. Who has not been touched by death and loss this year, both personal and collective?
Part of the reason I’m drawn to Our Living Cemetery is that it’s a specific, structured ritual designed for individual and collective loss. To be clear, I am not suggesting we appropriate Día de Los Muertos, but rather that we interrogate where within our own traditions might we rediscover ways to collectively remember the dead.
After my walk with Eli, I tracked down the creators of Our Living Cemetery project to find out more about it, and see how the rest of us might be able to take part.
It turns out that Our Living Cemetery was an experiment started by Lily Baldwin and Janet Wong post-Covid as an exploration in digital gathering at the Guild of Future Architects. They are each quite phenomenal. I caught up by Zoom with them this week, and they’ve offered a small experimental step for our community to take part in this growing collective act of remembering.
A simple Our Living Cemetery ritual by Lily Baldwin:
Alone:
Find a quiet space and take a moment to become still: What are the signals that show you you’re living? Touch them. Study them. Appreciate them. What moves — literally — when you breathe? What’s happening in your body without you even trying?
Pick someone you’ve lost who’s no longer alive. Remember the way they would say your name, the shape of their eyes when they laughed, what they did when they were nervous (or— how they pretended to not be mad). Get detective-specific. Sit with each memory — seeing, smelling and feeling it. (You can also write, draw or move each memory.)
What is one thing your person didn’t get to finish before they died? Speak their name three times out loud and tell them you’ll do it, exactly so. Don’t be shy. Laugh if you want to. Your words have resonance.
Together:
If you would like to participate in the collective Our Living Cemetery, please email a photograph of the person you’ve lost (if you’d like) and an 11-word-or-less answer to any of the following prompts to ourlivingcemetery@gmail.com to be included in the digital Our Living Cemetery in some form.
Describe their version of "a bad hair day."
Describe their silhouette.
If they were a scent, what would it be called?
How would you write out the sound of their laugh?
What was the quality of light when you first met?
What were you wearing the last time you saw them? What did you do right after that moment?
That thing they did that you didn't like, but now that they're gone, you miss.
What's one thing they always noticed about you you wished they didn't (but secretly liked)?
What's one thing they were always trying to change about themselves?
When they were exhausted, what changed?
What did they forget when they didn't care?
What did they do that nobody else did?
Inspirations
The Citizen University’s Guide to Gathering on Election Night
Be still my heart.
Somebody’s Beloved protest in LA.
Protestors showed us a different way to gather. They played “Somebody’s Beloved” by MILCK on loudspeakers, laid down in front of city hall, and each held a tombstone to pay homage to the 626 humans who have been killed under police custody during Jackie Lacy’s term.
A brilliant civic initiative created by The Election Defenders to make waiting in line to vote a joyful, musical, life-enhancing experience. You can find playlists from various contributors here.
